Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

86

The House Two Doors Down

Herman's house was being taken down. The giant orange crab claw rhythmically dug into the shrinking house and pulled out the twisted, broken, and pulverized remains and dumped them into large steel bins. From my front window, I couldn’t see anyone operating the destructive machine. Several thickset men, with only their white faces unprotected from the cold, stood off at a distance, talking more with their hands than their voices.

Two doors down, right where two streets came together in a T, I had a good view. The sound effects were pretty good, too, especially when the jerking hydraulic claw dropped its heavy bucket load of debris. The sound reverberated through the naked trees, occasionally rattling the windows. With just a little imagination, the machine looked like a sea monster from the early days of Japanese horror movies. This one's name was Hitachi. I don't recall the name of the one Godzilla fought in the 1960s, but Godzilla would have been no match for what I was watching from my window. This thing was enormous. Its powerful orange arm, even flexed, was taller than the two-storey houses on either side, and fully extended it could probably top the blue spruce next to what had been the ga-rage.

The machine monster was relentless in its demolition but remarkably under control. If it were to go berserk, the houses on three sides would have been summarily gutted just like Herman's. The round white-faced men propped up against their F-150s seemed to have trained this beast well. Every once in a while, one them would point or wave his arms or yell a single syllable command, and the beast would pause and then take a new course of action. I wondered if these things ever disobeyed or misbehaved—in real life, I mean, not in fictional horror stories and movies.