by Roland Goity
The clover lawn shimmered with sunlight where the boy played that September afternoon. Delighted by the intricacies of his own imagination there in the backyard, the boy stationed troops of plastic military figures at various positions within the waist-high jungle of grass. One by one, they’d fall down under the pressure of a thumb or forefinger, dead little soldiers.
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So lost was the boy in his own little world, he couldn’t hear the family dog scratching at the door on the side of the house, yearning to be let loose on the neighborhood. And he couldn’t hear the hiss of strapping tape, and the lumbering thumps as his mother piled boxes upon boxes in the entryway of their house.
Nor could he hear the goings-on inside the home across the back fence, that of the neighbors from the street behind. A desperate junkie with a prison record and oily black hair tied into a ponytail had broken into that home, surprised the young pregnant woman washing dishes in the kitchen sink, and—out of lust or fear or power—grabbed her and pulled her to his groin. Then he withdrew a stiletto knife from his pocket and held it to her throat.
What the assailant did next isn’t clear. Her dress was likely torn, his zipper likely undone; she was likely pulled further to his groin.
All that’s known is that the woman’s husband, a young cardiac surgeon at the local hospital, returned earlier than usual that day. The husband was surprised to see the front door to his home wide open, surprised to see the shoddy van parked along the curb. He sensed something wasn’t right, and bravely, but stealthily, entered his own home.
The sound of his terrified wife, then the horrible vision of what would soon come. With only adrenaline as his ammunition, the husband bolted for the attacker, grabbing the man’s wrist with one hand, enveloping his face with the other. The husband wrestled the knife away and plunged it effortlessly into the intruder’s chest, with the same ease and precision he used when performing open-heart surgery on patients. Blood pooled over the man’s t-shirt and formed in patterns, like continents displayed on a map. The husband withdrew the knife but held it steady, and his pregnant wife screamed so loud birds flew off telephone wires.
But not loud enough to stir the boy across their backyard fence. He was still enthralled in his own little war games.
The wounded intruder fled out the backdoor and hopped the fence, landing in a patch of cacti. Soaked in blood and fear, he fell to his knees, and reached out, every finger writhing like tentacles of an octopus drifting in the current. The boy actually looked up and his eyes met those of the bloody visitor who’d just dropped in. And when the man could no longer meet his stare, the boy went back to business. Back to his toy soldiers again.
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Roland Goity lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His stories appear or are forthcoming in Fiction International, Scrivener Creative Review, Watchword, The Bryant Literary Review, Talking River Review, Compass Rose, and several online publications. He is fiction editor of the new online journal LITnIMAGE.
