The Intrusion

Twenty-One

(Monday, March 19, 2018)

[Andy]

Jordan gets home from work at 5:03pm.

I have been watching her apartment from across the street for the past hour.

She locks the door behind her and places her purse on the glass dining table. She shrugs out of her jacket and lays it over the chair. Once she has taken her boots off, she approaches the huge window facing the street. She looks out at nowhere in particular. Then, she looks over towards my apartment.

Five seconds later, her blinds flip closed.

I don't blame her.

If I were her, I'd probably do the same thing.

I wonder what she is thinking about right now. I wonder if she is thinking about me. She must be. That is why she closed her blinds, after all.

She knows I'm watching her.

I don't care. It doesn't matter if she knows or not. It doesn't make a difference anymore, does it?

Nothing happened last night. I thought, maybe when I came home, maybe when I went to sleep, I would have that dream again.

But nothing.

I dream almost every night, but last night, no dreams. Not even a dream I forgot immediately upon waking up. I closed my eyes, it all went dark, and then, boom. Morning.

I go back to my desk and take out my sketch pad, turning to a page with a few wispy lines drawn in red colored pencil. It's the sketch of a face. It's so vague right now that you probably wouldn't even be able to tell who it is a drawing of (or even that it is a face at all), but I can tell. It's Jordan's face.

I've never drawn someone's face from memory before. In fact, I haven't drawn someone's face at all in nearly four months.

But Jordan.

Jordan.

I can remember her face almost as well as if it were my own.

I've always liked to sketch and draw. When I was a kid, the first things I drew were clouds. I would go outside on Saturday mornings in the spring and summer and lie on my back in the damp grass, still wet with dew. I brought a piece of paper I took from my parent's computer printer and an old pencil my dad kept in the desk draw—it's eraser all but completely worn away—and finally a sheet of corrugated cardboard to hold it all steady. And then I would draw every cloud in the sky.

There'd be one that looked like a horse, and one that looked like a whale, and one that looked like a woman holding a basket of laundry, and one that looked like waves crashing on a beach near a cliff where a man and a woman were standing together at the top and holding hands. I would lie there in the grass drawing them and hoping they don't jump.

After I got tired of drawing clouds, I started to draw frogs. I loved the way their legs and arms bent and folded together in smooth, creased arcs. I set my hand on the paper and ran my fingers around the page like a compass, tracing out the curves of a leg or an arm or an eye. It was around this time that I learned to shade, so I began darkening and sketching in the creases and giving the legs, arms, heads and eyes depth and making them real.

My sister and I used to find frogs in the small creeks at the bottom of the ravine. Whenever we found one that I liked, Alice would watch it for me while I ran up to the house to get my sketch book so I could draw it.

I remember one day while Alice, Jackie, and our other neighbors Joey and Mikey, and I were playing in the ravine, we saw a pair of ducks swimming up the creek. They had made a nest along the edge of it. When I saw them swimming up the creek, bending their necks over into the water to catch bugs, flapping their wings as they swam, I got so excited to draw them. I immediately ran up the ravine and back to the house to get my sketchbook.

But when I came back down to the bottom of the ravine, the ducks were gone.

"What happened to the ducks?" I asked, distraught.

"Joey and Mikey scared them away!" Jackie exclaimed excitedly, jumping up and down. "They ran at them shouting CAW-CAW-CAW! And the ducks flew away!"

And then Joey and Mikey mimicked the voices they had used to scare the ducks away, flapping their arms, miming giant, menacing crows attacking a corn field whose scarecrow has abandoned it to find his brain.

I felt heat welling up in the bottom of my eyes, and I had to hold back my tears to stop myself from cry in front of them. Why would these boys have scared away the ducks? Why? There was no reason for it.

None.

I think that's what bothered me the most about it—the fact that there was no reason for it.

It was cruel.

I went back down to the duck's nest at the bottom of that ravine every day for the next two weeks.

But the ducks never came back.

And their eggs never hatched.