The Yard by Danny Bagley

​Mrs. Sinclair our neighbor was dead.  She had died during the winter of a stroke; not one of us really knew much about her except that she was sort of creepy.  She always just sat in a rocking chair in her yard just watching the street. Everybody had a spooky story about that yard.  Now it was summer and we decided to go into the yard that had been haunting us for a long time. As we went into the yard my friend Kirill told my brother, Luke and me the story of Jimmy, the lawn gnome.  
“Jimmy was my dad’s friend” he said
“He wandered into the yard one day and never came out, but then a few days later there was a gnome outside her door that looked oddly like Jimmy”.
 Then Luke started telling a story,
“There used to be kids in the house next store, Mrs. Sinclair hated them so much she turned them into flamingos and when their parents came out she did the same.”
He said that was the reason they had five flamingo statues next door.  The gnome was gone though, and so was the rocking chair.  The yard was covered in overgrown weeds and had a pebble driveway that was pale gray.  (There were little bits of strange things everywhere.)  There was a broken china pig, a plastic duck and a few fish bones with mold dancing on them.  There were a few tall pine trees and a bunch of thorns everywhere.  There were many statues including a cement bird bath and two crow statues.  At the left of the yard there was a wood that you could barely see into.  The house was ordinary except for some shingles falling off and a broken window in the back.  If you stood in a certain part of the yard you could see inside the mysterious house.  It had blood red wall paper with green flowers painted like there were vines growing on the wall.  We walked around a bit more and found at least five no trespassing signs.  We started to wonder if we shouldn’t be there.  Then I heard a snap.
“Sshhhhh” I whispered.
We all stopped and it was there again the snap.  Someone or something was coming.
“Run!” I yelled.
“Hop the fence in the back, go faster!”
We went over the fences which lead a group of condominiums (called Beachfront) were people rent, and the people sitting outside their condos were staring at us.  We just ran to my house as quickly as we could and we didn’t look back.