If it’s All the Same
By Daryl Scroggins
A young man with hair on only one side of his head and tattoos covering both arms came to my front door. He handed me a book and said, “I’m real sorry.” Then he turned to a wheelbarrow piled high with household goods and went to passing things over to me.
The Bridges of Madison County. “Not mine,” I said.
He stopped halfway to me with a toaster oven. “I’m sorry, man. I got drunk with friends and we robbed your house, and I don’t want to be like that.”
I extended the book. “Not mine,” I said. “None of that stuff is mine. I’m not missing anything from my house.”
He seemed reluctant to retrieve the book. “It was real dark,” he said. “Do you know of any other houses around here that look like yours?”
We both stepped out into the front yard and gazed up and down the street, squinting in the afternoon glare. Shingled roofs and smooth lawns ran like the teeth of a zipper in both directions. “This subdivision goes on for blocks,” I told him. “They all look pretty much like this.”
The boy nodded slowly, like it was all too much to take in at once.
“Maybe you could wipe your prints off everything,” I said, “and just park it down by the police station. They would look to see who had reported burglaries.” More nodding. Then he gave a little wave and shoved off, pushing his goods on down the sidewalk.
I went back in and had another cup of coffee, but the kid was still on my mind. I stepped out to see if he was gone. He was, but he had come back and left the loaded wheelbarrow on my porch.
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---Daryl Scroggins lives in Marfa, Texas. His poems, short stories, and creative non-fictions have appeared in magazines and anthologies across the country, and his most recent book is This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press).
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