Meliorism

Tragedy

We used to live next to each other, but I never really did know him.

The street we lived on was almost always deserted. It stands by the quiet creek, and I always found it quite rewarding to sit at my porch and stare at everything. This involved looking at his house, of course. The whole structure was painted white except for the window to his room, which was painted blue at the edges—a crisp shade of blue. I later would learn that that shade’s just as crisp as him.

I was quite the astute observer. Every time his family went out for a trip, hunting or fishing or otherwise, I’d stare from the window of my room, noting how intact and ideal his whole family was. My mom and I were the only ones in the house; my dad had left us when I was just young. But I wasn’t jealous of him or his family.

One September night, my mother was cooking pesto for dinner. The scent filled the house. I was sitting on the couch, reading a book. My mom and I never really talked, but somehow we shared an unbreakable bond. Without each other, we would fall apart.

But tonight pesto was the case. And its scent filled the house, and I was reading, and everything was silent except for the steady humming of the old radio sitting near the foyer. It was just like every other night, except tonight my mom was making pesto for dinner, and tonight, a stranger would walk into our house with a handgun and say with conviction, with deadly, deadly conviction, “Stay the fuck down. Stay where you are, and shut up.”

I brought down the book and swung my legs over the couch and shut up. My mother, however, made a lot of noise by dropping whatever cooking material she was holding and running for the door and screaming for her life, but before she was able to run outside and therefore save her life, the stranger had grabbed her by the arm and covered her mouth with his calloused, filthy hand. I was still sitting on the couch, but it took all my willpower not to scream.

“I’m going to tie you two up, but if you say a word, I will fucking shoot you in the head,” the stranger stated matter-of-factly. He had an edge to his voice, a poignant echo in the void.

He tied us up to the legs of the table at the dining room and then proceeded to move around the house, a black loot bag in his hand. The rope was tight around my wrists. My mom was sitting on the other end, but if I struggled, I could touch the ends of her fingers. I was longing for touch then, so I chose to struggle.

“It will be okay, sweetie,” she said, her motherly instincts obviously kicking in. Before I realized it, I was crying. Seven years ago, when my dad left us, I had cried so much, every night, until I found refuge in music and books. And then I pledged that I would never, ever cry again. Not even at my own mother’s funeral. Crying, I believed, was a sign of weakness.

But tied up there, in my own home, in the only place that was supposed to make us feel safe, I realized that crying was not only to represent weakness; it was also to represent utter desperation and loneliness. I cried, and cried, and cried.

Then the doorbell rang.

It was almost comical, really. It rang and it sounded like a tease, like something from the norms, like we were in hell and that was the sound of earthly life. It was all I could hear, that soft ding-dong, that reverberating sound of prevalence.

The stranger in the ski-mask came down from upstairs, his steps aggressive but calculated, and he stared at us with cold eyes. He removed his ski-mask and went to the foyer, leaving the loot bag in the living room. How typical—a loot bag, a goddamn loot bag!

I could hear voices from where I was tied up. They were at first hushed and friendly, but then they became forced, almost contentious. And then after a few minutes, the stranger was dragging the woman from next door—and her son.