Gift of the Intruder

Flash Fiction

He was brave in the way that he fought off second guesses.

Diligent in the way he approached the job he was supposed to have in the vocation in which he allegedly excelled.

Quiet when he cashed the paycheck for which he traded five-sevenths of his weeks.

Willing to do what he was told was necessary. 

Terrified when glass shattered and footsteps clomped.

He was smart enough to know that when glass shattered in one’s dwelling deep in the bowels of a night, and the sounds of footsteps followed that there was a three-digit number to be pressed for armed assistance.

But rising from bed at a time he had quite possibly never, ever been awake in the over four decades of his adulthood he felt a nameless pulse that rose from his diaphragm and turned his neck into a bowstring.

If he had been able to name that pulse in that moment, he would have named it purpose.

David Paul Williams had done the puzzle of his life from the border in, like one is supposed to, and completed the puzzle quickly, looking down at it, glad that the puzzle was completed but unimpressed with the finished image the puzzle displayed.

And now he was faced with solving a new puzzle he hadn’t purchased on a crooked table with no light.

There was a person downstairs, he was certain.

That person would be called an intruder.

David Paul Williams had no weapons, no golf clubs, no friends.

The intruder downstairs was a criminal, a junkie, a thief.

He had come to take things from David Paul Williams.

But this night, he had given David Paul Williams a terrifying thing called a thrill.

David Paul Williams walked downstairs, crying out, hoping his presence, his voice, would send away whoever had entered his domicile.

The intruder would not be so easily sent away.

In one short moment, the intruder would both give to, and take from a man the true breath of life.

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