He Came To See Me

I lived in the suburbs of a town in Washington named Rio's Peak. It was a small town and in my neighborhood there were twenty or thirty houses.

People moved in and out of there all the time. I lived there until I was seven-teen. What I'm about to tell you about happened two years before I left. It was the reason why I left. I want to vomit every time I tell the tale.

It was the summer of 2009 and I was shooting baskets on my neighbors' hoop. My neighbor was such a prick; he hated everybody. He never had much of a problem with me, but that was because I stayed out of his way. It was like his wife would come out of their house everyday with a new bruise. More on that later...

Anyways, so I was shooting baskets and a young boy stared at me through the back window of a car. He wasn't in the car, just standing behind it. He had on a red t-shirt and a shark helmet. He was cute, but he was very young. He smiled at me. I smiled back, and then gradually he made his way over to me. He and I started shooting hoops together. He was the kindest little guy I had ever met. I looked forward to making his acquaintance every day. He was very talkative, never shut up. That was okay, though. I didn't mind.

Not more than a week later he got a new dog, a black lab. It was only a puppy. It was very cute. We would take it on walks all the time. He had not been trained to relieve himself in his own yard, and so he just did it wherever he wanted to.

My neighbor—the angry one—had been complaining about a dog shitting in his yard. All the time. He never quit bitching about it. I never said I knew whose it was. However, he figured out on his own. Every day, the things he said got more and more insane. His wife got worse and we all hated him even more.

One day I saw the boy playing basketball outside on his own. His ball went into the neighbors yard. He went to pick it up and all of a sudden I heard a loud crack and the boy started screaming. I got on my shoes and went out the door, and what I was saw was only the beginning. The boy's foot was caught in some kind of trap and it had basically taken off his whole foot. That's when the neighbor stepped outside with a baseball bat.

I went and got my mom's meat cleaver; it was the first thing I saw. By the time I got out there, everything had gone straight to hell. He was beating the poor boy with the bat. His brains and pieces of his skull came up with every swing. The boy was dead and the neighbor saw me.

I went inside and called the police, and I saw him coming towards my house. I began to panic. He knocked on my door, bat still in hand. I opened it. He came to see me. Bad decision. Right as he began to swing I ducked under and swiped up with the clever, splitting apart his scrotum. Blood trickled from it and he screamed. I then proceeded to strike his head, watching his brains spill over my porch.

The cops arrived and they told me that everything would be OK. Self-defense is a crazy thing one of them said. I didn't understand but I didn't question. Then the boy's mother and father approached the boy's dead body. They screamed and began to cry. I saw the dog, and he looked me straight in the face, and it was almost as if he was smiling. Then, he went over and started chewing on one of the dead boy's bones. I started to cry.

Later that night, the dog ran out of the house and came to my door step. He saw me waiting there. He came to see me. Bad decision.