The Monkey's Paw

Granted. The bank hired folks to do all that work, they'll arrive along with the eviction notice.

Granted. Someone has spraypainted racist slogans onto your fence with glow-in-the-dark paint. They also used a pressure washer to draw dicks on your deck, and those dicks are the only parts that are actually clean.

Granted.

A sandstorm whips across your area, blasting the dirt and grime from your desk, as well as a quarter inch of the deck material, your house, and anything else aboveground. That includes your friends and neighbors, which raises a mixed mist of sand and blood at the end of the storm, which settles onto your nicely blasted fence, leaving a lovely coat of blood as paint.

Also, I now have to write that up as lyrics for a metal band.

Granted. It was an exceptional storm. A storm that meteorologists would study and publish papers on, in the hopes of making that one breakthrough that would catapult them from obscurity to prominence. None would ever make that ascension. The smart ones would give up their pursuits before it consumed them to the point of obsession. Leaving this aberration for the conspiracy theorists to debate if it was caused by some weather control device operated by some government, secret society, or aliens. The storm was, after all, quite simply impossible. So localized that did not even register on the instruments of nearby weather monitoring stations. So short lived that the only evidence that it ever took place, aside from the destruction, were the handful of videos from the eye witnesses.

Unlike the tornadoes and hurricanes typically used for comparison, this storm was not a cacophony of violence surrounding a core of relative tranquility. The videos clearly showed the exact opposite. A calm swirling of air gentling rusting leaves surrounding a vortex of destruction that limited itself to a single house, in the most uncanny way. Within the vortex, the house was being pulled apart. Lifted in a thousand tiny pieces, straight up into the sky, never to be seen again. Eventually, enough of the house had been removed to show a person in the middle of all the chaos --standing huddled, clutching something too small to make out in the videos-- and then they were gone. Taken so fast that they were there in one frame and gone in the next. Conspiracy theorists heralded what happened next as proof that this was a targeted attack and no natural phenomenon. The storm dissipated. Within seconds after the figure vanished from the screen, the swirling dirt fell to the ground, the trees stopped swaying, and all that could be seen where the house once stood was a pristine deck and a fence painted with the bloody remains of that lone person seen briefly and yet forever immortalized in the annals of the mysterious and unexplained.

Granted. The government took your property and cleaned and painted what used to be your deck and fence.

Granted! You go outside to find everything from your deck now scattered across your yard. Additionally, the fence posts are painted, but only on one side, with it alternating which side at random.

So be it, but now you have to pay a bit more money than you were willing to to have that neighborhood kid come over and do a really good job.

Granted. You receive a brand-spaking-new violation notice in the mail from your new HOA board informing you that the outstanding violations have been addressed on your behalf due to your failure to act on the previous notices in a timely manner. The cost will be automatically included in your next HOA fee plus an additional $500 fine. From then on the HOA strictly enforces a clean deck and newly painted fence policy for as long as you should continue to live there.

Enjoy the HOA!

Finger Curls

You sob, cradling a limb, the greatest piece of what's left of your loved ones, their blood painting your once dusty monocolor fence crimson. The murder weapon, a rusty machete, lies embedded deep within a plank of your pristine deck, carefully cleaned of prints.

When the police arrive, there is only one suspect, and the trial is as short as the sentence is long.