The sight of the knife protruding from her flesh breaks some inner dam and releases the pain. Quite a lot of it. In a sickening tide, it rushes through her belly to explode in her head. Vision swims; bile fills her throat. For a long moment Rose holds on to the ridge with both hands to keep from toppling off.

The internal shriek subsides to a thin scream. Rose takes a deep breath and listens. From below comes not a sound. Fervently she hopes the intruder is dead, head crushed like a melon, spine shattered, neck snapped.

“No,” she murmurs. “Not dead.” Dead would be rotten. Her karma would reek for a thousand incarnations. In relative truth, the man needed killing, but in absolute truth, there is no excuse. Worse would be the instant karma. Karma now. She’d have to drag the great lumpish intruder into the backyard, excavate a shallow grave with a serving spoon, then roll him in. She really would be a criminal, complete with a decomposing corpse buried in the backyard. Add that to assaulting a health worker, and Rose would be deemed criminally insane and locked up for a long, long time.

Groans percolate through the still night air, welcome to Rose’s guilty ears. Grunts and foul language follow. Rose breathes a sigh of relief.

Right Concentration: She sends metta to the monster. May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free of suffering, and the causes of suffering.

May you leave and never come back.

From beneath the glove, blood runs in three small rivulets painting her thigh a bizarre shiny red-orange. The color is a trick of the streetlights. That, or during the previous weeks her body had been taken over by aliens with fluorescent orange ichor in their veins. Pain no longer loots and pillages her body but merely boils like molten lava in her left leg.

The intruder heaves into sight beyond the porch roof. Limping badly, his injured hand clasped to his belly, he crosses the street to a small dark-colored pickup. One-handed, he opens the door, then folds himself in. As he drives off, Rose tries to guess the make of the car, get the license plate number. It is too far, too dark, her mind and vision too disturbed: squat dark man, squat dark truck. Not much to put in a police report.

Of course there will be no police report. Living outside the law brings a plethora of complications, she realizes.

The truck turns a corner and is gone from sight. Rose sits unmoving. Throughout the smashing glass, crashing furniture, stabbing, de-guttering, and falling bodies, not one single light came on in the neighboring houses. Either violent crime is more prevalent in Charlotte than she’d thought, or its citizens are uncommonly sound sleepers.

Good. It quashes Rose’s temptation to cry for help.