From
the perspective of the stranger watching me last night:
I sat by the window, letting the coming storm pull the smoke
from my cigarette and breath as if it wanted it, and I obliged. But below there
was a black mass, a square tarp, seeming to squirm, as if it were the ground
around a planted tree about to be uplifted by burrowing vermin. What was it?
Again it moved. A door, it seemed, a square beneath the
square pushing up. It seemed to heave as if for breath.
At length it rose enough that the tarp warped and beneath
could be guessed a form. A human form!
And then a struggling hand escaped the clutches of the tarp
atop the storm door, and in an instant, a man, clad like a vagrant, and with
the meanest facial hair, was birthed from whatever hell that escape was from.
He burst forth cursing god's name profusely, and regaining
his strength, which seemed to have been as dampened by the exertion as his
sweater was gritty with the muck the tarp had funneled onto him.
At that moment the power failed, and the blackness of the
village was all consuming, saving my cigarette, which came to a quick end