I could have slept in until five-thirty this morning if the raccoons hadn’t come.

I have the day off from work today. My Darling B doesn’t, though, and somebody’s got to make the coffee for her, so I set my alarm last night to get me up at five-thirty. As it turned out, I didn’t need the alarm at all. I woke to the sound of the axe murderer shuffling through our house and occasionally bonking into the furniture. I hear him poking around in the kitchen or the living room once a week or so and, about once a month, I still have to get out of bed and turn on the lights to assure myself that it’s really just the loose floorboards creaking and popping as the house cools off.

This time, though, it wasn’t the floorboards. This time I could clearly hear someone … or something shuffling around the house. The longer I listened to it, and the more awake I felt, the more I was sure that I could hear someone moving around. Then there came a point when I could hear the axe murderer on the roof. That’s weird, I thought, he’s never been on the roof before.

We’ve had squirrels on the roof before. I knew what they sounded like, and this was no squirrel. This sounded like someone sprinting across the roof from the northern end of the house, where our bedroom was, to the southern end, where the eaves came down to a corner just above the back porch. Rolling out of bed, I crept to the window to try to catch a glimpse of the creeper lowering himself to the ground.

It was just before daybreak and everything was still gray on gray, but I knew the layout of the back porch all the chairs and junk scattered across it, all except for the shimmering, pulsing ball of static at the top of the stair. Bigger than a breadbox but smaller than a suitcase, it had no definite shape. It kept moving, but it didn’t go anywhere. I watched it for several minutes, wondering if the aliens had finally arrived or if I was just having a stroke and would collapse to the floor in a drooling heap any second.

I didn’t collapse, so instead I tiptoed through the house to the kitchen window to get a closer look. The shimmering heap was still there and still looked pretty weird, but instead of phoning the authorities to let them know ET had landed, I watched a while longer, and a good thing, too. The pulsing shape split down the middle, one half of it sort of blobbed away to the far corner of the porch while the other half remained at the top of the stair and started to tear up a stack of newspaper sitting there. In the breaking daylight I could make out the masked face of a raccoon.

I’ve seen raccoons in the neighborhood before, and we knew they’ve been in our yard. They pulled down all the sweet corn that My Darling B was growing in her garden last year or the year before. She wanted to murder every last one of them with her bare hands when they did that. This is the first time I’ve seem them on our property. They weren’t doing anything in particular, just poking around on the back porch, pushing the watering can around, climbing the rail and, eventually, the maple tree to the roof, where they’d scamper back and forth a bit before coming back down and rolling into a tussling ball on the porch again. This went on for the better part of a half-hour until the sky brightened. Apparently they felt too self-conscious after that, and wandered off.