An Ambiguous Appointment

Hello All:

Happy Friday! We conclude another week of the blog, and also enter the holiday weekend in America for our nations 250th birthday. Be sure to celebrate well!

Today we feature a rework of a short story that had been written around 2015. Now about these reworks that are being rolled out. Don't worry. Unless they originally contained rated-x material, they are the same stories with the same plots; just some re-editing for easy story flow.

An Ambiguous Appointment

   

 It was a late Saturday afternoon, the kind where the fading golden hour makes the shadows in the corners of the room stretch just a bit too far. Mario sat in the family room, the dull roar of a televised ball game filling the space. In the kitchen, Cynthia was chopping vegetables for dinner, the rhythm of her knife a comforting, domestic metronome.

Then, the doorbell rang.

Mario frowned, a sudden, inexplicable weight dropping into his stomach. "I wonder who that could be," he muttered, stepping out of the haze of the television.

He walked to the front foyer and opened the heavy wooden door just a crack, keeping the security chain taut.

Standing on the porch was a young woman. She looked intensely professional—a sophisticated, corporate archetype. She wore a tailored charcoal blazer, sharp glasses that gave her an intellectual air, and carried a sleek black leather briefcase. She looked entirely harmless, yet entirely out of place in their quiet neighborhood.

"Yes? Can I help you?" Mario asked.

The woman smiled. It was a perfect, blindingly confident expression. "I'm here. We can get started now."

Mario’s grip tightened on the edge of the door. “Started with what?”

The woman let out a musical, familiar laugh, as if they were sharing an inside joke. “That's really funny, Mario. Seriously, let's get down to business. Time is wasting.”

The casual use of his name made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. "And what business would that be?"

"Well..." The woman tilted her head, her smile remaining perfectly fixed, completely unbothered by the chain separating them. "You had a specific need to produce an outcome based on your expectations—expectations that simply weren't being fulfilled. I'm here with the objective to show you how to fulfill them. We had an appointment. Don't you remember?"

The words were smooth, but empty. They sounded like a corporate brochure, utterly devoid of human warmth. "No, I don't remember," Mario said coldly. "And that's a incredibly vague explanation. Who are you?"

Before the woman could answer, Cynthia stepped into the hallway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. "Mario? Who is it?" She looked past his shoulder, her eyes landing on the visitor.

Instantly, the woman’s smile shifted toward Cynthia, blooming with warmth. "Hi, Cynthia! Good afternoon! I'm finally here to get started, but your husband is playing games. Let's get everything taken care of for you."

Cynthia’s face softened entirely. The tense lines of a long week melted away into a look of sudden, profound realization. "Oh! Right! Of course!" She reached past Mario, her hand heading straight for the security latch. "Mario, move out of the way. Let her in."

Mario slammed his hand against the doorframe, blocking her. "No! Cynthia, stop. Who is she? What appointment?"

"Mario, don't be rude!" Cynthia snapped, her voice carrying a bizarrely frantic edge, as if she were desperately trying to solve a puzzle in her head. "She's... she's from the agency. Or the firm. You know she's legit! She has our names. Just let her in, it's incredibly important. Don't you remember the email? The invitation?"

"There was no email, Cynthia!" Mario hissed, glaring at his wife.

Through the crack in the door, the woman reached into her blazer and pulled out a small leather-bound planner. She flipped it open, pointing a manicured finger at a blank page. "I have it right here. An appointment with Mario and Cynthia Mendez. At five o'clock."

"See?" Cynthia urged, her breathing growing shallower. "She has our names. We are nice people, Mario. We don't leave professionals standing on the porch. It's social suicide. Just open the door!"

Mario looked from his wife’s glassy, eager eyes back to the woman on the porch. The stranger was still smiling, but as Mario stared closer, he noticed something wrong. Her eyes weren't moving. They were completely vacant, staring straight ahead like two polished stones. And despite her long, polite explanation, she hadn't actually said a single concrete thing about who she was.

It wasn't an appointment. It was a script.

"We are not opening this door," Mario said, his voice dropping into a hard, unyielding register. "I'm going to count to three, and then I am closing this door. One."

The woman's smile finally faltered. The warmth vanished from her face, replaced by a sudden, chilling rigidity. "Look, I would ask that you give me some kind of courtesy," she said, her voice dropping an octave, losing its musical corporate lilt and becoming flat, demanding, and hollow. "Treat me like a human being. We had an agreement. Open the door."

"Mario, please, you're embarrassing us!" Cynthia cried, her hand violently trembling as she tried to push past his arm to reach the lock. She was weeping now, an intense, irrational panic taking hold of her—not because of the creepy stranger, but because her brain was screaming at her to fulfill the social contract.

"Two," Mario said, his heart hammering against his ribs. He threw his weight against the door, fighting his wife's frantic movements.

The woman stepped closer to the crack, her face inches from the screen. The professional facade completely shattered. "Let me in," she whispered, her voice a dry, rattling hiss. "You have so much. I just need to take what I can get. Just let me in."

"THREE."

Mario threw his entire body weight forward, slamming the heavy oak door shut. He threw the deadbolt, the metallic click echoing like a gunshot in the quiet foyer.

Cynthia collapsed against the hallway wall, sobbing into her hands, the spell abruptly broken. She looked around the foyer as if waking up from a deep, sudden trance, her eyes wide with terror. "Who... who was that?" she whispered, trembling. "Why did I want to let her in?"

Mario didn't answer. He stood frozen, his forehead pressed against the cold wood of the door, listening intensely.

There were no footsteps walking away down the concrete porch steps. No rustle of a blazer, no click of a briefcase. Just a heavy, suffocating silence.

Slowly, deliberately, Mario moved to the small window beside the door frame and peeked through the blinds.

The porch was completely empty.

But as Mario's eyes tracked downward, his blood ran entirely cold. Resting perfectly in the center of the welcome mat was the black leather briefcase. It was unzipped.

Inside, there were no business papers, no folders, and no corporate documents. There was only a rusted crowbar, a roll of heavy industrial duct tape, and a handwritten list of every single name, age, and bedroom location of the children sleeping upstairs.