Part 1: From The Front Yard
The iron chair scratched the concrete as Marcus moved his chair from one spot to another, scrolling through his phone with that familiar routine. October nights in the city hit different—cool enough to need a hoodie, quiet enough to hear yourself think.
The streetlights brightened the streets with an orange glow across Mrs. Patterson’s yard next door, painting everything she sees.
10:44 PM.
He only noticed the time because that’s when he heard it.
Crack. Snap. Crunch.
The sound of someone—or something—moving through his neighbor backyard in the small patch of woods that came from a tree he struck by lightning. Marcus’s looked up from his screen, pupils adjusting to the darkness beyond the porch light’s reach. A shadow, low and fast, streaked between the trees in sync with the snapping twigs. His heart started beating faster.
“Yo?” he shouted out, immediately feeling stupid for it. Who says “yo” to the darkness?
Nothing answered. Just the distant hum of the air conditioning unit and someone’s TV blasting through an open window two houses down.
Part 2 Let’s Check It Out
Marcus stood, leaning against his house, scanning Mrs. Patterson’s backyard. She had been waiting for someone to clean up that lightning-struck tree for months—just left it there like a wooden corpse, all twisted and charred. One of the bigger logs caught his eye. In the weird orange light, it looked almost alive. Reptilian. Like a massive alligator sunning itself in her overgrown grass.
He closed his eyes out shut, counted to three, opened them.
Still there. Same shape. Same prehistoric creature.
“Man, you need to get more sleep,” he mumbled to himself, before sitting down in his chair.
Five minutes crawled by like fifty.
To be continued……..