The Coywolf

One month before the coyotes attack the town of Gerst-on-North, Toffy walks barefoot out to the backyard for eggs, only to find the three chickens beheaded, mutilated, and spread around the coop like sun-dried tomatoes. She returns to the house and walks into the kitchen where her father is drinking coffee. He looks at her, cocks his head.

No eggs? he asks.

The chickens had been his idea. They were big, colorful, chicken-looking chickens, red and white, almost horse-like, with buff hindquarters and full breasts. I’m Roy Wharton, he’d said to the farmer upstate, shaking his granite hand. Days later, he and his wife were eating Sunday omelets on the back porch, watching the chickens parade around. Toffy was still asleep. He thought then that the chickens were the best idea he’d ever had, that they gave him a certain sensitivity to his role in the world. He was coming up on ten years as head of the town’s Traffic and Crowd division. The chickens were a sign that the pumped strength of middle age was giving way to more lean and tenured fibers.

No eggs? Roy asks her again.

Then he understands. Shit, he says. Finally, Toffy raises her head to look at him, to show him that she’s satisfied, even corroborated, by the fact that the last good thing he’ll ever do has ended like this.

We’ll get more, he says.

What Roy doesn’t understand is that Toffy loves—loved—the chickens differently. He loved them for their products and benefits, but she loved them for their souls, for the peace in their eyes, as if they were capable of knowing and accepting love. She would walk out on those weekend mornings and meet the day with them, the dew tickling her ankles as she led them out of the straw-smelling coop and into the grass. She’d stand with them, fenced in, as they milled about, sometimes remarking on her presence with a mild tilt of the head—but they didn’t need her attention. And she certainly didn’t need theirs. It was almost as if she was trying to be one of them, to be regarded with their indifference, and thus, their respect.

It was also true that those caffeinated mornings in the henhouse were the only times in her week when she was truly sober. This was because she had been drinking and smoking weed with a boy named Macksin, and sometimes his friends. Before school, after school, sneaking out to the woods at night. But Toffy didn’t make the connection—to her, it was the presence of the chickens that balanced her, that settled her mind and stomach.

Technically, it could have been anything that killed them, her father says. Could have been a weasel, or a fox, or a hawk. But he tells Toffy that he has good reason to believe it was the coyotes, because they live in the backyard. They’re the ultimate sneaks, he says. He’d noticed their den out by the swing set last summer. They have a taste for fowl, he says, and they’re smart enough to dig under the fence, night after night, like criminals escaping prison.

Toffy crosses the room, pours herself another cup of coffee, and takes the mug to the doorway. I’m going upstairs, she says.

* * *

Two weeks later, and two weeks before they attack the town, Toffy sneaks out of the house at night and sees the coyotes for the first time. She is on her way to one of Macksin’s friend’s houses, where she’ll drink with him and the other boys in the grade above her. She has already said goodnight to her parents, waited one hour and fifteen minutes, snuck out the window, and climbed down to the cold stone wall. From there—perched and checking her phone to see if Macksin has texted her—she sees them. They look like dogs, or foxes. But there’s something snakelike about them. They’re silent, frugal with their movement, as if they’re swimming through the darkness, led by the light of their eyes like primitive fish at the bottom of the ocean.

Toffy grabs a sharp piece of rock from the wall. Before, she didn’t believe the coyotes existed. Not really. They were a neighborhood myth, a suburban ghost. Her father blamed them for killing the chickens only to divert her resentment. But he was right. Now Toffy looks across the lawn and sees herself as a little girl, swinging back and forth, rocking the earth as the coyotes underneath wait patiently for dusk. All these nights she has been sneaking out—thinking the night was hers. Her quiet darkness, her secret. But the night has always belonged to them. How stupid she is, how stupid her father is, her mother, everyone. They think she’s safe now, warm in bed. She looks back to catch another glimpse of the coyotes, but they’ve vanished.

Her phone buzzes. It’s Macksin. Thinking of leaving the party anyways, the message reads. Do you want to just meet me at the cave?

The cave is what Macksin calls his bedroom in the attic above the two-car garage next to his house. Sometimes Toffy dreads going to the cave, but she always goes anyway, because she knows that she wants to be the type of person who likes hanging out there. It’s a humid, foul-smelling place, with low, sloped ceilings and no windows. There isn’t much room to stand, which might be why Macksin always seems to be so relaxed when they spend time there, draped over the bean bags like a discarded jacket. Toffy had hoped that she could meet him at the party, and maybe stand next to him while they drank and talked to his friends. But he is thinking about leaving. It makes more sense to go straight to his place. Sounds good, she texts back.

It is true that Macksin often starts thinking about leaving parties right around when Toffy is ready to come meet him. She has only ever met a few of his friends. Most of them probably don’t know she exists. Sometimes she imagines herself showing up to one of the parties and knowing everyone, being handed a drink, going to the bathroom with some of the other girls, laughing as they poke and prod—so, you and Macksin, tell us everything, come on, Toff.

She walks quickly through the cold night. It takes her until the first crosswalk to realize she is still gripping the piece of stone in her hand like a baseball. Stupid, she thinks. As if a rock could do anything. She drops it and crosses the street at a trot, returning to the shadows on the other side.

Toffy is careful not to walk anywhere within sight of the main house, where Macksin’s mother might be able to see her. The garage is big and dark and mostly empty. On the back wall are a few stacks of Gerst Brewery boxes, which Macksin’s mother brings back from work to use as storage for seasonal decorations and old baseball gear. There’s a thin wooden staircase against the wall that leads to the cave.

Hey, she says.

Hey, you, he says back. Macksin is sitting on a bean bag chair and rolling a joint on his knee. The cave smells like it always does, like sweat and sawdust and barbecue sauce. It’s awful, really, but Toffy knows she’ll get used to it in a few minutes. Macksin tells her that the main reason he left the party early was because he preferred it here, with her, away from it all.

Beautiful, she says, when he holds the joint out to her. Soon she will be high and sharing his calm.

A few hours later, when he starts snoring, she puts her clothes back on and silently lowers herself down the steep staircase. When she steps onto the cement floor of the garage, the bile gnaw in her stomach returns, knowing she’ll have to walk home alone. The doubts about Macksin and the party come back, too, as if the air in his room contained some sweet poison that shielded her from the truth. He’d fallen asleep immediately. They barely said anything to each other, before or after. All she wants now is to be home, in bed, safe and alone enough to wish she never came in the first place.

But she stops at the edge of the garage. At something on the ground.

She would have missed it if not for the noise. Right there in front of her, spasming in the dim glow of the emergency light. The sandy cement floor hisses with friction as it drags itself around in frantic circles. It’s so small, she thinks. So much smaller than she thought bats could be.

Minutes go by and Toffy watches the bat with interest. It bucks its head, churns its tiny, human-looking feet. Eventually, Toffy realizes the irony. It is the cave, after all.

The coincidence warms her up. She feels as if the dark world outside the garage has opened itself up to her, given her a sign. A quiet quickness, a tingling of the fingers, she feels alive again, like she could leave the garage and walk the darkened streets all night if she wanted to. Instead, she stays, watching. Witnessing.

But she can’t just leave it there, sick and deranged. Not for Macksin to find in the morning. He wouldn’t even move it. He’d probably just step over it, walk out, and forget about it again and again until the smell got bad enough. No—it’s hers to take. She doesn’t know what she’ll do with it yet, but it’s hers, she knows that much.

Keeping her eye on the writhing bat, Toffy walks in an arc over to the Gerst Brewery boxes. She tries her best to search through the contents without making noise. She takes what she needs from the stiff, dusty heaps: an old baseball mitt and an empty plastic Wilson tennis ball tube.

Bending down, she can see its nails, its red eyes, its frothing fangs. She picks it up with the tip of the mitt’s fingers. It’s as light as air—she knows she could crush the life from it if she wanted to. It drops gingerly into the tube.

She is out of the garage in a blur. All she can focus on are the small scratching noises coming from the deranged little goblin in her jacket pocket. In another instant she’s halfway home, crossing the street. Hopping the curb, she notices the rock she had dropped a few hours earlier. The gnarled chunk of old stone looks strange on the smooth, sparkling concrete. It shocks Toffy to think that it was some distant version of her who brought it here. And seeing the heavy rock, recalling her childish, instinctual grab of something so useless and dead—it is then that Toffy remembers the coyotes. She stops walking for a moment, as if to check if she is still scared. No—it isn’t fear anymore. She is mad. Mad that a few coyotes could make her feel so young and small. It makes her seethe, the animals’ cold disregard, their cunning. How they live peacefully in Gerst-on-North, under her very nose.

It is then that she decides where she is going.

Soon she’s in the backyard, searching. She finds it easily, the entrance to the coyote’s den, right where her father had said it was. A hole no bigger than a basketball, dug into the dirt where the swing set’s wooden bolsters meet the ground. Out comes the tennis ball tube. It’s still contorting itself, scratching at the plastic. She does not know, exactly, what she is doing, or why she is doing it. But she hopes the bat is still writhing by the time they get back. She likes thinking about it. The possibilities. Maybe it will scare them away. Maybe it will die in there, maybe its flesh will start to decompose and it will poison them when they try to eat it. The tube’s cap pops off like a champagne cork, and she pours the bat in the hole, where it can do nothing but wait for the coyotes to return.

Satisfied, she stands in the yard, tuning into the quiet hissing of the night bugs. She takes off her shoes and walks around the old chicken coop barefoot, feeling the cool, prickly grass on the soles of her feet. She will sleep soundly tonight, and for many nights, before she knows what she has done.

* * * 

The day the coyotes attack begins like any other Saturday in the town of Gerst-on-North: with the farmer’s market, and with Roy Wharton directing traffic in the unrelenting sun. No, you can’t park here, he tells the bronzed couples through their rolled-down windows. This parking is for vendors.

Roy’s grandfather had been Chief of Police before the reconfiguration. After it, his father had been head of Crime. Now here he is, head of Traffic and Crowd. Three generations. It is the door of his own childhood bedroom that he opens, just a crack, to make sure Toffy is asleep by ten. His wife goes running every morning in the woods where his great uncles once hunted deer and fowl. The thought makes him miss the chickens.

Earlier that morning, Roy had seen a woman watching television on her phone while she was driving. She was stopped at the red light in front of him, and he could see her in the act, clear as day. The phone was on one of those suction stands. When he knocked on the window, she didn’t even have the decency to take her sunglasses off. He asked if she knew why he had approached her. She did not. He asked for her license.

Mrs. Cumberland, he said. You’re watching the news at the wheel.

It’s a red light, Mrs. Cumberland said.

It’s still the law, he said.

You know, she said, I’m not the type of person who follows all the rules.

He gave her a warning. Not because he was lenient—no, she was wrong in some profound way that he couldn’t find the words for, and she deserved a ticket. But he knew Mrs. Cumberland. More specifically, he had known her husband, before he died of colon cancer. He used to bring his son, Macksin, to the fundraiser cookouts, and once he inquired about signing the boy up for Junior Volunteer Fire. He was only in his forties when he went. Roy had worked the funeral, which brought in quite a crowd. He had directed traffic for the procession. He gave her a warning.

Roy snaps back to duty on that hot Saturday morning when an unaccompanied toddler runs into him. He bends down to engage the child. Who are you? he asks. Where are your parents? They are unaware, already across the street, with tote bags full of swiss chard and mutton. He watches as they realize the boy isn’t with them, spinning around in place as if looking for a penny on the sidewalk. Before he can say another word, the boy runs across the street without looking. The parents welcome him easily, proud that he found them on his own. Roy holds his tongue. He tries, even, to hold his own thoughts in check. He doesn’t want to become one of those public servants who resents the public.

That’s when the radio on his belt bursts to life.

It’s the voice of Ed Hollis, head of Fire and Emergency. We’re just notifying you, he says. Some of your team is already here and have the road closed off.

By the time Roy gets to the site, the ambulance has already left. One of Ed’s men explains. A mailwoman, at the end of her shift, had been walking between mailboxes on Trent Avenue when an animal charged her. She was bitten on the arm and above the knee. From her descriptions it was likely a coyote, medium-sized.

As he drives back to the farmer’s market to pack up the cones, Roy can’t keep the images from his mind: coffee spilled on the table as shrieks pierce through the autumn wind; bills, birthday cards, and bar mitzvah invitations strewn about the road, shining white in the morning sun; raw skin beneath a tattered and bloodied USPS uniform. Then, just as he pulls back into his parking spot, the second call comes in. It's Ed Hollis again.

Another attack, he says. This one was bigger, based on what people are saying.

What do you mean, bigger? Roy asks, thinking he’s talking about the attack, and not another rabid coyote, the mother.

* * *

Roy arrives at central office the next morning, after a sleepless night. He and Ed have a short chat before they head into the briefing. Roy gets the feeling that Ed is enjoying this period of high alert, of civilian lockdown. He’s got people patrolling the streets with rifles in a town with a ban on toy guns. The rush of instant coms, the caution tape, the sirens—it brings Roy back to the days when his father was head of Crime. Now, Roy knows, crime isn’t the danger out there, it’s the endless acts of God, the floods and collisions and electrical disasters. Now, Fire and Emergency runs the show. But not at this meeting. This one is run by Dr. Reed, the animal specialist. Ed rolls his eyes when he says it: the animal specialist.

She is already speaking when they walk in the room. Scientific articles and maps of the town are stacked on the table. It is clear from her tone that Dr. Reed has decided to start with the good news: that one of the stationed sharpshooters killed the smaller animal—code name Baby—yesterday, around sundown. But she says there’s at least one more out there, maybe two. She gives a short summary of the fourth attack. Mrs. Carusi, the longstanding history teacher at the high school, was struck from behind while she was walking her dog to the brook. She’s all right, save the mild head injury and shock. Her dog, Van Buren, is surely dead. A yorkie.

The animals are dangerous. Dr. Reed says that she cannot stress this enough. Ed Hollis gives Roy a look that says, I think she has stressed this enough. Seeing this, Dr. Reed pauses.

Technically, they’re not coyotes, she says.

Someone says, What?

She explains. In Gerst-on-North, and the rest of the Northeast, what is called a “coyote” is actually Canis oriens, the eastern coyote, also known as the Coywolf. They descended from migrating western coyotes, who then interbred with wolves from the North, eventually forming a new species. Sixty-forty, roughly. Coyote-wolf.

Meaning, Ed Hollis says.

These aren’t skinny, mangy things, Dr. Reed says. They’re killers.

Roy finds this fascinating, and soon he’s off on his own sequence of thought. Gerst-on-North, he realizes, is a coyote’s paradise: large swaths of protected forest, busy restaurants and their open dumpsters, a ban on weapons and loud machines. A few even live in his yard. They killed his chickens. They have come from away, and now they are threatening the town.

Meanwhile, Dr. Reed is making her recommendations: Close the schools, close the restaurants. Close the business strip. And the roads.

Which roads? Ed asks.

All of them, Dr. Reed says.

At this, Ed looks at Roy, as if to remind him that the roads are under his jurisdiction. But in the wandering of his mind Roy has found his own justification of the truth, like a treasure to be held up to the light.

Close the roads, Roy says.

Soon, the emails are sent, the sites and boards are updated, and the room is like a call center, the crescendo of voices fighting for space, Dr. Reed with a phone up to each ear. In a lull, a small man from Media and Communications blocks his phone’s mic with his chest and addresses nobody in particular.

Got Gerst Brewery on the phone, he says. They want to stay open until noon, so people can stock up if they are going to be in lockdown for a while.

Fuck the brewery, Roy Wharton says. The room goes silent.

Dr. Reed smiles widely at him, showing her teeth.

* * *

On the fourth day of the attacks, Toffy wakes up at noon. School has been canceled. The sun-soaked stillness of her room reminds her of waking up to snow days back in middle school. Once, she remembers, they’d had two in a row. They called off the second day in the afternoon of the first, when she was sledding on Lookout Hill with everyone she had ever known. They all looked up at the sun-blotched sky and shrieked with joy. Now, she lies in bed with a pit in her stomach. She reaches for her computer and wakes it up.

The town message board is still open. Before she reads the updates, she scrolls back a few days, to the mundane, colorless list of weekly events. BEAUTIFICATION COMMITTEE Solar Zoning Change: Panels must face away from Ardsdale Road. FARMER’S MARKET Spotlight Vendor of the Week: Amongus Mushroom Farm. CONCEREND FAMILIES Hearing for Suicide Fence on Riverview Bridge, October 9 at Gerst Brewing Community Room 7:00 p.m.

Then Toffy scrolls up to the announcement of the first attack. It looks as if the message board itself has caught rabies, with the bolded, blood-red fonts appearing one after the other in frenzied bursts.

Then the scrolling stops, and she’s at the top. It says, COYOTE REPORT. I would not want to be a coyote today. We now have three sharpshooters and several trappers who have set bait nets and night cameras. Links to their current outposts and areas of surveillance can be seen here. We encourage all residents of Gerst-on-North to remain indoors during this blitz on the animals.

Toffy slams the laptop shut and feels the urge to move, to leave her room, her house, her town. Her body. Instead, she walks downstairs, where her mother is watching the news. The two of them are almost never in the house together during the day, and seeing her splayed on the couch like a youth is strange.

In the kitchen, Toffy messages Macksin to see if he wants her to sneak out later, hang with him in the cave. When he responds, the sun is already making its way down toward the other side of the river, casting a dark orange glow to seep through the windows of the house.

What about the rabid coyotes, he types.

It’s fine, Toffy types back. She tells him she’ll look at the map online to avoid the places where there are shooters or traps. He says okay. He then reminds her that his mother lives in the main house and she should make sure not to be seen in the driveway.

A few hours later, she makes it safely to Macksin’s garage. She had taken a strange, zigzagging route, staying away from the roads nearest to the woods, where the traps and cameras are, but also avoiding the main roads, where she might have run into patrols. It was a stupid thing to have been out there alone, at night, which is what Macksin tells her when she climbs up into the dank, hazy nest.

Don’t act like you’re not glad I’m here, she says.

She’s thankful for the relief from herself, thankful for Macksin and his never-ending jar of weed. For a moment, she imagines telling him about the bat, imagines his reaction. Even if she did tell him, she’d feel like she was lying. Up here, with him, she isn’t the girl from that night. She is the girl he thinks she is: chill, unconcerned, down for a good time. Hot, even. She looks at him and smiles, like a child smiles at an imaginary friend.

By the time she descends the stairs of the cave, it’s one-thirty in the morning. She walks home, staying close to hedges, crossing lawns to avoid intersections and streetlights. She knows they’re out there somewhere, snarling, panicked, vision malformed, blazing from within. Toffy understands that she is terrified. But the fear is a pain that she welcomes, that she walks toward. The sting of it makes her feel a little better.

* * *

Toffy wakes up the next morning even later than the day before. Again, she brings her computer to her lap and sifts through the news, the updates, the posts from neighbors, classmates, and the angry, lonely old people who seem to live online. She recognizes a last name, the parent of a girl in one of her classes. We can get kids to school. You can keep them inside for recess. Just a pooch! A video starts playing as she scrolls, reposted by a boy in her homeroom who always wears camouflage. It’s an interview with a lean-looking, bearded man in Colorado. He had been attacked by a mountain lion on a trail, and he killed it with his hands. I was able to pin it down with one arm, he says, and choke it with the other, like this. It was the adrenaline. It was me or the cat.

Eventually, she slips downstairs to make a pot of coffee. The kitchen shines in the sunlight coming in from the bay windows. Already, Toffy is getting used to the new Gerst-on-North, where outside is off-limits, where her mother does planks in the living room, where her father is always dealing with an emergency. She takes a shower.

She hears the phone buzz on the sink counter as she’s drying off. It’s from Macksin—she can see his name even from the other side of the bathroom. Before she reads the message, she sits on the edge of the tub, towel wrapped around her, and listens to her heartbeat. He has never texted her first, not once. She wants to see how long she can wait before she looks at the phone. After a minute she goes over to the mirror, brushes her teeth again. She washes her face, pressing the scrub into her cheeks, feeling the friction of the little beads. She remembers reading somewhere that the little beads in face scrubs never dissolve or break down, that they make it all the way to the oceans, into the fish, and the people who eat them.

Her phone buzzes again.

She realizes something is wrong when the third text comes in. And the fourth, the downhill tumbling of the messages, each vibration spilling into the next. She snatches up the phone and forces herself to read them in order, to follow the words as he had put them, not skipping to the end.

I’m in your dad’s car. The words make Toffy lose her breath.

* * *

Roy Wharton drives toward the hospital, glancing intermittently into the rearview mirror at the Cumberland boy in the backseat. Roy tells him, again, that his mother is going to live, that she’s all right in the places and ways that matter, but it might not look pretty. Just understand, he says. Certain places of the body just happen to bleed more, just happen to require more bandages.

Roy refrains from telling the boy that his mother probably deserved to get attacked, considering she went out, on foot, to get her phone charger from her desk at Gerst Brewery while a rabid coyote was on the loose.

The boy thanks him and does his best to avoid looking at the rearview mirror. His phone, which he grips like a stress ball, bounces up and down as he taps his leg. Roy lets him know they’ll be there soon.

Roy had given the boy quite a scare. He’d tried to call the house and warn him, but there was no answer. Then, on the drive over, he’d planned out a little speech—son, everyone’s alive, but your mother’s in the hospital. He’d played it out in his head: knocking on the front door, delivering his remark with a reassuring tone, walking the boy to the car with a hand on his shoulder. But there was nobody at the front door, or the back door, and it threw him off. So, he yelled a hello from the driveway, as loud as he could.

Macksin was playing video games in the cave, as he had been for the last six hours, his face inches from the monitor, headset on, the spit-smelling plushy end of the microphone in front of his nose. When he heard the man’s voice coming from below, he’d nearly jumped out of his skin. When he saw it was Roy Wharton, he wished he had.

Roy can tell the boy is still scared, but he has no reason to guess that the boy is terrified of him. Macksin texted Toffy as soon as he got into the car: a cry for help, a lifeline to the only other person in the world who understands the nightmare he is living. Does he know about us? He had asked. But she hasn’t responded. Macksin has been smoking all day, and he feels the weed turning against him now, the swelling paranoia. He is worried about his mother, too, but it’s relief he feels when Roy finally pulls the car up next to the hospital door.

Good luck, son, Roy says.

Roy drives away, suddenly feeling more like the man Macksin thinks he is: looming, powerful, respected. It is as if he has stepped into a projection of himself, put his arms through its arms, wiggled the fingers. And that man, he knows, is not fearful, is not bitter. He’s not angry at Mrs. Cumberland for her defiance of the law. It isn’t the town’s responsibility to keep itself safe: it’s his. He is a Wharton.

He puts both hands on the steering wheel and drives back through Gerst-on-North, his birthplace, and suddenly feels the history of the moment. He knows everything prior will forever be referred to as before. The news has already gone national. The Town Overrun by Rabid Coywolves. Four days of lockdown, groceries delivered by patrol cars, dogs using litterboxes. One of the coyotes shot dead, the other, or others, more dangerous, still on the loose. He remembers an exchange between Dr. Reed and Ed Hollis at the last meeting. The good news, she’d said, is that the disease will kill the animals in no more than ten days. Worst case, we wait until then.

No, we’ve got to kill them first, Ed Hollis had said, slamming his hand on the desk. We can’t just let them die of natural causes.

Roy tries to imagine what will happen when they finally do die. Celebrations in the streets, friendly honks at the neighbors, free ice cream. Or will they be scared to return to the world? Children no longer walking to school. Curfew at dusk. Perhaps Dr. Reed will tell them the coyotes likely spread it to other animals, that they need to be on high alert in the next few weeks, months. He worries that it might never be over. Or, when it finally is, he won’t be able to tell.

His phone buzzes. Strange—it’s always the radio, never the cell phone. But then he sees Toffy’s name on the screen, bolded, vibrating, as if to remind him that he has a daughter.

Hello? he says.

Did it kill Mrs. Cumberland? she asks, sniffling. Is she dead?

No. Roy doesn’t know how she found out. He blames the internet, social media. She’s going to be all right, he says.

You have to kill it, Dad.

Toff, are you okay?

It’s my fault, she says, crying openly now, the distinctive sound of snot and tears through a speaker. It’s all my fault.

At this, Roy is choked with affection for his daughter. It’s my fault. Had he not been thinking the same thing, about himself, a minute earlier? And it sounds ridiculous, coming from her—of course it’s not her fault. But it soothes him to know they feel the same way.

It’s not your fault, Toff, he says. She cries harder.

She is just like him, he tells himself. She’s a Wharton. Passive, yes; cynical, absolutely; but when the going gets tough, when the alarm sounds, she feels responsibility, falls on the sword. He has been worried about her lately, but here she is, calling him Dad—when was the last time she called him Dad? And suddenly, briefly, Roy can see how the future might just unfold in his favor, how things in Gerst-on-North could go back to the way they always should have been.

And we will kill it, Toff, he says. His lifts the phone from his ear, looks out at the empty street, awash with dark, golden light. They’re somewhere out there, he knows. Canis oriens, the eastern coyote. The coywolf. The ghost of the suburbs, made real by its own madness.

We’ll kill it.

NATHAN BLUM

Nathan Blum was born and raised in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. He left Westchester for Bowdoin College, where he received a degree in English. It is only fitting that his first published work outside of college appears in the magazine named for his home county. He is now a teacher living in New York.