A Confession

I returned to my apartment around 8 p.m. one night after grabbing dinner out with a friend. As I opened the door to my apartment I quickly realized I had forgotten to turn my light on prior to leaving, an odd mishap for me. I shrugged it off and immediately did my usual rituals which was removing my shoes and making a quick phone call home to say hi. As the phone rang, I saw him from out of the corner of my eye, he was huge and frightening. As I dropped the phone, I could hear my mother say hello, but out of fear I ignored her voice and started to hyperventilate in panic of what I should do. I screamed…loud with terror. Trying to think fast on my feet, I knew it was going to be either him or me. He turned toward me and then stopped unsure of his own decision to either attack or run out. All I could think about was how did he get in here. I’ve never seen him around here before or anywhere else for that matter. I remember uttering 50 times over and over, “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” By this time my mother’s tiny voice was calling me through my cell phone yelling my name in sheer panic knowing she couldn’t help me from a million miles away, while her daughter was about to be raped and killed. The only thing I could grab as a weapon was my shoe, which I had just removed two minutes before. Now remember, I was crying and screaming but something inside me gave me power…power to fight back. For a minute an incredible amount of self-preservation came upon me. I knew the years of kickboxing and Taebo were about to pay off. I took my shoe and hit him…and hit him again, and again, and then finally, one last crushing blow to his skull and it was finished. He was dead. I killed him. I was exhausted and could hardly move. I threw myself onto my futon expressionless and limp. Breaking the silence I suddenly heard my mother crying through the phone still calling me saying “Tara, where are you?” I picked up the phone and began to cry and told my mother I had just killed the biggest bug I had ever seen in my entire life.