Dove Street
As usual, Adelle was walking with a joyous air in her step down her street. It had been her street for 21 years already, but in the past couple of years it had changed dramatically. The municipality finally invested their preciously guarded money to fix the pavement, and to bring investors who will design new office building in the place of the ruinous houses. Those houses were there for her entire childhood, and she grew to accept that worn out, damaged look. As she moved towards the end of the street, she saw him. Leaning on the car parked on the right side of the pavement- their side.
"Well, hello miss, " he said with a grin that gave away his familiar contemptuous outlook on everyone around him. He greeted everyone on his daily routine of 'watching over' the neighborhood and waiting for his opportune moment. She never replied.
He hissed slightly trough his teeth, and pretending to be questioning the thought with a conscious effort, he raised his head upward, looking at the pale morning sky: "You know, you are a neighbor who never wanted to hang out with us, our gang. I was always wondering why that is". He piercingly looked at her seemingly expecting an answer. Why now, she thought, when he knew that she never replied to their overly friendly greetings. This morning he must've been in a tremendously satisfying mood since he had a nerve to walk up to her and get his face dangerously close to hers. "Will I, pretty please, get an answer this one time ?" She stood petrified for couple of perpetual seconds, her mind swirling with childhood traumas, many of which started in this neighborhood and because of them, specifically- because of him. The thoughts came in a tide, she was unable to stop them now. The mocking, the violence towards her schoolmates, bullying on daily bases after school, molesting her best friend's father for couple of bucks, shaking her father's car just to upset him and just because he could. He knew he could, we all knew he could and even the local police knew that (even though he would suffer an occasional beating, just to keep him civil; what an irony).
In an atypically deep voice she said: "You know what...I will answer you. No, really. You just wait for me in the courtyard around the corner". She said it calmly and assuredly, and he hadn't foreseen this obvious lack of fear in her first response to direct teasing.
He seemed confused but slightly content. "Alright, then. Huryyyy, " he grinned.
She turned away and begun to run so fast to her house (first one in the street), that when she got to the courtyard, she barely managed to catch her breath.
"So... "he started.
"O.k., just turn to Nery's shop, there's something I'd like to show you."
Memories flushed her again, this time more severely than ever. She heard the screams of that poor young soul (she never found out who she was) from this very yard. In the night the poor girl shrieked, yelled, cried out for help, in this courtyard surrounded with good, law-abiding neighbors. She yelled in vain while he raped her with that grin, she imagined, mercilessly. That demon from the street was never confronted until now.
"What am I looking at?" he said impatiently.
"You are not gonna look at anyone else, you freak!" she smiled coldly and stabbed him right in the neck, on the left side, where his skin was exposed significantly. The blade went in with all of the strength she had and he shockingly waved his arms around, trying to get the knife out. She foresaw this and took it out swiftly, and when he was trying to turn around and fell to his knees, bleeding like a pig on slaughter, she seized her chance to stab him again in the kidneys, and once more, and once more. For that girl, for the terror of the years and the normal childhood all of us will never get back.
As he tried to scream, she laughed triumphantly. Adelle knew that all of them locked in their houses will never get out an help him, thinking that he was just another of his own victims. Convenient as hell. She turned around on her heels, and proceeded to wash away the blood.