No One Locks Their Doors Around Here

“There were no signs of forced entry,” the investigating officer said.

“No one locks their doors around here,” the dead woman’s husband replied.

He burst into tears as the stretcher bearing his wife’s body was loaded into an ambulance.

Then he secured the house, got into his car, and followed.

Room with a View

woman scratching her head

Betty often went into a room and couldn’t remember why she had gone there. She had developed strategies for dealing with these situations, but nothing she tried today brought her purpose to mind, until she heard a loud, impatient voice. “Are you going to be in the bathroom all day?”

Shots Were Fired

Two shots, then a scream. A figure races out of an alley. No one pays any mind. Minutes later a wounded man stumbles from the alley and falls onto the sidewalk. He, too, is ignored, except by a sympathetic young girl who is yanked away and scolded by her mother.

The December of His Years

image of the author of this piece

The tan, lightly sweated college student jogging up the leafy street did not change stride when the octogenarian blew pot smoke up her ass from the safety of his front porch, sixty feet away. “Damn,” she thought, “didn’t feel a thing. The old dude’s weed must be losing its potency.”