She stalked the front porch for a while, looking for coyotes, before she finally gave up and went inside.
“I heard ‘em,” she said.
“I know you did,” said her son, startling her. She’d forgotten he could talk, they’d sat in silence so long. She grimaced.
“I think I scared ‘em off. They smelled me.”
“They smell anger, I hear.”
She foofed a dismissive foof into the air, and then a second for good measure. “That what they teach up at Yale?”
“No, mama, I went to Brandeis, remember?”
She remembered no such thing, but a little thing like reality had never slowed her down. “They got coyotes up at Brandeis? D’you take Olfact’ry Emotion Detectin’ 101 for non-majors up there?”
His silence was all the answer she needed. She considered spitting derisively at the thought of such wasteful academia, but thought better of it when she recalled she’d tossed the spittoon out into the yard the day before. To fetch it, rinse it, and bring it in would spoil the effect of the derision. Besides, there were coyotes out there.
She crept past the windows and tried to move slowly and carefully enough that the floor wouldn’t creak. Every second pass, she picked a window and twitched the fabric aside to see if she could spot the much-despised tan flashes that she knew haunted the treeline.
“They probably can’t smell you now.”
Now he was just needling her. Well, she’d been needled by better than him, and didn’t need to take such amateur abuse. She shrieked an inarticulate holler, as shrill and grating as she could manage. Her throat itched and became raw and she tasted dark copper. That put paid to him, but she jerked back to the window just in time to see the shadow of a coyote bounce across the limbs of a tree and skitter out of sight toward the moon. She ground her teeth together and clenched her fists until her fingers went white and she felt the blood pumping insistent and desperate through her palms, her wrists, her forearms.
He dropped back into his sullen silence as the shadows of the day began to swallow him and he melted slowly into the room behind her back. She sat cross-legged on the floor by the window, fixated on the trees.
The moon began to sing the coyote song and the shadow moved again. If she turned her head almost away from the window and looked only from the smallest corner of her eye, she could see them out there palavering in the silver moonlight.
“They finally come for you, mama?”
“Shut up.” The words snapped out of her before she knew she’d thought them. They hung like a lead axe in the air between her and the indistinct blob of shadows behind her.
“They know what happened, mama.”
She froze. That was new.
“What happened,” she asked, probing the question cautiously.
“The coyotes, mama. And the shotgun.”
She nodded slowly.
“And you shot at them. And me just home from school, mama?”
Her skin fairly crackled with sudden anger.
“And then what happened?”
“I don’t know, mama. I don’t remember. I just remember the moon, mama. The moon and the coyotes.”
She turned her head to the empty room now. He dissolved into her memories and shadows. She screamed again, not the shrill cry of before, but a long and beaten call into the void.
She sat in the silent empty room, bewildered and stunned, until the sun rose.
Audio Version read by Ruth Gibbs
Piano by James Gibbs