I caught a burglar in my apartment last night !

I didn't even know the bastard was in my home but the persistent, soft little growls of my dog awoke me. I thought it must have been another cat that knew about doggy doors eating Chili's food. I got up to shoo it out when I realize there was somebody in my place !

Talk about freaky. It was spooky when I had to enter my neighbour's dark apartment to cut him down after he had hung himself, but that was the kind of fear I could control. This was more like a cold wave of panic washing over me.

My first swing in the dark hit him on the bony part of his skull and I could just feel all the bones in my right hand crunch. My second must have luckily caught him in the jaw because his knees buckled and he went down. I jumped on him and just kept punching his face over and over until he finally quit moving. The whole time I kept expecting his accomplice to come out of the shadows and hit me on the back of my head with a bat, or to feel a shank in my kidney. The memory of the burning pain of being stabbed in Spain years ago suddenly very fresh in my mind. Then... it was suddenly very quiet and the stale odour of his body and the stench of booze assaulted my nose.

I jumped up and flicked on the lights to search for the wireless phone and dial 911. The brightness of the room shocked me. There was blood everywhere, his face was a bloody pulp and he was gurgling, his breathing making a raspy death rattle. I thought I had killed him. It had felt wet in the dark but I assumed it was saliva or snot or something, I didn't realize he was bleeding. Christ what should I do?? Still phone the cops? Ambulance? Then my mind raced back to a bumper sticker I had seen long ago. "Good friends help you move, really good friends help you move bodies" Again my mind raced, not to a vision of my phone book, but my email address list. Nah that won't work, nobody is on their computer at three in the morning. The bastard is still bleeding profusely all over the place, so............ I dragged him outside onto my cement patio. He was still out cold and choking to death on his own blood, but at least it wasn't on my carpet.

I rushed back in to get a pot of water. The cold water may revive him I thought, and I could always use the pot to bonk him on the head if he attacks me again when he comes to. The first splash missed but after a few more he came round and staggered up the stairs and away. Phew!!

A few more pots to wash away the blood and a quick mop up of my apartment were in order. By this time my hand was starting to really balloon. Damn... no ice cubes in the freezer. Poor Chili. She was really freaked out by the episode, so she runs and hides. Neither of us can sleep, the door is double locked now but we are still nervous and full of adrenaline.

This morning I found one of his shoes on the steps, if I bronze it maybe I could use it for a jelly bean dish or something. This neighbourhood is really starting to get to me.

Thomas Lockhart
Vancouver, January 2002

Just to give you some kind of idea about the passions of Polynesia, keep this little anecdote in mind. I was sitting on the front veranda of the Seaside Inn late last night sipping a beer when I noticed a man in his forties arguing with some teenagers, say 18 or 19 years old. I believe it had something to do with the noise level of their boom-boxes. The teenagers, it was plain to see, were telling the older man what he could do with his requests for less volume.

The older man stalked off. However, he returned shortly with something wrapped in a bright pink blanket. With the teenagers jeering at him he calmly unwrapped what looked like to me suspiciously like a twelve-gauge shotgun. Indeed it was a shotgun of some sort. The man then proceeded to empty shot in the general direction of the flock of unruly teenagers. They by now were in full flight, attempting to outrun the pellets fired in their wake. They were unsuccessful.

The man had at least fired at their feet in a kind of homage to Mexican Westerns. There was much screaming and shouting as he found his clay pigeons. The man then walked over and with what must have been his last shell, blew the boom-box to smithereens. This whole incident was over in ten seconds or less.

I'm telling you, you just can't make up local color this good! Those of us sitting on the veranda were stunned. We were no more than a hundred feet away from the action. The man looked over at us, turned around and walked home. Problem solved.

Vince Hemingson
Samoa, November 2001