A smash hit

(Here’s the golden envelope.)

Dear diary,

Yesterday my next-door neighbor and I both happened to mow our lawn at the same time again. And we finished at the place where the chain-link fence divides our yards; so, after shutting off our mowers, we began to shoot the breeze [a North American idiom meaning to have a casual conversation]. He ended up inviting me over to his side of the fence, to show me his deck and his gazebo and his patio and his addition to his house, all of which he built himself. — I said that I admire his talent and his ability, and I wish that I had his knowledge and his skill, because there’s a lot of stuff that needs fixing on my own house.

& he said “O? Like what?”

& I said “Well I was planning on replacing the windows this year, but then the pandemic struck, and now the question of money has put all plans on hold.”

Then the rest of the afternoon passed, and I went to bed at sundown.

My sweetheart was with me in the bed; & she was with me as well during all the adventures above — she was using the weed-whipper to whip the weeds while I was mowing, & she stood by my side while we chatted with our neighbor about his handiwork; & she nodded her head to emphasize the truth of what I was saying, when I was explaining our foiled plans to replace our house’s windows.”

So now my sweetheart & I fell fast asleep in our bed, after a hard day of yard work.

Then at 1:20 a.m. we were awakened by the sound of a crash. It sounded like glass breaking, but it was slightly muted.

“Oh my god; what was that!” whispered my sweetheart.

“I don’t know” I said.

Then, tensely & carefully, we crept out of our bedroom & began to investigate the rest of the house. We turned the lights on in each separate room & scanned the area, expecting to see something broken, such as an object that was previously hanging now smashed in pieces on the floor. But nothing looked amiss — everything was as it should be: intact & non-shattered.

“Maybe that giant crash was only the ice-maker,” I said. (For our refrigerator has an ice-maker which is often very noisy: when its auto-rotating mechanism releases the frozen slices from their incubation tray into the plastic reservoir, it sounds a lot like a truck dumping glass into a shard-filled canyon.)

“Yeah, it probably was just the ice-maker,” my sweetheart nodded.

So then she went back to bed, and I stayed up and snooped around my own house for a while longer while worrying.

Then about an hour later, at 2:20 a.m., I decided that I had snooped as much as one can possibly snoop in one’s own house, and that whatever had made the crash noise, if it wasn’t the ice-maker, must remain forever a mystery. But I didn’t feel right about just going to bed again — I somehow felt a responsibility at least to mull over this problem for a span in the front room. So I sat down on the sofa and frowned. Then I turned around and peeked thru the blinds out the window behind the sofa. There was nothing outside — it was dark & still, and our yard lights were on, so I could see the whole lawn clearly.

Now, while wandering, my eyes alighted upon the space between the panes of the double-paned window, right down on the wood of the lower frame: it looked like there were crystal gems down there... maybe even diamonds! — This made my heart leap up: I’m used to seeing dead spiders & dust between my window’s panes, not clear jewels. So I adjusted the blinds to be able to see the whole window. Then I gasped. Then I pulled the blinds completely out of the way so that I could confirm what I saw:

Sure enough, there was a fist-size hole in the glass, with several huge long cracks extending out away from it. But only the exterior pane was breached; the inside pane of glass was unhurt, except for a smudge, which I assume was left by whatever caused the hole in the outer pane.

“Ah, the glass IS broken,” I called to my sweetheart. And she came out & shrieked.

Then I opened the front door and walked outside to see if I could locate whatever it was that had hit the window, expecting to find some object like a hacky sack, or a small rock, or perhaps a ball-bearing from a gun that shoots ball-bearings (are there guns that shoot ball-bearings?—I’m just tossing out ideas, off-the-cuff; and modern weaponry is not my strong suit) But nothing unusual was to be found. However, I noticed that the mulch bed directly beneath this window contains many interestingly shaped pieces of wood.

CONCLUSION
(competing views)

So, during breakfast the next morning, I said to my sweetheart:

“While looking online, I noticed that the trustworthy sites all claim that flying mammals are demented, hence the phrase ‘bat-shit crazy’ and ‘as sane as an angel’; therefore; it’s clear that our window was demolished by a messianic vampire sent from the Apostle Paul so as to inflict us with Everlasting Life: howbeit, as usual, rather than showing up according to schedule (which would have been when the window was open, during noon), the fiend was instead more than 2,000 years late; and he arrived like a thief in the night; either because he forgot to reset his wristwatch for “Daylight Savings” (the practice of advancing clocks during warmer months so that darkness dies more democratically) or else he was just not rigorous enough in his adherence to William Blake’s famous proverb: Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

Yet, just after my reference to that quote, we both (my sweetheart and I) saw (thru our now-damaged window) that our neighbor across the street was getting ready to leave for work in his bright white van. So my sweetheart dashed outside and flagged him down and pointed at our window. He then got out of his vehicle and took a closer look, and remarked:

“Ah, I bet this was done by that new trio of tenants down the street who rent that triplex: since they moved in exactly three months ago, all three of them have called the cops on each other thrice weekly.”

“And what I tell you three times is true,” I quipped ironically, after my sweetheart returned inside & relayed this encounter. “I don’t buy it,” I added; “the idea of criminals living nearby is too scary.”

Then, later that day, my sweetheart spotted a second neighbor doing yard-work; so, in order to get a tie-breaker opinion about the cause of our broken window, she sprinted out and captured his attention: While pointing to the cracked pane again with one hand, she made the ‘come hither’ gesture with the other, and raised & lowered her eyebrows noticeably, as if to shout: “What think you of this!?”

This second neighbor addressed his assessment to the both of us (for he espied me hiding aft the blinds of the window, attempting to eavesdrop on their exchange), and he pantomimed as follows:

“Hi all; I just wanted to acknowledge that you had your window broken. No big damage, only a hole in the storm glass; so no shards even got in the house, because the interior pane was unaffected. My guess is that some federal agents were simply letting off steam in a destructive way. Please be safe and kind to each other.”

FINAL VERDICT
by the One True God

So, like I said, my conclusion is that a bat (a winged mouse) was gliding near our house around 1:00 a.m., in search of tasty bugs; and its mental sonar, which serves as its navigation system, mistook our window for a clear swath of heaven, thus leading it to bump its head straight into our outermost pane at 1:20 a.m. — After which, the poor creature was still alive, albeit feeling a bit hungover; so it flew away to hunt & eat more bugs.