The porch with the wooden blinds

Jackie was thrilled. Her offer had been accepted, and after waiting for months, she was moving into her little piece of paradise. Her cabin, barely 1000 sq ft, was more than adequate for her and her dog, Remi. The porch was bigger than her living room, but that was just fine with her. She loved the porch, and with the wooden blinds installed, you couldn't see her sitting out there with the lights off.

Not as though there was all that much to see out there. She had 3 whole neighbors visible; one on each side of the lake. All of them, little cedar cabins like her own. The neighbor to the left and right of her, a woman. Directly across the lake was Ed, purported by the realtor to have grown up in the same cabin he still resides in.

Jackie had spotted Ed out prior to the sun rising this morning. She and Remi sat on the porch, she having coffee and researching an article while Remi snoozed at her feet. It was the brief flash of light that caught her attention, presumably when Ed opened the door to step outside.

Jackie watched him by his penlight beam as he gathered his fishing materials and walked them down to his jonboat. Remi stood and silently watched Ed alongside her, and it was so quiet out that Jackie plainly heard the jonboat splash nosefirst into the lake.

She would have to keep that information to herself. She didn't want to be thought an eavesdropper, but if Ed so much as whispered a conversation in this early hour of the day, Jackie had no doubt she would be able to hear every word he said.

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Sometime around Noon, she and Remi walked toward the cottage on the right side of her front porch. Nina is the occupants name, an insurance executive, the realtor had informed her. She kept a 9-5 schedule, as did Carrie on opposite side. The only neighbor home during business hours was Ed.

Ed apparantly operated his business from home, although it was unclear what the business is. Jackies' realtor thought he may have inherited his fathers taxidermy business, but he wasn't certain. There was no way to determine what his gainful employment might be from her front porch, either. He had no schedule, it seemed. Anytime she and Remi were enjoying the dark solitude the porch provided, there he was. Carrying boxes to and fro, stringing fishing lines, some minor form of puttering around was a constant at Eds', it seemed.

"Not our circus, not our monkeys," she told Remi.

Some thought was nagging at her, though. She had been in the cabin for almost 3 months, and never caught a glimpse of any animal, stuffed or otherwise. Stranger still, he had no dog. Having a dog is damned near a prerequisite for a hunting license in the south. Especially for a taxidermest; water fowl and the like. Jackie hadn't ever known a man making his living off of the land who didn't own a dog.

Maybe he does I.T. from home. Maybe he was left enough money to live frugally without working for his natural liife. As much as she tried to turn her warning system off, the alarms were starting to blare, and it seemed no amount of rationilazation would cut the emergency beacons. She was missing something, something critical to the story.

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Usually, she and Remi caught a nap prior to dinner, ate around 10, then she worked until the sun came up. No point in trying to sleep before sunrise, her crippling fear of the dark set the schedule she adhered to.

Her porch was absolutely perfect for working. It was beyond quiet, her work lamps were not visible through the wooden blinds she had spent the additional money to buy. For years, she yearned for them every time she visited Home Depot, but was never able to justify spending the equivalent of a months pay to fit the rental house with them. Definately worth the extra change. She and Remi were invisible with the blinds drawn, only her breathing and the scratch of her pen to betray their location.

Tonight, there was a full moon. The blinds on the screen door were opened about a milimeter: just enough to see the blazing moonlight, and the 3 neighboring cabins, with their interior lights still blazing . Carrie, per her usual, turned the porch light on and her living room light off at 10:15. Ed wasn't even 5 minutes behind in extinguishing his lights. Finally, Nina shut her lights off around 11:30, right in line with the end of the news broadcast.

Jackie picked up her notebook, and thumbed back to the article she worked on for a few hours last night. She heard her thumb zipping over the individual sheets of paper, and quickly closed the notebook. Remi sat forward on her haunches, straining her ears as far toward the sky as they would protrude.

Nothing. Huh. Odd....

No, really, nothing. No frogs, no crickets, no mosquitoes, nothing. Not a single sound of life from the thriving ecosystem a stones throw from her chair.

There it was. That nagging thought that she had only the bare bones of the situation, and all of the crucial details had been purposely removed.

She was a Florida native,and had slept under the stars on essentially every beach, orange,and pine needle within its borders. Dead quiet like this meant only one thing; predator. There was a predator in their immediate vicinity, and every creature in its' radius was silently struggling to hear its footsteps so they could run the other direction.

She took the 2 steps over to the screen door and silently thumbed the deadbolt. Then she closed the millimeter opening in the blinds, and silently sat down next to Remi. She put her hand on Remis' back and they exchanged a glance and devised a quick plan, silently. Remi would let her know when she caught the predators scent. She always did.

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