24. She must’ve lived in Detroit or something

I was six or seven years old, in my parents’ apartment, and heading towards the kitchen. There is a small hallway corridor that starts with the front door, after five feet there’s the door to the kitchen to the right, and the door to the living room to the left, and two feet further away there corridor turns to the right and continues to the bedrooms from where I was approaching.
So I go towards the kitchen where my mom is talking on the phone, cooking with the oven and the oven fan on. And at the end of the corridor in front of me I see the front door opening, and halting because of the door chain holding it.

I thought it was my dad. It was about eleven in the morning. So I think my dad will close the door and ring the doorbell for my mom to open up the chain. It was weird, because I hadn’t heard the key turning.

Except that nobody rings the door, and an enormous hairy hand, that definitely doesn’t belong to my father, tries to pull out the chain.

Immediately I understand it’s a burglar, and I rush to slam-shut the door with my entire body, while I whine a little “Nooo!” And I would have managed it, if the burglar didn’t think to put his foot as an extra stopper.

So there’s me, slamming against the door with all my seven year old strength, panicked out of my mind, and then putting all my weight against the infernal piece of wood, with a huge burglar on the other side trying to keep the door open so he can pull the chain off, fingers trying to grasp the end of the chain, and my mother completely oblivious about twelve feet away on the next room.

I tried to scream at my mother, I remember yelling muffled pieces of “Mooom! Moooom!” but she thinks I’m horsing around and pays no attention. It’s after my seventh or eighth scream, when I was about to give up hope, when I heard my mom tell the person on the other end of the line she’ll call her back because I’ve done something and she needed to check on me.

The burglar heard her, and let me close the door. My mom arrives and demands to know what I think I’m doing. I’m crying at that point, not being able to utter a coherent sentence, trying to point at the door, saying only “burglar, out” or something to that effect.

My mother, not getting the hint, comes over and tries to open the door to see what the fuss is about, with me still pushing against it with my back. As soon as I realized what she was about to do I tried to push her away, crying, sobbing at her “Don’t open the door, there’s a burglar outside!” I had to fall on my ass, then on my knees, and beg her against trying to push me aside, before she decided to change her mind and see through the peephole instead of opening the door.

So she looks through it in a hurry, starts saying “See? There’s nobody the-“, and I see her very annoyed face, turning pale as a sheet all of a sudden. She grabs me and pushes me away from the door and tells me to go get her the phone.

I rushed to the kitchen and I heard her yell through the door:

“I CAN SEE YOU CROUCHING. YOU’RE BEHIND THE DOOR. I’M NOT GOING TO OPEN, AND I’M CALLING THE POLICE RIGHT THIS MINUTE!”

The bastard was still behind the door, crouching as low as he could, not making a sound, so my mom would think nobody was outside, and she’d open the door and he’d rush inside. My mom called the police, and after five minutes of my mom issuing threats through the door, we heard somebody creeping away from the hallway and down to the building entrance and outside the building door. My mom was white as a sheet, not making a sound or expressing any emotion throughout the whole ordeal. It was as if she was scared stiff.

About half an hour later my father arrived, oblivious to the whole thing. When my mom told him what happened, he went and got a new lock and a better door chain.

The police arrived that afternoon, a full five hours later, even though the police station is a ten minute drive from our house. I don’t think the burglar was ever caught.