Michael D. Davis.

Alright, to tell this story, and all that happened Saturday night, I have to back up a couple of weeks. If ya didn’t already know, I am an artist, and over the summer I have been working on a couple of big projects.

They are wood cutouts of cartoon characters of my own design, something similar to what people put up in their yards around the holidays. I was working on a four-foot duck and a frog that neared seven feet. To do this, and have my own area, I have taken control of one stall of the garage.

Now, a couple of weeks ago, I was nearing the deadline to get these two projects done, and the horrendous heat has been keeping me from going outside and working on them. So, I decided to do a little work at night. I take some paint, a brush, and I head out to the garage.

I’m walking over to my stuff when all of a sudden I hear a thump thumpa thumpa thumpa thump thump. The noise is coming from the roof, it starts on the left side then it moves across the roof to the right side and back again.

For several minutes I stand there, looking up, tracking the noise. Thumpa thumpa left, thumpa thumpa right. I figured it was one of three options.

1) An insomniac squirrel trying to tire himself out.

2) Maybe a raccoon or a possum, I mean that’s a possibility.

Or 3) A cat that somehow got on the roof and now can’t find a way down, because we do have stray cats in the neighborhood.

After maybe five minutes of standing still listening to this noise and seeing nothing, the noise stops. I shrug and start to walk over to my four-foot duck, then I catch something out of the corner of my eye. I turn my head and a bat is flying around in the closed garage and starts to dive right for me. I run, which may seem unbelievable to those who know me, but I do, up the four crappy wood stairs and in the door to safety.

Now we get to Saturday. Me, my ma, and my sister were working on a project, changing furniture around in the house. We have this old fold-up bed that we don’t need in the house anymore, so we decided to put it in storage.

Well, it’s getting late, we aren’t gonna take it down to the storage unit tonight, but we should get it out of the way. We decided to put it in the garage.

At the back of the house, there is about a 10-foot hallway type area that you have to go through to get to the back door. From the back door, you go down four horrible wooden steps, and you are in the garage.

So, me and my sister are carrying this folded-up bed, and my ma goes ahead of us to open the back door. After she opens the door, Ma has nowhere to go, but out into the garage, as we are coming with the bed. Me and my sister are trying to navigate the crappy steps when I say, “Better be on the lookout for Bruce.”

My sister, not listening to me and simply hearing the name Bruce, which happens to be the name of a friend of mine she doesn’t get along with, blurts out with little thought, “Bruce is a stupid name.”

We finally set the bed down in the garage and I say, “I’m talkin’ about Bruce like Bruce Wayne as in Batman, ya get it.” My sister grumbles, and my ma ignores me.

Ma then tries to make her way around the bed in the cluttered garage, loses her balance, and falls against a pile of wood, but doesn’t go all the way down. She then takes this opportunity to make a Seinfeld reference and says, “Jimmy’s down!”

Me and my sister laughed, even though I knew my sister didn’t get the reference. We start over to help Ma back on her feet when I see the bat fly overhead. I scream, “BBRRRUUUUUCCCCCEEEEE!!!!!” And start running for the door.

A few seconds later, my sister screams bloody murder and follows. We both abandon our mother.

Running behind me, my sister starts to yell at me to close the door to the house, which had been left open. Ma starts yelling, “No, just get inside.”

I’m struggling to get up the horrible steps as fast as I can with my sister right behind me. And I tell ya, at one point I could’ve sworn she was trying to push me out of the way.

I get inside. My sister gets inside. I hear another scream, I look back and Ma is struggling up the steps, thrown off her balance again.

My sister heads back to the door to help her all while my Ma is saying in a real sarcastic tone, “Why don’t ya just leave me? Just save yourself!”

Ma finally gets in the door and it gets slammed shut. I take my inhaler because at this point I’m having a full-blown asthma attack. Ma, again sarcastically, thanked us for leaving her fell against the pile of wood.

I told them that I yelled a warning when I yelled Bruce. My ma and sister informed me that neither had been listening to me, and neither had known what I meant when I yelled the name Bruce and started to run.

I said that this is a perfect example as to why they shouldn’t tune me out. It is at this point, as the three of us rest in the kitchen, trying to deal with what just happened, my father walks out of his room and asks for a piece of cake.