Chapter The Buzzard Tree by Melissa Ann Hardin

Chapter The Buzzard Tree by Melissa Ann Hardin

Based on a true story.

It started with the lights going out all over the hood. It was pitch black in a world where darkness and wooded thickets nearby can disguise terrible crimes. I sat in the complete darkness. My boyfriend out for the night. What followed was a nightmare of darkness. Some strange instinct in me called me to prepare for another event. Events are crime dramas televised for perverse pleasure seekers on a dark net of despair. Victims are numerous and the games are madness and cruelty. Hard depictions of bloody murders. Covered up by public corruption and mass blood lust. Anyone can be a victim and again it was my turn. The door shut behind my boyfriend with a soft whisper. He was going out for the night. I set to preparing immediately. In anger of course because he was taking my car to his girlfriends or parking it elsewhere and doubling back to be with the girl next door. Women are expected to accept these circumstances after a world ravaged by the pandemic COVID. The virus was first introduced long before the first alarms were given. Much like a tornado, an F5 that barreled down our doors. In the hood it’s hoodwinkin’. You always got to be careful. I’d overhead my neighbor and her friends dogging me next door because I called her a super *****. Thereafter I paid attention to her friends helping my boyfriend have an affair with her. I brought her in my house and had them face each other in front of me to check the intimacy level and sure enough they did not talk like strangers. Sadly she told me that my bed was a very comfortable pillow top. Now, I’d like you to keep in mind that I would stop breathing during the course of their affair. No, I’m not dead, and Yes, I got hoodwinked out of my neighborhood for being the wrong color. They worked on my car, so that it was dangerous to drive. I started missing work due to illness. Found small cuts on my hands and face that would go on to scar new irreversible lines. I would awake completely distraught after having been drugged, my eyes stinging from some unknown substance. I heard people talking in my attic and my ex-boyfriend would walk to and fro in the kitchen talking to thin air. When he would go out, the shadow dances would begin. Strange people in strange costumes flitting hither and yon in the darkness. Sitting in deer stands in the trees. I awoke after passing out in terror some nights praying the lord god almighty to save me. Some nights I would sit outside in the darkness and smoke cigarettes and cry and sing. I sang Fulsom Prison Blues on my backsteps and watched as a neighbor shot someone or something in his storage shed. He then closed the door to it and walked away. Call the police you say? Report it, why didn’t I when it happened? Call the police in the hood, in the real world of human trafficking and murder I’d fallen prey to? My life would dramatically end if you do that. I was surrounded in the darkness by my babysitters for each event. I pretended to go out one time. I dressed in his dark clothes. Pulled my hair up into a bun and a baseball cap with my darkest shoes and pants. My ninja suit from Knox on under his clothes to stay warm. I took my glasses off and put on his contacts and I pretended to go out the door. In reality, I crossed soundlessly back to the kitchen and waited to hear the doorknob turn down the hall. The door would close almost soundlessly as I sat crammed in terror into a cabinet by the refrigerator. The lowest to the left. I cracked open the door to listen to the footsteps of my silencer coming ever closer. I had a flashlight on my head to click on and a knife in my hand that was my ex-husbands military spider. I intended at the first confrontation to flip on the light to blind my phrogger and stab him before he could shoot me or stick me with needles. I kept an emergency bag in the car and a blanket and an emergency phone. Remnants of our being homeless living in the car for a year together days. Terrorized into submission by a crowd of perverts and thugs. The footsteps halted at the refrigerator. I heard them pause and listen for me in the silence. They stood silently, their breathing and mine. Then as I sweated in cold fear as tried not to twitch or breathe too loudly, I heard them turn to go. They walked out the front door after passing through my living room. I let out a relieved breath and followed after 10 more seconds. I crept out as quietly as they had and waited in the darkness but no sound was there to give them away. I got up, walked to the front door and shut it rather loudly. I walked down the sidewalk looking like my ex-boyfriend as he was the same height as me. I got in my car as swiftly and shadow like as possible on the passenger side facing my apartment, wrapped myself in a blanket against the cold night and to leave no trace to onlookers. He had returned my car and left with his friend hours before. It was cold and my speakers were bugged by his other cohorts. I watched when they came back from a run as they entered the door of my next door neighbors house. He kissed her and gave her a hug because he was bringing his new other girlfriend her party for the night. Now keep in mind. I confused my neighbors dressed as him. They thought I was sound asleep or not in my apartment anymore. But I watched from the car for an hour or more till their party was over. Then the man confidently strode back into my apartment confused as to why the electricity was switched off, the air was off, the water was off, and he had no way of taking a shower. Oh, and he had no idea where I was, nor did he call to ask me. He ignored my disappearance. He was angry when I walked back through the door and told him with is friend there that I was in my car the whole time and I saw everything. The hoodwink was over. The intruders were there to stay in the attic I was told. I was expected to live with them…one of his other girlfriends, besides the neighbor, and his friend who bugged my car. The buzzards grew in the tree at the edge of the hood. They started canvassing our neighborhood and plots of earth turned for fresh landscaping. This is all on one tiny but deadly little street in Bardstown and I just want you, my reader, to know, that this nightmare was but one event I survived. Of the more than 6 years I was trapped by the neighborhoods inhabitants, both in the houses and the woods that led to the parks nearby, both humans and buzzards alike thrive in grotesque there. Be careful of the strangers, of course, but be ever wary of your neighbors. Of the man sleeping in my bed, who defiled me so heartlessly, holding me closely and ever watched? Oh, my story was called farfetched by the police and he still resides there heartlessly winning other hearts. Be careful dear sisters of the charming and suave. The price they pay and you, will be way too dear. They call it your deal for your soul. It’s instead a carnival of death.

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