Flash Fiction: Deaf on the Right

Needed time to recharge, so that's why I've been rather scarce online recently.
I participated in Columbus Creative Cooperative's Flash Fiction Smackdown on March 1st. Didn't win, but that's okay because the final round involved writing another story in 15 minutes based on a prompt, and then presenting that story. Scary, yes?

So, here is what I read that night--

Deaf on the Right

By J. Lannan

Spending summer at home was boring. But I kept seeing this guy. Hiding in bushes. Standing behind garages. So, like I said I was bored. That afternoon I snuck up and snapped him in the back of the head with the stupid rubberband on his Halloween mask. I hadn't been expecting that falsetto scream. I took off down the street even though I wasn't scared. Why was he even wearing that when it was ninety degrees out? And he had to be way too old to be creeping like that.  I felt justified. He ambled after me groaning like a constipated walrus.

"Really?" I could walk backwards and he wouldn't even catch up. So, that's what I did. "Are you seriously such a spazz that you're following me? Look at how you're dressed. Who do think you are the next member of Slipknot?"

I stopped on the sidewalk. He lurched forward with his hands aimed at my neck, but he didn't know that I played soccer. I corner kicked him in the junk and ran for a friend's house.

Now, no one had seen any of them for about a week, but maybe they went on vacation. Without telling anyone. The door was unlocked. Inside, the place smelled like road kill. Like big roadkill.

You know, in these situations most people try to rationalize that the creepy guy who showed up a week ago and the house that smells like week-old death were somehow not connected. I wasn't one of those people. 

I knew they had guns. The downstairs cabinet was locked. I knew about the loaded pistol in the nightstand. But that was upstairs, and there are rules against that.

Serving as a reminder of the rules I encountered Colleen laid out on the stairs with a knife wound to the chest. "You never run up the stairs." I yelled at her, but that was pointless.

So the gun wasn't in the nightstand, it was on the bed by Colleen's dead dad. The psycho was faster. He gripped my throat. But I had the gun. Put it up near the side of my head. Pointed back. Heard him breathing. Pulled the trigger.

And that's why I'm kind of deaf in one ear.