• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Susette covered her face with her hands. Tears streamed down her face. Steely-eyed, Von Winkle didn’t blink or speak.

Barberi moved his excavator toward the house next door to Susette’s.

“The City of New London doesn’t care about us,” Susette shouted at her neighbors. “They don’t give a shit about any of us. They’ve got a plan, and it doesn’t matter what we want or what we do to try and prevent their plan. They are going to do what they want.”

The noise of the machine and falling debris drowned out her voice.

Barberi used the excavator jaws to tear off the front quarter of the house. The windows shattered, sending glass flying in every direction. Hysterical, Susette ran into her home and emerged with a broom. Standing only feet from the machine, she frantically swept the glass and debris off her porch while a thick cloud of dust overtook her and the outside of her house.

In the noise and confusion, Barberi didn’t realize Susette was within feet of his gnawing machine. He raised the jaws to tug away another part of the house.

“Hey!” the city’s fire chief shouted at the NLDC official from the street. “You can’t let this happen.”

The NLDC official didn’t respond.

“Is anyone going to stop this?” the chief yelled.

Everyone looked at him and said nothing.

The chief motioned for Susette to come away from the house.

She ignored him.

Barberi slammed the bucket of his excavator into the side of the house. Shattering glass sprayed Susette, speckling her red hair.

“Hey, Chico, knock it off,” the fire chief shouted. Barberi looked over his shoulder, struggling to hear the fire chief above the roar of the machine’s engine.

The chief put his index finger and thumb together and ran them across his throat in the motion of a cut. “You have to stop,” he yelled. Finally discovering Susette, Barberi killed the engine. He took out his cell phone and called the police back to the scene.

Von Winkle, Matt Dery, and Tim LeBlanc tried to coax Susette down from her porch. “C’mon, Red,” Von Winkle said, “you gotta go.”

She kept sweeping, oblivious to the danger. “They’re making such a mess.” Tears streamed down her face, mixing with the film of dirt on her skin. She appeared to be in shock. No one knew what to do.

“C’mon, Red, I’ll take you downtown,” Von Winkle said. “We’ll have a beer.”

Refusing to move, she started wailing.

Barberi had seen enough. He approached Susette. “I’m sorry,” he said, his husky voice nearly a whisper. “I didn’t know this was going on down here.” He turned on the NLDC official. “You never told me this was goin’ on down here,” he shouted in anger, waving a finger in the official’s face. “I can’t do any more work with her standing here.”

“Susie,” LeBlanc said softly, “come on.”

The captain of the police department pulled up. The group explained the situation to him. The captain didn’t want to arrest Susette. Von Winkle took one more shot at coaxing her down. He approached her on the porch. “Look, you’ve got the captain of the police department and the chief of the fire department here,” he said empathetically. “C’mon, Red. Your house will be okay. We’ll come back in a couple hours, and it will all be over.”

She dropped her broom and came down from the porch. LeBlanc helped her into the back of Von Winkle’s car. Then he called the hospital and explained Susette would be unable to report for her nursing shift that night. Von Winkle took Susette to a bar, where she drank until she couldn’t feel the pain anymore.

The next morning, Susette woke up groggy, hoping it had all been a terrible nightmare. She looked out the window. The houses on her street were all gone, replaced by mounds of rock, concrete, busted wood, and dirt. Her neighborhood resembled a war zone. It had not been a bad dream.

She got up, showered, and put on a pot of coffee. Then the doorbell rang. Expecting Von Winkle, she answered. It was Chico Barberi, wearing a tank top. “I’m sorry,” he said, handing her a gift basket of perfumed soaps.

She invited him in and offered him a cup of coffee. He followed her through the house