"Life is but the shipwreck of our plans."
Plan your missteps wisely.
Plan your missteps wisely.
Karmic Catastrophe by Lisa Ciarfella
The constant
hammering, going on two years now, never ended. It had been all bang, bang, bang in her ear twenty-four, seven including Saturdays, sometimes
Sundays too. Traci’s next-door neighbor had been on a roll, determined to see both
the tear-down of his old beach bungalow and the birth of his new McMansion through
to the bitter end, and she’d grown mighty tired of it. Weekday evenings were always the worst. She’d slug home dead tired after a full day’s grind of grad school classes and all she wanted was to veg out on the sofa and mindlessly click her way through re-runs of FX’s Criminal Minds. Tonight, that game plan was not to be.
Her day had been
particularly brutal; two final exams and a follow-up thesis meeting with her adviser,
neither of which had gone particularly well. He’d never embraced her writing, especially
her crime fiction, and always sent her away from the mandatory weekly interrogations frustrated. If only he understood; those unpaved alleys snaking their way down crime-city
central fed into her soul like a mainline, much like that crystal-clear moon outside
her kitchen window.
As she mixed her
nightly snack of pasta and perfectly poached eggs, Traci stared up at the moon’s
amber silhouette, half crescent with slivers of orange and black running straight
down its middle. Nature’s ultimate backdrop for banging out a couple of deliciously
decadent criminal characters.
If only the damn noise would just stop! But the work crew’s constant Mexican Mariachi
music and hard tools cracking away at the concrete got inside her head, made it
throb hard. If only her neighbor had hired a real contractor instead of forging
ahead on his DIY project, with no clue how to DIY! Ahhhh, but a girl could
dream!
Since he’d
started, she had multiple waking fantasies where she casually walked by and
tossed a match over the construction mess skewed carelessly across his property.
Then nonchalantly watched while the place went up in flames; a real bang-up, Fourth
of July backyard extravaganza! In her fantasy, she always waited to call 9-1-1 til it burned half way down to the
shards, with nothing left to recoup. Problem was, her apartment lay within
spitting distance. She didn’t own much but her laptop—full of grad school projects,
a novel in the works, and stories yet submitted—was not expendable. Neither was
her puppy, Lilac, who she’d snuck in under the landlord’s radar. Everything
else, though...
Running had been
her go-to to drown out the noise, so she’d laced up the Reeboks and when she
got back, the crew had finally packed it in. Clicking on the telly, she sat
back to unwind but quickly realized she wasn’t alone.
A gruff, strange
voice rang out from the half-constructed space next door, straight through her
living room window. A rough, male accent; Australian or New Zealand. “Awwwrrrrr... I’m gonna
do it. Back off mate, or I swear I’ll do it. I can promise ya that.”
Traci jumped up
out of her makeshift sofa fashioned from beach chairs and whoopee cushions and
went to the window. An unrecognizable large dark figure swooshed right by her in
the narrow shadows between her place and her neighbor’s house-in-progress. “Who’s there?” she
cried.
She ran to her
tiny bedroom and grabbed up her dad’s old aluminum bat from underneath the bed.
He’d given it to her years ago, thinking it might come in handy one day. Back
at the window, she saw a spark flash from deep inside the construction zone
where a quaint bungalow once stood, long before the wrecking ball wreaked its
havoc. Another flash popped off quick, then another and another.
“Hey you, I’ve
got a bat,” she said, as if that might help. “And a dog.” She eyed all twenty-four
inches of Lilac’s height. There were three more flashes, each brighter than the
next.
Then, from the
dark, came her neighbor, Karl’s, voice. “Traci – that you? Quick call the cops,
now. He’s gonna do it and I don’t have my phone!”
“Gonna do what?”
she cried. “What the hell’s going on over there?” She saw nothing but heard running,
feet shuffling, then a whoosh of liquid spilling out onto the dirt.
A lunging sound
came next, a jacket ripping, and a strange gurgling noise from the stranger’s
throat. “Get your hands off my throat, yankee, or I swear I’ll let her rip,” he said.
“Traci, call now!”
Karl shouted.
Another flash
exploded and fantastic heat welled up all around. She started to dial but her
fingers hesitated. She tried again, but nothing.
“Sheeeeit,” Karl
cried. “You son of a bitch. Now you’ve gone and done it.”
Traci stood mesmerized
as the blaze outside her window grew from the size of a flickering Bic at a Bon
Jovi concert to the mother of all bonfires. Thoughts of graham crackers and
marshmallows entered her brain.
When the heat really
started smoking, she snapped to and grabbed both her pup and prized laptop and jammed
out her apartment’s back door. She could hear both Karl and the strange figure
who started the blaze loudly screaming and fighting. Neither one of them would go
down without a fight.
Traci stood on
the sidewalk with neighbors gathering on all sides. Someone had called the fire
department, someone else the cops, and her typically serene street was now
filled with the chaos. Everyone stared as Karl’s proposed McMansion slowly melted
into ashes.
The next day, the neighborhood was abuzz. The
cops had matched the stranger’s teeth with that of a local known vagrant. They’d
had trouble with him before and said it was just a matter of time before he’d
cause more.
Neither Karl nor his DIY project made it into the new year. Christmas was still a few weeks away, but it seemed Karma delivered presents early this year.
Neither Karl nor his DIY project made it into the new year. Christmas was still a few weeks away, but it seemed Karma delivered presents early this year.
