It's mid-week in mid-summer and I'm sleeping in bed in my cottage with my typical summer set-up, where all the blinds and curtains are closed, except for the box-fan in one living-room window and then on the other end of the cottage a kitchen window slid open on both panes, to allow the air blown in from the fan to circulate through and blow out the warm stagnant air in the cottage.
And, it's like around 4am and I rouse because I hear a rattle like a storm door closing from off the alley, and it's a bit loud, but it doesn't register as anything unusual, since sometimes late at night a car-door will slam in the alley or something like that, because of a person leaving their friend's house late and being noisy.
Then, as I'm lying in bed, I hear another rattling of a storm door, and I rouse a bit, and then it rattles again, and I realize it sounds like my door, so I jolt up in bed, realize it **is** my cottage, and I immediately leap up (naked) and run to the front of the house (still naked), where as I test to make sure that the door-bolt is locked with my right hand (it is), I suddenly start pounding on the closed front door with my left and being like, "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE, WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING," etc. etc. etc., and as I keep pounding on the inside of my front door and shouting things I hear a scuttle by my storm door, and then nothing else.
(Later, the neighbor in the next house told me that my pounding was so sudden and so loud that it woke him up, since his bedroom is by the wall immediately by the yard-line that faces onto the backyard where my cottage is.)
And, I stop and stand still, and I look out the cracked-open kitchen window for movement (nothing) and out through the box-fan for movement (nothing), and I just stand and listen for additional movement because I don't know if the person is gone (nothing), and then I remember that my door has a peep-hole and I quietly move up and look out through there (nothing).
Then, after those couple minutes go by and everything is still still and quiet, I go and get my smartphone and call 911, and I go back to bed, as I hear a car pull up and see flashlights move around the windows of my cottage.
Then, after a bit, the police knock on the door of my cottage, and I call out "Hello, who is it?" etc. until they say it's them, and then I ask them to wait as I put on some boxers, and then I go open the door and talk with them some, and as I'm groggily doing that, I notice that the storm door is open but neither is holding it, and I ask them if they did that, and they say no, they found it like that, and I suddenly realize that someone had actually propped open my storm door at like 4 in the morning, by opening it and sliding that little metal tab thing up next to the air-pump closer so that it stays open, probably as a prelude to trying to break open my locked front door.
And, the cops had been telling me that it was probably a homeless person looking for a place to stay, we're near the downtown area where they all hang out and there's been a lot of that happening lately, too, especially because a few run-down low-income housing complexes with out-of-state owners on different sides of town had been condemned and that put a lot of people out on the street, but as soon as I point out the door, the one cop is like, "Maybe it could have been an animal," and I had to tell him that that was pretty impossible, since I'd been living there for years and nothing like the wind etc. had ever blown open the storm door, nor had the metal tab ever slid up accidentally when you had the door open wide because you were pushing it open as you carried in groceries, etc.
Anyhow, right afterwards I wrote the front tenant and my landlord to let them know about what had happened, and then I stayed up texting my one (art school) colleague who wears (women's) clothes because I was so tense -- thankfully, he's a night owl -- and because of all that, I couldn't get to sleep until after like 5am, when it was already getting light out.
It was just that scary.
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