Crutches

Dad says he was just a kid, maybe older, but definitely too young, and stuck in his bed.

Stuck because he’d jumped a little too high and fallen a little too fast and broke his ankle playing basketball, just like his dad had decades before, but he’d broken it in North Carolina instead of in Korea.

Either way he was a kid stuck in his bed in his room, a five-pound cast on his leg, all by himself in the middle of the night. North Carolina is hot – HOT – in the summer, and so humid it’ll rain if you sneeze, and this was decades before a kid like him had any chance of having AC in his room. So he laid there with his window open, begging the heat bubble to pop and send in an ocean breeze.

He says he thought maybe it was a breeze when he first heard it.

Haah-huuuh… haah-huuuh…

He can’t remember how long the sound was going before he really noticed it. He lifted his head from his pillow after a bit, because he realized it wasn’t the wind; there wasn’t a wind blowing anywhere.

Haaaah-huuuuh… haaaaah-huuuuuh…

That time he’d definitely heard it. The noise was definitely, absolutely coming from his window. There was no doubt.

It was dark in the room, but it was darker in the window. Just a black square on his wall.

HaaaAH… HUhhhh… HaAAAH… HUUHHhh…

Dad says he didn’t freak out. He didn’t freak out, but he did sit up as tall as he could, not quite close enough to touch the windowsill, but enough to peer at the strip of grass out there and try to see what could possibly-

HAAAAH-HUUUHHH! HAAAAH-HUUUHHH!

He didn’t freak out. He didn’t freak out, but he did forget his crutches as he nearly fell out of his bed, then his room, and hopped down the hall to his parent’s door, hand on the handle, barely even breathing-

But stopped.

Because if there wasn’t a monster outside his window, he’d be sure to face one after waking his dad up in the middle of the night. And who needed two monsters in the middle of the night?

Dad says he stayed right there so long he could feel the weight in his healing bones, listening to see which monster would get him first.

But actually… it was quiet. Just the cicadas buzzing loud in the trees, and the waves touching the shore three blocks away.

So he hopped, hopped, hopped, as quietly as he could back to his over-hot bed. He put his head on his pillow, and raised his foot above his heart, like the doctor told him. Nothing stirred. He wished his window had a screen.

Then

Haah-huuuh…

HaaaAH… HUhhhh…

HAAAAH… HUUUHHH…

He got his crutches.

He got a flashlight.

He slowly, quietly opened the front door, eased the squeaky screen door closed behind him. He stepped with his crutches across the old wood porch and down the two steps to the front lawn. Then, quietly, carefully, he crutched his way to the side yard…

Step

Clack

Step

Clack…

The old garbage cans were there, right under his window. He swears that in the dark shadows he could see one of them moving. It rattled.

Then clanged.

HAAAAH-HUUUHHH! HAAAAH-HUUUHHH!

He dropped a crutch, flipped on his light, and pointed it like a weapon at the cans-

-and out popped the head of the smallest, fuzziest raccoon he’d ever seen. It wheezed,

“Hah-huuh, hah-huuh,”

in the smallest, cutest voice it could, just a little stuffy – and maybe a bit asthmatic – in the humid summer heat.

Dad went back to bed.