Uninvited Guests

                                                Uninvited Guests

Rick collapsed back upon his rusty rocking chair, it´s squeaks exacerbating as the swaying motion heightens. His t-shirt, a light navy blue tunic, saturated against his back as drops of sweat commenced their arduous voyage down his grimy face.Virginia´s blistering sun was especially lambent through the insulating windows of his old, two-story abode in the middle of Blacksburg, and the pathetic attempt at circulating wind made by his archaic ceiling fan hardly coughed up a breeze. Rick grunted, dabbed up the molecules of perspiration, and heaved himself off his chair and through the primal corridors of dusty furniture and cacophonous silence. 

With his father in absence on another one of his endless business trips for his ¨blooming startup¨, Rick often found himself passing the time engaged in vast periods of nothingness,  eyeballing a spider constructing a web, or rocking the last bits of grit off his favorite steel rocking chair. The chair, outmoded and metallic, was his mother's favorite. It would always blast Rick off on a trip through memory road...

A few days after Rick´s 10th birthday, he and his mother were cruising through the colonies on their way up to Maine for a family get together. He recalled their conversation midway through Maryland, the final one he would ever cherish. 

¨Mom, can we stop by for pizza tonight? I´ve had enough of the granola bars and yogurt you've packed, and the cinnamon rolls have become stale,¨ he´d whined.

“Sure honey, I feel you. We have had a long journey so far, so let me treat you ,” she had spoken with a grin. Her smile was like sliding into a warm tub of butter, her genuineness radiating from her with a scintillating aura, and her mutual adoration for Rick binding the two together like shoelaces to a shoe. That smile was Rick’s last concrete memory of her before the collision. Before a gargantuan monster truck, glittering with ire and furiously attempting to overtake another car on the narrow two lanes of the highway, utterly devastated their bijou Honda Civic. 

As Ricky recollected these thoughts for the umpteenth time and was wiping off his tears, a slight creak echoed from downstairs. A familiar creak. One that has been etched into his memory from the countless times his father has abandoned him on futile business trips to assorted areas. As he sluggishly lumbered over to the stairs across his house, he peered at the depths below with a ballooning suspicion, one that was followed by a gut feeling in his stomach, and bloodshot nerves branded into his eyes. His heart was pounding. He was sure he had seen the doorknob turn.

Dad shouldn't be home for 3 more weeks. How is the doorknob turning?  Rick pondered these thoughts, his head pounding from the Pacific Ocean of thoughts brawling through his skull. That's when his already fried brain went into sensory overload. 

The only people who could be here at this time were kidnappers, aware of his seclusion and amenable to seizing him. At least this is what his aching brain had told him, which didn´t have a tendency to function radically after his mother´s accident. As he scanned the items at his disposal, he quickly manufactured a plan in his head. One that he was semi-confident would vanquish the intruder.

First, he scavenged through the leftover chemicals of his father´s vestiges, scouring for necessities to set up the trap. He had binge-watched   Home Alone half his life ago, and the gears in his noggin were already unambiguously shifted to design such mechanisms.   As he commenced the construction of this exploit, the continuous rustling of the knob was like a blade of ice to his ears, cutting through his eardrums and freezing the little sanity he had left. His heart accelerated with the drop in his gut, amplifying the gushing of the sweat oozing down his forehead and the intensity of his veins breaking out of their confinement cells.  Finally, he blew the dust off the spiky end of a saw blade, coughing from soot, and rotated it adjacent to the synthetic fibers from a shoelace of one of his dad´s snow boots. Brain cells jamming, fingers toiling, he wrapped up contriving the Rube Goldberg Machine that would seal the gruesome fate of the unbidden intruder.

As the clock sneered at Rick, the door´s futile clicks shattered the silence binding the strings to his heart, Rick´s hand gripped the scissors he would use to make the incision.  With the purpose to slaughter and his motive a laser pointed at the peril of the intruder, his hand twitched from the murderous adrenaline pumping it. Suddenly, at the peak of expectancy, the door yawned open from it´s morbid hinges, and Rick´s trigger-happy fingers snapped into the motion he had trained them to perform. 

¨I'm hom-¨ a middle aged man in a sleek burgundy suit and crinkled glasses paused mid-sentence, as the whetted razor saw blade was unleashed from its position. In a gleam of recognition, Rick shrieked in the agony associated with realization, but it was too late. He could do nothing but spectate as his father's face was sliced in half from a killing machine he had so expertly assembled.