The Story of Her Holding an Orange by Milos Bogetic Page B

make a huge fuss if Rose was just going to go right back to normal again. For fuck knows what reason, I decided to talk to her. There had to be a rational explanation for this irrational behavior, right? At worst, she was mentally ill. At best… Well, I don’t know what the best scenario would’ve been. Probably one of my fantasies coming true, but trust me - standing in my room that night, wet dreams were the last thing on my mind.
    I took a slow step towards the window, and stopped immediately when she moved. She slowly put a hand into her black leather purse and pulled an orange out of it. Again, every motion was terribly inhuman, almost robotic. The urge to run away shot through my body again, and I could feel the blood pumping through the big veins in my neck. Thinking that, if push came to shove, I could easily fight this fragile-looking woman off, I walked towards her again.
    The closer I got, the wider her smile became. I wish I had a picture of that scene that night… Me, standing in front of a window in my boxers and a t-shirt, and outside, a strange woman holding an orange. My window was made of thick glass, so I had to push the window up if I wanted to talk to her. I opened the window maybe ten inches, and stopped. I looked at her. That was enough for her to hear me, yet not enough for her to come in.
    “What the fuck are you doing?” I whispered, not wanting my parents to hear. I have no idea why I didn’t want them seeing this lunatic at my window.
    Rose didn’t answer. Instead, she started bending. Bending towards the opening. I made a quick step back just as she managed to push her head through the hole. 
    “You ready to take it now?” she asked in her child-voice. I thought that her voice had been scary at the balcony, but hearing it in the dead of the night gave me an all-new wave of shivers.
    As she spoke, her right hand snaked its way through the window. In it was the orange. 
    Terrified by the increasing horror of this absurd situation, I decided to run. 
    “Dad! Dad!” I screamed, running through the hallway and towards my parents’ room. 
    By the time I got to the master bedroom, they were both already on their feet.
    “What the fuck is going on?!” my dad demanded.
    All I could muster through my shaking jaw was, “Rose… Window.”
    While my dad went to the closet to get his pants and perhaps some sort of weapon, I ran back to my room. I wanted Rose to be there so bad. You know how, in those horror movies, the main character screams for help, and when the help finally comes, the monster is always gone? Well, when I made it back to the room, I was still able to see Rose. She was getting away, however. I could see her right next to our house, in our neighbor’s back yard that was equipped with one of those motion-activated lights. Rose set the sensor off, and the yard lit up just enough for me to watch her disappear behind the corner of a neighbor’s house. When my father ran into my room, she was gone. I wanted her to be there so bad. I wanted to tell them what was happening. Instead, all I got from my dad was an angry “you and your fucking imagination” as he left my room. Needless to say, I got exactly zero hours of sleep that night.
    Nothing happened for the next two months or so. During the few days after the incident, I was incredibly tense and would be set off by even the smallest sound coming from outside my window. Rose did come visit my mom for their standard gossip evenings, but I would never be around. Fuck that. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons were reserved for Rose’s visits, and I would come up with different excuses not to be there.
    Since I successfully avoided Rose and she never stalked me again, I started to forget about the incident. As with every other teenager in the world, I had an attention span of a butterfly, and there just wasn’t enough room in my mind for that woman.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    TWO
     
    She's Back
    I was sitting in my room, browsing