Midnight Madness

I think there was a terrible incident, maybe even a murder, in my neighborhood last night. It happened right around midnight. I'd turned off my TV and was about to go upstairs to get ready for bed. But then I heard yelling outside, an angry voice shouting at someone or something. It sounded like it was coming from my own backyard. I rushed to the kitchen to see if I could see anything through the window. It was a foggy night and, despite the rear porch light, I couldn't see the yard clearly. I went outside to check it out.

It took me almost a minute, I didn't see him at first, but then I noticed a kid, maybe ten or eleven years old, standing beside one of the trees. His clothes were filthy. He looked like he'd been living outside for a long time. And even though he already looked kind of terrified, I started yelling at him. I'm not sure if I was trying to get him to come out so I could help him or if I was masking how frightened I was. Whichever it was, the kid responded by scaling my back fence and disappearing into the night.

I stood there for a minute, just listening. Then I went back inside not knowing if I should call the police or just go to sleep. That's about when I heard a gunshot a few blocks over. I tried to look out from an upstairs window, waiting for the police to show up, but they never did.

I finally went to bed and laid there for hours before I finally drifted off to sleep. I kept thinking that I'd never seen that kid before, didn't know him at all. But all the same, I prayed to God it was him that had fired the gun. Those other things out there are a lot scarier than he was.