Thanks to your bladder you wake up at 2:14 a.m. You look over at your wife. She is in a deep sleep and doesn’t stir. You’d prefer a full night’s sleep but those days are long past. Sometimes if you use enough alcohol and CBD products you can sleep through the night, but you forgot them at home and you need to piss. You try to get your bearings. You are renting a vacation house and the layout is unfamiliar to you. You love it here on the Oregon coast, the wild magnificent beauty, the untamable ocean, even the seclusion in Neskowin, a town that’s nothing but a turnout along Highway 101, isolated and safe, a place where the very few residents mind their own business. You open the bedroom door and walk out, aiming at where you think the bathroom should be, running your hands against the wall to steady yourself. | You are in this house because your cousin cleans the place, and she knows for a fact that no one is going to be staying here over the weekend, which means you can break in and take whatever you want, even stay there all day if you like. But you know there are cronies that watch the neighborhood, and you will stand out, especially when you start removing the contents of the house into a truck that barely runs. You got the door code from your cousin so getting into the house is a breeze. You break in sometime after midnight, take your time, keep it dark and quiet, don’t draw any attention to yourself. You take your time on the first floor, make a pile of the appliances and the 55” TV and a few other items. You go upstairs and you come into a large open room with a hallway to the right. |
There is a man standing there. You don’t know what to do. But your brain does, and it takes
over, automatically. Your blood pressure spikes. Blood pumps into your muscles. Your eyes
dilate, your breathing and heart rate quicken. You involuntarily freeze for several
milliseconds and time slows. Your adrenal glands squirt epinephrine into your system,
readying you for what comes next.
Fight or flight.
Someone yells, but you are unsure who it comes from. You lunge forward without thinking, protecting what’s yours. Your life. Your wife. You have nothing but your bare hands. At home you would have a baseball bat and a 9-mil next to the bed, right next to the sleep aids. You try to subdue the man. He is smaller than you but lithe. You have mass and little else and you get winded even on short walks. You know your best hope is to somehow pin him down. You pray the noise will wake up the wife and she will call the police because you know you can’t hold him down very much longer, and then you feel the dull thumps against your side, and they don’t feel like punches but something far worse, and you can tell that you that you are failing, flailing, in over your head, and you should have chosen not to fight. | You want nothing more than to run away but you never get the chance. The man rushes on you and it’s like being tackled by a bear and with the same level of ferocity. You’re not prepared to fight, not at all, you know it’s best to avoid fights, that violence does nothing but escalate the criminality. You’ve done time and you know that B&E is tolerable but not when paired with assault. But this guy has got you by more than 40 pounds and he won’t let go, so you panic, and you pull a utility knife from your pocket, the one from your day job building houses, and you begin punching at the side of the man holding you down. You hear him grunt in pain and his grip relaxes and he is breathing hard, and you use the moment to push him off, break free from his grip. You can’t seem to get back on your feet, and you struggle and slip, and stagger back to the stairs. |
You wish this nightmare had never happened, but it did, unexpectedly and in an instant.
You can’t calm down. You still operate from pure instinct, wildly on edge, heart racing.
You hear someone screaming, a woman, and the vocalizations are like the gibberish of an
unknown language, the confusion and despair and agony all blending together, and yet
somehow you know what she is saying. But you care very little. You are getting away,
fading away, fading, fading, the shadows enveloping you, a useless shelter that provides no
protection at all from your regret.
…
C.J. Friend is the author of several fiction and nonfiction publications, most recently in New Maps and Black Sheep. He has also self-published three short story collections. Notably, he was a finalist for the 2014 VanderMey Nonfiction prize and a semi-finalist for the same competition in 2015. When not writing, his insatiable curiosity gets him into all kinds of trouble. But he can’t seem to resist peeking around the corner of what he doesn’t know.
RIC Journal 
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