Week 15 Story: The Home Invasion

There was once a family living in the suburbs of Norman, Oklahoma. They were a normal family; a mother and father with three children, aged 17, 13, and 8. Each day, the mother and father would go off to work, leaving the the children home alone. Now usually, the parents would leave at least one of the two eldest children with the youngest whenever they left in order to make sure he was looked after, but one day they ran into a problem. The oldest child was out of town visiting a friend at college and the middle child was spending the night at a friends house. The plan was for the father to take a sick day from work and watch their young child when the mother left. The problem arose when the father was unexpected called into work for an emergency meeting with his boss. Unable to miss the meeting, the father left his youngest home alone for the first time. The young boy was fine with this, he had even been asking to stay home alone for a while. The father was confident everything would be okay.
The boy happily watched tv in the living room by himself. With no one home, he decided he would even turn the volume all the way up and have some fun. As king of the house, he blared the tv and jumped up and down on the couch until... *crash*... he heard glass break. He turned off the tv, thinking he broke a vase and was going to be in so much trouble. Then all of the sudden he heard voices.

"Hello?" He asked. "Is someone there?"

Around the corner came two masked men.

"Who are you? What do you want?" The boy asked in a shaky little voice.

"We are here to rob your house." One of the men said bluntly. "Where do your parents keep the valuables?"

The boy replied, "I am only 8! I don't know where they keep anything but food and my toys! Why do you come here and scare me?"

The men looked confused.

The boy went on, "I am small, I can't do anything to you. So why do you come in my house and try to hurt me and take my things?"

The men looked at each other and slowly retreated out the door and to their car, and the boy went back to his cartoons.

When the father returned from his meeting he asked his son what happened to the window, the boy replied, "some guys tried to rob the house but I scared them off."

That was the last time the boy was left home alone for a while.

The End.

Burglar (Source)

Bibliography: The Forest Fire by Noor Inayat (Link)



Author's Note:
My inspiration for this story came from a Jataka Tale by Inayat. The story is called 'The Forest Fire" and has a very similar plot. In that story, there is a family of quails that loves in a forest. There are two parents and seven baby birds. The parents go and fetch food like insects and seeds for their babies every day. Six of the seven babies eat the insects and grow big and strong, but the seventh only eats the seeds and doesn't grow at all. One day a forest fire approaches their nest. All of the birds fly away except for the small baby who didn't eat enough and cannot fly. As the fire comes near, the small bird tells it that he is just a small, helpless bird and tells the fire to go away. Upon saying this the fire stops and retreats. I read this story for my week 15 reading and I really enjoyed it so I thought I would rewrite it for my story. I changed the story to human characters and made the seven baby birds into three different aged children. I wanted to make it into a more realistic version of the same tale.