A Yearly Donnybrook
A short story
I live in a reasonably safe neighborhood. Sure, we have the occasional incident where some punk kids will knock over a mailbox or steal a garden gnome, but those are more prank than crime. We can walk the streets after dark without fear and are confident that the explosions on the 4th of July are firecrackers and not gunshots.
Except for one night a year.
No, we don’t have an evening of murderous mayhem akin to some suburban version of The Purge, but it’s almost as bad. It’s bad enough that this year, as soon as the kids were tucked into bed I stretched barbed wire across the roof and around the front lawn, locked all the doors and windows, set the alarm, stoked the fire in the fireplace to a level that would make Hell seem cool by comparison, and settled into my recliner with a Glock 9 mm, a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, and a bayonet I swiped from the armory on my last day in the Corps.
My wife thinks I’m overreacting, of course, but she somehow manages to sleep through the carnage every year. This irritates me to no end, as I’m sure I could battle the infernal intruder far more successfully if I didn’t always have to do it alone. To add insult to injury, she always leaves a snack out for the ruffian before heading off to bed; she is a proper Southern lady who says it would be inhospitable not to do so. It is…
