The Silhouette Artist
© Riko Best – stock.adobe.com
When I was twenty, a man broke into my bedroom in the middle of the night. He’d busted the dead bolt of the house, where I was alone inside. Asleep. The doorknob clicked; I stirred. A yellow glow pooled into the dark of my room. By the light of the hallway, this stranger saw me in my underwear. They were leopard print. He was the first man to see me that way. All I could see of him was a silhouette.
His shadow: hazy, rough. It sighed. Said, “Oh.”
He shut the door, and then I heard nothing. It was 2001. I had no phone, no computer, no fire escape. Petrified, I waited the four hours until dawn to open the door and found that he had gone. All he left behind was a broken dead bolt and a trail of muddy footprints turned red by North Carolina clay.
By midmorning, a police officer arrived and asked me to describe the man.
