The Least

Winner, J.F. Powers Prize For Short Fiction, 2023

Judges’ Note: This contemporary parable’s realism, distilled into intoxicatingly strong concentration, is best enjoyed at the cliff’s edge of allegory. This page-turner stood out for the swift pacing and keen urgency with which it offers us a new, and doubtless very different, Misfit-Grandmother pairing. Not to be missed.

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She could just barely hear the clock tolling the hour. But she was still too foggy with sleep to know what hour, or even what day, it was. Still, Mrs. Peters—she disliked the term “Ms.”—knew it was the middle of the night. Not a decent time for someone to be knocking at her door.

And not just knocking. Whoever was out there was pounding the door with one hand, ringing the doorbell over and over with the other, and saying something in almost a stage whisper, as if trying to be heard and to keep quiet at the same time. It took a few seconds for Mrs. Peters to make out the words: “Open up! Please, open up and let me in!”

Once the fog of sleep cleared, Mrs. Peters felt almost numb with terror. She curled into a ball, pulled the covers over her head, and silently prayed for the man to leave. But when she detected what sounded like fear in his voice, her terror began to subside and mix with irritation. Still trembling slightly, she fumbled her way out of bed and into her bathrobe.

Odd that Matt, her German shepherd, hadn’t wakened her before the intruder had. She had gotten the dog for protection after her husband died and the neighborhood began to deteriorate—all those immigrant kids hanging around the park making a racket until all hours, or practically drag racing down nearby residential streets, their so-called music thumping so loudly that their car doors rattled in time to the bass line. At times the posts on Nextdoor chattered of almost nothing else. And her house was isolated, the only one on the cul-de-sac, all but surrounded by woods that led to the park. So if the dog was for protection, why wasn’t he protecting her now? Granted, he was barking, a little. But he didn’t sound intimidating. In fact, he sounded happy and excited. And rather than standing at the front door, poised to attack, he was running back and forth between the door and Mrs. Peters, tail wagging, looking up at her expectantly, his usual reaction when one of her friends from church dropped by.

But this was no friend, not at this godforsaken hour. Whatever this hour might be.

She stumbled into the front room and squinted. There was only darkness and, beyond the picture window, a subtly contrasting shade of outer darkness. Sometimes she came out here when she couldn’t sleep, so until recently she had been leaving the lamp near the door lit even after she went to bed. But now she had let it go out: the bulb had burnt out, there was no replacement in the house, and she kept forgetting to get one when she went shopping. The lamp in the cul-de-sac’s lone streetlight was out, too, doubtless vandalized by some juvenile prank.

Not that she had any intention of turning on a light anyway. The man—or just a boy maybe, who could tell?—was still out there yammering to be let in. If he saw a light, he’d know someone inside was awake and listening. Of course, normally she’d want an intruder to know someone was inside, the house was defended. But Matt’s occasional barking, despite its annoyingly welcoming tone, would take care of that. If the man didn’t see a light, maybe he’d get discouraged and wander off into the darkness.

She stood still and listened, hoping to hear the voice go silent and a set of footsteps moving away. It didn’t happen. Then, although she had intended to move as little as possible and above all to stay away from the door, her curiosity overcame her fear. She crept across the room, bent to the peephole, and peered out to the porch. There was a pitch-black shape, framed by an almost equally black background. Despite the darkness, she could tell he was dressed like they all dressed: a hoodie, jeans, sneakers. He had stopped pounding at the door, for now at least, and was pacing back and forth.

Then he turned to face the door. “For God’s sake, let me in,” he said, his voice still urgent but now softer, almost intimate. With a sinking feeling, she recognized that he was speaking personally to someone he knew to be just on the other side of the door from himself. He had heard her.

“Go away,” she said. She was pretty sure the porch light bulb was burnt out too, but she didn’t flip the switch in any case.

“Please, lady.”

She always kept her cell phone in a charger near the front door at night, and now she grabbed the phone and dialed. “Hello, 9-1-1? I’d like to report an attempted intruder.”

The man in the darkness outside kept talking, and the dog barked now and then, but Mrs. Peters bulled her way through the call. Her voice cracked a few times, whether from fear or anger she couldn’t tell. But she got the words out. The dispatcher wanted her to stay on the line, but once she had provided the necessary information she got off as quickly as she could.

“You’d better leave,” she said. “The police are coming.”

“That won’t help. The cops don’t patrol around here at night. They won’t get here quick enough.”

“Are you threatening me? Because if you try to set foot in this house, my dog—”

“Threatening you?”

He sounded bewildered, although Mrs. Peters didn’t buy it.

“Oh,” he said, as if he had just figured something out, although Mrs. Peters didn’t believe that either. “I wouldn’t hurt you, lady. I meant the cops won’t get here quick enough to
save me.”

“To save you?”

“They’re after me.”

“The police?”

“No. Or maybe they are too, but—”

“Then who?”

“Better for you if you don’t know, lady. Safer. Anyway, they’ll find me before the cops get here. But thanks for at least calling them.”

Mrs. Peters said nothing. It was disconcerting to hear the man thank her, as if she had called the police to protect him, not to protect herself from him. But mostly she was indignant to hear him making it sound as if this were the least she could do for him. The least? It was the most any sensible person in her situation would do for him, even if he were truly in danger.

Not that she believed his cockamamie story for a second. “They’re after me”? Just another way to manipulate her into letting him in. She had learned a thing or two about scammers in her day.

Mrs. Peters backed away from the door. But she was determined to stay in the front room where she could order the dog to attack the man if he broke through the picture window. She had never bought a gun, although she had often considered doing so, and now she regretted the omission. So she had to settle for scurrying out to the kitchen, grabbing the biggest and sharpest knife in the house, and then rushing back and installing herself in an easy chair on the far side of the front room, where she could keep an eye on both the door and the picture window.

The man had continued talking through all this, and now his voice began to quaver. The dog’s ears pricked up, he took a step toward the door, glanced back at Mrs. Peters, and began to whimper. She shushed him. She had decided that the best approach would be simply to wait for the police while refusing to speak to the man.

“…plus I’m getting married soon. Baby’s due next month. If they get me, what happens to my fiancée? And the kid?”

Mrs. Peters silently refused to believe that the man was about to marry, although she didn’t doubt he had gotten some poor girl pregnant. These people don’t bother with marriage.

“You got to save me,” he said.

“Why me?” she replied, the words slipping out before she could stop them.

“Who else is there? They came after me, I ducked into the woods and ran. Then I climbed that little fence and ended up here. This is the only house on the, the, what’s the word—?”

“Cul-de-sac.”

“Right. Only house on the coldy sack, or whatever.”

“Why can’t you hide in the woods? Or try the houses out on Maple Street?”

“They’re not stupid, lady!” He paused a moment and when he continued, his voice was under control again. “They know to check the woods. If I go back in there, once it’s light out they get me right away. And they probably got people looking on Maple already, there’s streetlights there, I wouldn’t last a minute.”

“There must be some other—”

“It’s you or nothing, lady. I got no other options. And they’ll be here pretty quick. So I’m begging you—”

“I don’t even know you! I’m not going to let some stranger into my house in the middle of the night!”

There was silence on the other side of the door for the first time since Mrs. Peters had awakened. She tried to convince herself that the man had given up and left, but she knew better: she’d have heard the footsteps. It felt as though the police would never arrive, and neither would the morning light. She was too stressed to remember that she could check the time on her cell phone, so she still didn’t know the hour. A few people nearby raised chickens, and shortly before dawn the neighborhood always came alive with the crowing of roosters, calling to each other back and forth across the park. The sound usually annoyed her, an undesired alarm clock. Now she longed to hear it. But she heard only the dog, whining the way he always did when he wanted something, as he looked at the door and then snuck glances back at her.

“That dog a shepherd, lady?” the man asked. She could tell he was trying to keep his voice casual, like this was just small talk. But she knew he was just looking for another angle, another way in.

“Yes. And if you know anything about the breed, you’ll know that if you so much as—”

“You walk that dog down past the park about six o’clock most evenings?” He added, “Hey, boy,” and the dog wagged his tail.

Mrs. Peters was silent for a few seconds before saying, “I’m not about to answer questions about my personal life from a stranger.”

“I’m not a stranger, lady. We see each other most every day. All them other dog walkers got earbuds or look at their cell phones, but you always got your nose in a book. Am I right?”

“I said I’m not going to answer your questions. And even if you’re right—I’m not saying you are, mind you—anyone who wastes all their time in that park would’ve seen—”

“But nobody else comes up and pets your dog, right?” The man was talking faster now, accelerating as he went on. “Everybody else is too scared because of the breed or else they just don’t give a shit, sorry lady, they just don’t care about the dogs or the old folks walking them, sorry again, but I always come up and pet him and we talk, nothing serious, just the weather, something the dog did, whatever, but we talk, you know me, if you’d turn on the damn porch light for just a second you’d see—”

“The bulb is burnt out. And I don’t know you. Maybe some other hooligan in the park came up once or twice and petted my dog, and you happened to—”

Mrs. Peters stopped mid-sentence. Had there been movement in the darkness beyond the picture window? Another dark form, maybe more than one, slinking closer? She had been looking toward the door, so she had only seen it—if she had really seen anything at all—out of the corner of her eye. Or maybe it was just her imagination, spurred because the dog, suddenly alert, had just turned toward the picture window, hackles up. Mrs. Peters faced the window and stared into the outer darkness.

The man on the porch started in again, his voice now softer but high-pitched, trembling, out of control. “It was me, have a little faith in me, lady! There was this one time I saw the book you was reading, it was one I had read in school, I mean it was assigned in school anyways and I did read some of it, swear to God, so we talked about the book, please remember, you do remember, right lady? What the fuck was the title, oh yeah, it was—”

“I’ll be damned if I remember that!” Mrs. Peters shouted. She always prided herself on not swearing, so now she was at first shocked to hear these words escape her mouth, then indignant at this man for goading her into such language and for using far worse language himself. Perhaps to avoid considering the man’s message, she clung to her indignation at his impertinence, not only for the foul language but for coming here at this hour and asking to be let in.

“For the last time,” she said, “I don’t know you!”

The man uttered a cry, a high, sustained wail, which after a moment merged with another, similar sound. For a moment Mrs. Peters mistook this second sound for a rooster and thought with relief that the night was finally ending. Then she realized it was a siren, still a few blocks off but coming closer. The dog howled, as he often did when he heard sirens. Then he began racing back and forth in front of the picture window, barking and growling.

“Hear that siren?” Mrs. Peters said, struggling to be heard above the barking. “You’d better leave! How could you imagine I’d let a stranger into my house in the middle of the night? For all I know you could be—”

“Jesus Christ, lady!”

Mrs. Peters heard a sharp, explosive sound. The dog barked frantically into the blackness beyond the picture window, where Mrs. Peters thought she saw a couple of shadowy forms melt into the deeper darkness.

She heard a thud on the front porch. The dog went to the door and began whimpering.

The siren was approaching. If the police were to knock on her front door when they arrived, Mrs. Peters wondered if she would find the strength to open it and let them in. If she did open the door, she wondered what she would see on the porch. She wondered if there would be a permanent stain. Or if she would ever be able to look at the porch, or anything else, without seeing that stain. Or whether the light would ever return, and if it did, whether she herself would be able to see it.