This is quite a natural thing for one to do when bored, and if you have never done so, then I suggest you have never been very much bored. The first point to know when robbing a house is that it is against the law, and secondly, if caught by the police, it is no use saying �Arthur Brown recommended it to me in his best selling novel�, because after all, who is Arthur Brown? And is this a best selling novel?

The first point Katy dismissed as fickle, and of the second she was ignorant. So when I write the third point to know, acknowledge that in Katy�s mind it was actually the second. The third, or second, point to remember is that the house to be robbed must be unoccupied for the period of time it takes to do the job. There is nothing more terrifying to a burglar then to be quietly going about their business of burgling a house and suddenly coming face to face with the inhabitant (the person whose house is being robbed at that point in time), carrying a baseball bat or a vacuum cleaner. The inhabitant, sensing fear in the burglar, will act on it by screaming loudly.

Keeping point number two (or three) in mind, Katy observed each house on Pickle Avenue with care. Being a business day, people were all working in the city and so every house was empty. Like Katy�s parents, the inhabitants of Pickle Avenue worked long hours in a company that made machines to give adults more time in their chaotic lives. The amount of time it took to create this extra time made one wonder if it wasn�t all a waste, and why adults seemed to lose intelligence rather then gain it as they grew older.

The apartment blocks on Katy�s side of the street were out of the question as they were all installed with the second most terrifying thing to a burglar, that being burglar alarms. Noisy, screeching devices that went off with nothing more then the weight of a mosquito. Katy was not sure exactly how heavy a mosquito was in weight, but there was little doubt that she was the heavier.

Across the street was a series of five tall thin houses separated by a fourteen inch gap of air. The owners of the first, third, fourth and fifth houses all kept dogs. Katy knew this because she often saw men and women dressed in ridiculous tracksuits and running shoes, dragging a dog down the steps of the house, then back up them a half hour later. Katy didn�t think much of people who dragged dogs around the block for exercise and so had no desire to even open their front doors.

This left the second house, number ten. No burglar alarms, no owners dragging dogs for exercise, no barbed wire fences, no onsite police people, no holes covered with leaves for the unsuspecting burglars to fall in.

You the reader may be thinking I�m making this easier for myself. I am. I do not want to write ten pages of story based around the plot of a girl falling down a hole that has been covered with leaves. If this is what you want to read, I suggest you take the next few lines to write it yourself, and ignore the rest of this story. >>

...the end<<