First Impressions(Jeremy McCool) “George,” she said as he closed the red front door, “the water bill came today.”

“Where is it?” He asked, slumping his left shoulder and letting his black laptop bag fall to the floor with a heavy thud. It was old and had many tears. Only three of the several zippers still worked. He didn’t have a laptop computer, but it held papers and files and books nicely too.

“Um, I think I put it on the computer desk,” she said nonchalantly.

He grunted at the unwelcome news and immediately walked to the pressboard computer desk to see if it could be salvaged. He spent ten minutes moving dirty cups and plates and bowls and toys and cameras and papers and only broke one ketchup stained and crumb spattered dish before he determined that it was not, in fact, on the computer desk.

“George,” she called from the living room.

“What?”

“The kids are being really quiet in their bedroom. They’re probably doing something awful. Can you go check?”

He walked into the living room and glanced at her, sitting in his big leather easy chair, fully reclined, reading a Penguin classic. He nodded his head with a kind of sneer on his face and moved toward the children’s bedroom, kicking aside toys and Styrofoam plates, stuffed animals and small piles of tiny clothes that were strewn across the dining room floor.

Just before he reached their bedroom, he noticed that the bathroom door was closed. He listened at the door for a moment and heard tiny hushed voices over the sound of running water. He opened the door quietly and saw a still shot, like a Polaroid, of chaos with three tiny people frozen in the foreground, eyes wide and staring at the door. There was some kind of bluish white powder all over the floor. The gingham curtains from the window were tied loosely around the three year old’s waist. He had a box of powdered laundry soap which he had apparently been dumping into the sink basin. Lumps of blue residue were creeping down the sides and a pile of suds three feet high bubbled up from the drain. The faucet was on high. The four year old was wearing at least five shirts and three pairs of pants, and the one year old had been silently stalking a black widow spider that disappeared over the small tile rise into the shower.

It was an ugly scene. And it ended ugly.

An hour later, as George was lying on his back on the somewhat sticky bathroom floor struggling to put the drain trap under the sink back together and the one year old was balancing on his ankles and holding onto the toilet, he heard the doorbell ring. Then it rang again. He heard feet scuttling across the cheap tile. He gave the wrench a final twist, his legs a little wobble -- causing the one year old to stumble -- and stood up. His clothes were discolored. The green waste bin next to the toilet was filled with sludgy blue hair and what looked like water-saturated clumps of toilet paper. His wife ran into the room.

“George, that creeper is at the door. Can you please go talk to him?”

“Who, Riff Raff?”

“Yeah. I don’t want him coming here anymore. He scares me. He’s always coming around when you’re at work.”

“You shouldn’t have let him use your phone that day. Those vagrant scuts are like leeches. They’re animals. You gave him a little blood. Of course he’ll be back.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I thought I was doing something good. Can you please get rid of him? I don’t feel comfortable with him coming around here. When are you going to put up those fences you promised?”

He held up his hands to calm her down, or maybe to repel the coming attack. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

She snatched up the one year old and hid in a crevice in a far corner of the house. The three and four year old were staring like zombies at a Disney movie. He went to the front door and opened it. The man standing on his front porch was tall and thin, but was wearing several layers of dirty and worn clothing. He smelled faintly of dead fish and garbage. He was missing several teeth. He had fiery eyes that never stopped moving, trying to see past George and into the house. George puffed himself out to fill most of the door frame.

“What do you want?” Asked George.

“Could I use your phone? I gotta call my mom, see, so I can tell her to come pick me up.” His voice was vacuous, yet somewhat demanding. He was talking fast.

“No. You can’t.”

“It’s really important. She’s at the store and I need to tell her that we’re out of milk and then I’ll go pick her up. It will just take a second.”

“Listen, I said no.”

“Come on, man,” he was getting combative. “I just live right up the street. Is this how you treat your neighbors? I just need to call my uncle for a minute.”

“I don’t want you coming around here anymore. I know my wife let you use the phone before, but the privilege is dried up. You won’t get anything else out of us. And if I hear that you’ve been coming around when I’m at work again, I will hunt you down. Understand?” His voice sounded bolder than he felt.

“Well, can you at least give me a ride to my girlfriend’s house then? She just lives across town. I got a bike, but it’s a killer in the wind.”

“No. I want you off my property. Now. And don’t come back.” As if to accentuate his point, Fritz, the black lab who never barked at anyone, rushed the door by George’s feet barking ferociously. Riff Raff backed up quickly and almost stumbled over a small fence that ran the length of the porch.

“Alright, alright, I’m leaving, for now. Just call the dog off!” He stalked over to an old rusted bicycle and clattered down the dirt driveway.

George closed the door and locked it. He sank back into a chair near the door and held his head, breathing off the dizziness.

“George!” From the bedroom.

He just sat. Then he noticed the water bill, stuck to the wall with what looked like peanut butter.

All that week George couldn’t sleep. The next day he called in sick to work. He had nothing but a B.B. rifle with which to defend his family. And a useless dog. He wondered how effective they would be. His friend told him that ten pumps on the rifle should put out an eye. He had heard stories about the power and audacity displayed by tweekers looking for a fix. He had also heard stories about this particular one. Stories of break-ins and auto thefts. Arson. He called in sick the next day too. Then it was the weekend. He looked haggard and hadn’t shaved in a week. By Monday, after four days of watching, he had not so much as seen the vermin ride his bike down the street in front of their house.

Sunday night, he finally slept.

He awoke from a strange dream at two in the morning to the sound of shattering glass. It was from the dining room. He jolted out of bed, slinked to the closet and shouldered the rifle. As he peeked around the frame of the bedroom doorway he saw the shadow of a large figure crawling in through a window near the table. Fritz was whimpering in a corner of the living room. Beyond the dog, his three year old son was toddling down the hallway toward the dining room holding his blanket and a stuffed whale.

George raised the rifle quickly. If he missed, the assailant would know it was only a B.B. gun and the intimidation factor would quickly subside. He could see moonlight glinting in the whites of the beast’s eyes as it stood in the dining room and turned its head from side to side. His son saw it too and stopped in the middle of the hallway, staring. He began pumping the rifle, sweat pouring down his face. One-two-three-four. The creature leaned down and brushed broken glass off of its legs and elbows. Five-six-seven-eight. It stalked towards the kitchen. Nine-ten. He pushed the pump to its closed position carefully, as quietly as he could.

Then the brute fixed its eyes in the direction of his son. It froze. George saw the glint of the moon from the windows again and took careful aim, his index finger meticulously coiled around the trigger. Headlights drove by outside and threw shadows of large trees all over the dining room walls. The fiend began to move toward his son, glass shards crackling underfoot like dry twigs. He heard from behind him, “George!” He flinched. His finger twitched and the gun went off, sending a B.B. careening through the air just above the animal’s head. It ricocheted with a loud ping and then he saw the thing stop and slowly crumble to the floor, facedown, just ten feet away from his trembling son, who had peed himself.

He ran to the spot where the creature fell and clubbed it mercilessly with the butt of the rifle, over and over, yelling with a savage sort of pleasure. Blood spattered across the kitchen, turning the counter top into what looked like a gingham table cloth. He raised the rifle and swung it down, like an axe, up and down. Each collision with the thick skull made a sputtering sound, like slicing a boiling meatloaf. After a minute of this, he let the rifle fall to the floor. He was panting. He turned around and saw his wife holding the three year old in the doorway, stunned. He looked behind him again and saw his four year old stumbling out of her bedroom with her blanket and heard the one year old crying from the other side of the house. Loud, gasping cries.

His hands and arms and face were spattered with warm blood. The back of the creature’s head was caved in. Grey matter was spilling out onto the floor and oozing onto his bare foot. He saw a little pock mark on the neck just below the erratic hairline, right at the base of the skull. It was a pulpy pink with a small hole at the center. Ten pumps.

His daughter stuck her hand in her mouth and began to cry, her panic cry. He kneeled down and put his arms out for her to come to him. She screamed and ran around him to where her mom and brother were in the hallway. The baby was crying louder now.

He sat down on the floor next to his kill and put his head in his hands.

A few days later, the mess had been cleaned up, the investigation done. George had a court date in three weeks but was assured that there was no case against him. He had acted in self-defense.

His wife, while tidying up the dining room, had found a small B.B. sized dent in a tin decoration that hung above the dining room doorway. It displayed an ornate typeset of the Ten Commandments. The dent was in the center of the word “murder”. She never showed this to her husband, but instead, threw the tin away.

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