Over the span of a few months, someone has been sneaking into our yard. They don’t take anything or do anything drastic. At the most, they are or, rather he is generally silent. But occasionally I hear the tell tale sounds of rushing feet or the crunching of leaves as he walks on them. Or shuffling of the papers from the newspaper pile put outside to be recycled (why he does this, I don’t know).

The first night, we checked the main gate (from the window, we didn’t dare go out) to find it swinging wide open into the night.

Being the night owl that I am, it freaks me out. There have been times when I’ve heard a door handle being tried or a body pushing against it to be opened (we have this kind, our house is pretty old). Depending on who’s doing a night-out, either me or my baby sister wake my mom up, and we turn on all the lights and the T.V. at an attempt to drive him away. It usually does.

A month before my brother came back, we woke up one morning to find two of our windows shattered by a brick. Luckily, the room was unused and so was locked and dead bolted away from the rest of the house. Plus, all the windows have burglar bars.

But this morning, somewhere around 12 midday, in broad daylight, we hear a crash. And then this:

Same room, third window. This time, we filed a police complaint. A sole policeman came to investigate, found someone lurking by (a homeless man, drunk and mentally unstable), roughened him up a bit and left him with a warning and us with a promise that he’ll find the culprit if it happens again.

Whether or not it was the intruder, or someone completely unrelated remains a mystery as does his identity.