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I was reading over the older prompts at Writer’s Digest’s writing prompts page and when I read this one I just had to try my hand at it:

Your neighbor has taken in an unusual pet and it does something unpleasant to your house/yard. Confront your neighbor

There was something about that writing prompt that just made me snicker and I had to try my hand at it.

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The bag of groceries hit the ground with a heavy thunk, canned goods and vegetables rolled in different directions, unnoticed as I stared at the roof of my house. An old Victorian, I had carefully rebuilt it over the span of twenty years. Woods salvaged from old construction to match the original woods they replaced, the shingles had been taken from a dozen different demolitions and tossed together, mixed and put up onto my house in a lovely collection of old woods that had blended perfectly.

It had been such a lovely house, and now… it needed a new roof. The shingles were being doused by the hoses of the fire truck by the time I pulled out of my shock enough to sort out what had happened to the house. There was only one explanation and I knew it was the right conclusion. Hands fisted I stalked past the muttering firemen and through the flowerbed that had already been trampled by the helpful firefighters that were drowning everything in my house to add water damage to the smoke damage.

I pounded on the door of my neighbor’s house, my fist hit so hard that it rattled the heavy door on its hinges. This was not like when my garden had been dug up. It was well beyond the damage that my car had suffered the week before and somehow even worse than the pile of excrement that had been on my lawn on a near daily basis since the man had brought home his new pet. When the door opened it was tempting to keep pounding on the man that stood there, instead I pointed at my house. “Do you see what your dragon did this time?!”