The Back Door

The neighborhood had changed, but having lived there for so long they hadn’t really noticed. It was home. They were comfortable there.

That one night changed everything for the girls and their mother. It was after dinner. After the dishes. Tina had headed down to the basement to retrieve some laundry. Cynthia was flipping through the channels on the living room TV, while her mother sat flipping through the latest edition of National Enquirer, a publication she truly believed to be as credible as the New York Times.

Suddenly there came a noise at the back door. The kitchen door, with its paned glass top, and its pale butter colored curtain, started shaking and banging, and there was a maniacal yelling coming from the other side.

Cynthia looked at her mother. “Did Tina take the garbage to the alley and lock herself out again?” Tossing down the remote she groaned and hoisted herself off the couch. “All right, hold on!” she yelled. “I’m coming.” And as she rounded the corner from dining room into the kitchen she nearly bumped in to Tina who was emerging from the basement steps. The pounding stopped.

“What the hell was that?” Tina asked.

And the pounding once again started.

“Who is that?!”

Neither girl wanted to go find out. In fact, neither girl moved from the spot, ten feet from the door. There was a light on the back steps and they could make out a shadow of a man. Quickly Tina dropped the laundry basket and stepped over the the kitchen sink window and tried to peer out to get a glimpse of whoever it was, but all she saw was a grey, ratty old coat.

“Come, on! Mother Fucker! Open up! I know you in there!”

Tina ran back to her sister’s side, terrified.

“What do we do?!” They had actually thought of this moment, but they hadn’t planned what to do. They both recalled how they had wondered what they might do if this were to happen. Over the past couple months there had been more and more break ins in this part of the city, some of them while people were home. Three blocks away a woman was beaten and robbed, while her small child sat in a playpen only a few feet away. Such activity was startling mostly because this part of the city was a quiet, working class, neighborhood. There weren’t a lot of rentals, it was mostly family owned homes. It was a lot of homes passed on from one generation to the next. It was peppered with eastern European immigrants, who contributed to the diverse makeup of the metropolitan region with their bakeries and restaurants. But they did so in downtown and elsewhere. Not here. That’s why the crime spree was so unusual. It was a safe part of town, because nothing ever happened here. No one came to this neighborhood. All the action was elsewhere.

The door shook even harder. The small peg board where Tina placed her car keys, that hung next to the back door, shook and suddenly fell to the floor in a loud crash. That was all it took for their aging mother to run up the stairs to her bedroom, the fastest she’d moved in years.

“We’re calling the police!” Tina screamed at the door. But the phone was over there, hanging on the kitchen wall by the back door and she was too frightened to go near it.

And the door shook harder.

“Open the fuck up!!”

Tina turned to her sister, and said louder than was necessary, “Go get the gun!” Cynthia looked to Tina, not understanding. They don’t own a gun. They don’t even like guns. So Tina repeated, “Go get the gun! I’m calling the police!”

And the door shook harder.

Cynthia panicked and joined the charade. “OK! I’ve got the gun!”

And with that the pane of glass on the back door smashed open into pieces. An arm emerged through and started fumbling for the lock. The two sisters backed up in to the dining room, unsure of what to do or where to go.

Tina grabbed her sister’s hand and squeezed it as she shouted, “Well if you won’t shoot him, I will! Give me that!”

The arm that reached through in to their kitchen flailed wildly, breaking out more glass. “Fuck you, then!” the stranger shouted, as he backed away from the entry. The screen door slammed and they saw his shadow recede into the yard.