Larry Kinder stopped mid-step as he passed by the living room. Through the bay window, the interior of his truck was visible as the overhead light was lit. No way he’d left it on; he’d come home from work at 4:35 PM, then headed out to the pond to cast a line. He’d come inside around 7:30 PM to eat, and had since sat at his kitchen table working on a puzzle of the first Canadian Tire location—he’d grabbed the puzzle from a discount rack on a whim three years ago, wholly unsuspecting that the death of his twenty-three-year boyfriend would create the kind of void where doing puzzles of boring things would feel a suitable option.
“Sonofabitching junkies,” he mumbled as he turned around and headed for the door that led into the carport.
He never parked the truck in the carport; it had been Gustavo’s spot. He slipped his feet into a pair of beat-up moccasins he’d received as a secret Santa gift from a cousin in Saskatchewan the one time he came east for Christmas.
Outside was cool enough that Larry pulled his sweater tight, folding his skinny arms across his chest. He took loud, shuffling steps, giving any person—or any beast; a bear was a much lesser possibility than a junkie, but a possibility nonetheless—a chance to skedaddle without a proper confrontation.
He reached the truck. The door was ajar about six inches. After a deep breath to calm the adrenaline starting to flow, he yanked open the door. Nobody. Nothing. The change was in the cupholder, the stereo was in the dash, and the interior was unmolested.
“Huh?” he said, then, after a crunch of gravel directly behind him, he spun and shouted, “Who’s there?”
No reply came.
Larry remained facing the night as he blindly reached into the glovebox—taking a peek now and then over a shoulder to find his way—for the flashlight he’d stashed there. He clicked the button and a dull beam did battle with the black night. He saw gravel and grass; the beam reached no more than a few feet from where he stood. And that beam of light was fading fast.
Gravel crunched on the driver’s side of the truck. Larry yanked himself as far as his hips allowed, his feet all but rooted. The crunching started to play around the nose of the truck.
“Nope,” Larry mumbled, leaping into the truck and closing the door, dropping the flashlight outside in a mad scramble.
He flopped over the center console, reaching, and lit the headlights. The white of his home looked like a single tooth in the black maw of some unfathomable beast. He cranked down his window some and listened.
Seconds became minutes and Larry began to laugh. He lived in the country, there were all kinds of sounds, all kinds of motion. He shook out a shiver as he reached over to kill the headlights. The window went up and he climbed out of the truck.
The flashlight emitted more an idea of light than a beam of it now, and he carried it with him back toward the carport.
Dark everywhere, the carport felt like an abyss. As he reached for the door, footfalls ground and crunched a stony soundtrack behind him, racing nearer and nearer and nearer. His heart leapt and he launched himself through a half-open door, nailing his shoulder on the way by. He slammed the inner door and spun the deadbolt.
Backing away, he found himself in the kitchen, peeking around a blind as his breaths became ragged and his limbs turned to jelly. He saw nothing in the darkness, not until he saw the interior bulb in the ceiling of his truck blaze like a lighthouse on the shores of Hell.
“This is my property,” he whispered.
A moment later, the light went out. Larry remained in spot, exhalations fogging the window before him as he watched the darkness.
“Just call the cops,” he said, psyching himself up, but before he could turn from the window to locate his cellphone, he heard the click of the living room lamp, saw the yellowy swath of light snap to life around him. He began shivering, his knees knocking together like boney drumsticks setting a speedy tempo.
Rather than turn, he closed his eyes and tried to will the universe back to normal, unwilling to accept that some things let free might be caught and returned to their place, but once they were let into the home, they were there, ravenous as cancer, and nothing would be the same again.
xx
Stacy Cotton lives in the middle of the great Canadian nowhere with their cats, writing stories about the dark peripheries of civilization.
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This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.
No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.
INTERIOR LIGHT © 2025 Stacy Cotton