Home Invasion
- Sep 13, 2019
- 3 min read
by Paul Negri
They used to come only at night. Now they come at all hours. The light of day is no deterrent; no more than my wild lamentations. They want me and they will have me. They are getting closer. Closer than I can bear. But I will not make it easy for them. I will make them pay a price. Though I am not vengeful by nature, I will rise to the occasion. Or at least I so hope.
In past years, it would have been simpler. I could have left, I suppose. Picked up and gone somewhere else. There is nothing holding me here. The family is long gone and largely forgotten; as for friends, I never had any nor wanted them. One place would have been as good as the next. Or as bad. But I was ever a homebody, comfortable indoors, reassured by the staid repetition of the days and nights, soothed by my little routines, content inhabiting the nooks and crannies of this old house. It’s home, after all, the one place where you feel just right. And that is something you do not give up, not even for the rest of the whole wide world.
The tall one is the leader. He seems always angry or about to become so. The other two, both much younger, are merely acolytes, I assume. They trail behind him like shadows. They mouth words I cannot hear. The shortest of them, a girl perhaps, but close to androgynous, seems particularly cowered by the tall one, and I can tell he enjoys it. They move about and look and move about some more, the tall one directing them to place this there, that over there, check this, take note of that, raising a hand to make them stop in their tracks, then waving them on.
I sit still the way only I can and watch them contaminate my home with their malevolent presence and malignant intentions and I feel something I have not felt for time incalculable, a rising heat and gore, an iridescence. And though they cannot see me, they know I’m here. Their infernal machine has somehow detected my presence, though I have stayed out of its way, tripped no wires to their cameras, ducked beneath their sensors, remained resolutely imperceptible, save only for twice shrieking high enough to warn off all but the most heartless of predators, whose lust in the hunt overcomes their common sense.
The tall one, the leader, is looking straight at me, but of course sees nothing. He hushes the others, as if I were a cat that might be spooked by their voices or sudden moves. Oh, fool, I am no cat. I will not be spooked. Nor will I be driven from my home by you and your quaint science. Follow me, as I come to a boil. I lure the tall one away from the other two, through the kitchen where cats do indeed sometimes sharpen their claws on the peeling cabinet doors, past the dining room and the web-cloaked chandelier, crashed long ago on the dust-laden table, into the sewing room where no sewing has been done for time incalculable, tight and closed as a fist, windowless, with one way out only, the narrow door he steps through. I move behind him and block his exit.
So, you want to see what should not be seen, hear what should not be heard, feel what should never be felt by the living? I put a hand on his shoulder. He turns and looks. I become manifest…
It is the girl who finds him. She covers her eyes and mouth and though I cannot hear the scream I know it echoes through my home like the siren’s song. The other one rushes in, staggers back. The tall one sits against the wall, his dark hair gone the whitest white, his eyes wrenched wide, so wide the others may see a faint imprint of me manifest on his pupils, his mouth frozen open in a silent scream more piercing than the girl’s and so much more deserved, his heart quite stopped dead in his chest. They run and stumble through my house as if chased by something inescapable, propelled by an instinct to survive.
I will never understand the living. But this I know. At the heart of these pitiful live things is fear. It sits in their core like tinder awaiting a flame. And know this, all who enter here and intrude on my home: I am the flame; you are the tinder. Do not play with me.
Paul Negri has twice won the gold medal for fiction in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Writing Competition. His stories have appeared in trampset, The Penn Review, Into the Void, Flash Fiction Magazine, Vestal Review, Jellyfish Review and more than 40 other publications. He lives and writes in Clifton, New Jersey.
