Story

Orin was sitting on the porch reading an unremarkable magazine story, while the carpenter bees provided convenient distraction, zinging around the cedar soffet they were excavating or studying him, suspended hummingbird-like at eye level. The end of April, eve of the ancient May Day revels, he thought. May Day had long ago suggested something amorous to him: "May I?" "You may." Birds chirruped in the treeline. A sweet breeze swept the last buds off the Judas tree and onto the warping boards like wet confetti. Beyond the drive, he could see the first bangle of blossoms on the empress tree, violet, slightly darker than the sparse wisteria on its struggling vine. He took it all in with a glance, feeling the breeze under his red summer robe with the small polo player stitched over the heart. His wife had presented it as a birthday gift and said it made him look "dapper." That was a word Orin did not much care for: "dapper," like some kind of house painter's assistant. He kept a steady rhythm with his cedar rocker and felt a current of sadness wash through him. The ardor had long been drained from May Day, but for the moment, it seemed the fault of the story.

In a dispassionate but soigné manner, the author was delving into the fantasies of an upscale Manhattan barber who leered at all the women he saw and wanted vengeance against all the men. It was winter in the fiction, and ice glittered from the sidewalks. Pausing with his bright scissors over a customer's thinning hair, staring into the mirror across the room, the barber felt neither guilt nor ambivalence, but entitlement. He was convinced he had every right to his appetites. This was meant to signal the temper of the times. Orin dragged his thumb across the glossy page, smearing the ink, obscuring two lines of the story, which made him smile. He could hear a passenger jet in the western sky; "western heavens," he thought, mocking the story's voice, but the tulip poplar's new leaves and dingy flowers blocked out much of the sky, the morning sun, any clouds left over from last night's rain.

The sun was high enough, however, to carve the shadows sharply – leaves and porch rail on the decking timbers, his hands poised above the magazine on his lap. Lifting his cup, he found the last coffee gone tepid and glanced through the patio's glass doors, toward the coffeepot, which would, no doubt, be equally cold. That was when he saw the movement, the dark trousers and white shirt flashing at the far edge of the living room. At first, he thought it was a trick of light, his own reflection blurred by the rocker's motion, but no, the figure was beyond the sofa, outlined against the wall Mina had insisted they paint leaf-green. "The accent wall," she called it.

This couldn't, he thought, be possible. He and Mina lived in their isolated house alone, absorbed in their books and cribbage and videos, nursing their truce. No children or pets, infrequent guests; deliveries and service people were equally rare. Mina was in Italy this month with her art class. Orvieto, a famous chapel in the cathedral, a monograph she wanted to write while her students drew, or as she said, "sketched the hell out of the place." Even her language made it clear that the torpor in their life was not her doing.

He found he was beginning to scroll mentally through the list of all the visitors who had been in the house during their years of occupancy, but now, certain he had seen a person and not an apparition, Orin rose and, with the New Yorker rolled into a blunt instrument, he stepped to the door and slid it open.

The man facing him held a long kitchen knife Orin recognized as part of the Sheffield set Mina's mother had left her.

"Who are you?"

"Mickey. Shut up and sit down."

As the man took a step towards him, Orin couldn't see any other options...