Got a very late start. Dashed something off to this prompt
Title: Lintel
WC: 700
You don’t know that it’s a knock at first.
Nothing much catches your attention, and even when it does—three taps at the precise intervals denoting the polite knock of a persistent stranger—you figure it could be whatever summer insect it is, huge, hard-shelled, and hideous, that’s been hurling itself against the window screens by the hundreds. It could be the one dying as it flails desperately at the duct tape you’ve used to repair one of the larger gashes. It’s been dying since sundown, dying since it decided it found the flame of your oil lamp more appealing than the buzzing fluorescents in the windows of the neighbors on either side. It could be a dying thing. That’s likelier than a knock.
But it comes again, three taps, just loud enough to drown out the tick of your wind-up Timex clock as the big hand and little hand haul each other from today into tomorrow. A knock. Your head lolls toward the nightstand. The air is thick and stifling. It’s all the energy you’re willing to invest, and even that much comes down to the certainty that the knock must be the product of the woman from three doors down, stopping with a basket on her hip to tell you that you’ve managed to leave the key in the outside lock again.
You gotta be careful. Around here, Lord knows what you might be inviting in.
But the key is on the nightstand. You can just make out the shape of it in the erratic light of the oil lamp as the knock comes again. With more effort than you thought you had left to expend, you lift one hand and guide a fingertip along its edge just to be sure it’s not wishful thing. One of its jagged teeth catches on the raw, painful skin of a cuticle you’ve chewed raw. Not wishful thinking. Not even the kind of wishful thinking you’d come up with on a night like this.
It’s feet on the floor, then, you suppose. Three taps come again, no more or less insistent than the first time, but you wonder: is the safety chain on? Did you remember to turn the lock? You run through all the things a woman alone should wonder in the wake of a knock on the door at midnight, but it’s going through the motions. The woman from three doors down might have been been right all along—a part of you might want to forget the key, the lock, the safety chain. A part of you might want to let in Lord knows what. It’s feet on the floor, and the explanation seems suddenly likely.
It’s pitch back between the bed and the door. The single tongue of gold from the oil lamp flickers in one panel of the mirrored closet doors across from the foot of the bed, but that’s behind you now. You don’t reach for the light switch. It’s been long enough that you’ve trained yourself out of flicking it as though the electric bill fairy might have dropped by to pull you out of at least one of the messes you’re in. It’s pitch black.
The knock comes again, the vibrations gallop through your palms, your fingertips this time, but the lock is flipped to vertical, the safety chain is on. It’s a what now? moment. A who is it? moment, but what’s the point of that? An axe murderer is unlikely to announce himself. A drunk at the wrong door would surely have moved beyond knocking by now.
Who is it?
Whoever it is, whatever it is—malevolent or mistaken—has one distinct advantage: It is not here. It is not confined to these walls, this heat, this soul-crushing buzz of summer at midnight.
You scrape the chain back. You flip the lock to horizontal and wrench open the door at tap one-and-a-half. He is a stranger. He is no one you know, no one you can even make out as you blink at the sallow hallway light.
“I’m in,” you say before his fist can even fall to his side. “Whatever it is, I’m in.”
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 