Deborah Woehr

I had just started writing an article for Supernatural at about nine-thirty when I heard a crash on my front porch. I left the office, saw my husband playing his video game, and walked up to the front door. Someone was outside.

Like an idiot, I opened the door and saw this young guy staggering back down our walkway. My porch reeked of his beer. “What are you doing to my house?” I asked him.

“Ugh,” he said.

“Shall I call the police?”

“Ugh, yeah.” The kid stumbles down my driveway and into the street, where he staggers around in a daze. I hear the party going on next door.

At this point, my husband is standing behind me. “That guy is gone!”

After the door closes, he looks at me and says, “Are you crazy? That could have been an axe-murderer.”

“I guess I am crazy,” I replied.

The kid has disappeared, the party continues, and I go back to my office to work on that article. Midnight strikes, and the party is still going on. At one-thirty, they start shouting. It wasn’t the happy-go-drunkly shouting.

I go back outside to investigate. A shouting match is going on in my next door neighbor’s driveway. There are at least twenty kids, and two boys are wanting to duke it out very badly with each other. Like an idiot, I shout, “Excuse me!”

No one hears me or sees me, and that was a good thing because I was able to slip back into my house and call the cops on them. My voice shakes as I talk to the dispatcher, betraying me for the wimp that I really am. I hate drunks, especially violent ones.

I get off the phone and peer through the blinds. The throng has moved in front of my house. Three guys are pulling one of the would-be boxers down the street toward a parked car.

I hear my oldest son get up as three skanky hobags walk by. Then the street is lit up by the first of three cruisers. The kiddies go running because they know they’re going to get busted. My son watches the scene from his bedroom window.

I don’t know if there were any arrests, and I don’t care. They’re gone, it’s quiet, and it’s time to go to bed.