The isolated homesteads. The outposts of the outposts. What he’d done to the chickens had provided the wolf no solace, nor did he feel regret. The wolf had made the chickens thin air, had given them unprofaned existence, and they’d given him back nothing. He’d gained no knowledge. If there existed a more potent apprehension it could be found only in a human, not in a human’s lesser companion. The wolf now peered out from a thicket of soft weeds, spying on a mother and a baby. The house was a box of sticks but the porch was grand. The wolf couldn’t see the baby but it was there, wrapped down in the cradle. The mother made tender, distracted clicking sounds in her cheek. It was dawn, the world yellowing. The mother rose and stepped inside the house without shutting the front door. She could see the cradle from where she stood, the wolf knew. The mother was recovering from injury and the baby was a baby.
The wolf broke from the thicket, crossing the dirt road and halting at the mailbox. He couldn’t see the baby but now he could smell it, fatty and scrubbed. Like he would’ve in his old life, the wolf washed the base of the mailbox with his urine. If he took another step closer to the baby he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. Before he knew it he would have the soft infant in his hard jaws, its limbs flopping as the wolf galloped into the wilderness. He kept his haunch against the post. He wanted the mother to come back out to the porch so he might be able to flee but she was brewing tea. The wolf smelled cut pine and tobacco and the knees and elbows of the baby. He couldn’t back away and tried not to move an inch closer. The wolf wondered if he was mad enough now, devoid enough of instinct, that he could be blamed for his actions. Innocence was a silly human notion, but guilt had been around always.
The wolf realized his teeth were bared. He had never in his life tasted human blood. The wolf tried to imagine where he would take the baby, what would happen to it since he was not going to eat it, and of course its unavoidable end was to be ripped asunder by buzzards whose profession was hunger and who didn’t distinguish a human baby from a roadside possum. The wolf put his belly to the ground. He was trying to outrace fate but he was going in circles. He had known it all before and forgotten it all before. He could remember being healthy and somehow could remember being even more ill. The baby would not help nor hurt the wolf. The baby was beside the point. The reason to take it was the same as to not take it. The wolf was playing games — taking pets, subsisting on flying insects, waiting around for fixes of music. Making vows. It was not the wolf’s job to protect anything. The wolf was afraid he might push the mailbox over. The mother was still inside, feeling secure on a whim as humans always did, and she was right this time; the wolf was not going to harm the baby. The wolf wanted to believe that every last hope for peace had not expired in him. He pushed himself back from the mailbox as if dragging a loaded sled and then raced, stumbling, into the borderless abyss that had to be his true home.
CECELIA’S MOTHER
Whether she wanted coffee or not, each morning she put on a kettle of water. As she ran water in the kettle she got to look out the back kitchen window and see her chickens getting about their business, and early in the morning was the only time she enjoyed them anymore. She got to stand near the warming stove. The kettle was something to wait on, a ritual. And when the kettle started whimpering she would wait still, until the sound grew urgent.
This morning she pushed close to the window and saw no movement, heard no impatient clucking. The ground outside was blanketed white. The rest of the desert was correct, but in Cecelia’s mother’s fenced enclosure the ground was a downy carpet. The feathers were spread evenly, as if a giant had fixed up a place to sleep for the night. Cecelia’s mother pulled the door open but she could only make it down the first step. She didn’t want to tread on the feathers. She was marooned on the steps. It was like looking at art, or something more important than art.
By now everyone knew the wolf wasn’t killing out of hunger. He was killing to settle a score Cecelia’s mother could not fathom. Cecelia’s mother had begun to believe that the wolf had passed her over, like in the Bible when all those people painted their doors with blood. Cecelia’s mother knew that the chickens had been working against her. She had secretly begun to hate them. If her chickens were tender for some ancient, animal debt, she wasn’t going to begrudge the transaction. Some chickens became nuggets; hers had been raised to a higher calling. She wanted to laugh at these thoughts, standing alone on the steps, because they were stark and even silly, but she had no laughter to give.
Something was wrong with Cecelia’s mother, but at least she knew it and at least she was working her way out. She wasn’t crazy. She missed the chickens. She’d let go of them weeks ago in her heart. She hadn’t tossed and turned last night, which was unusual. She’d had dreams, and they’d been empty. Her dreams had been hollow eggs. She hadn’t heard a ruckus out back of the house and she hadn’t heard Cecelia leave this morning. She remembered the day she’d bought the chickens, one of the last times she’d walked to Lofte’s little downtown to go grocery shopping. She’d had her backpack with her, and was planning to grill steaks and panfry something green. On her way she’d passed the little Redding property and had not felt like cooking but had definitely felt lonely and the chickens were in the front pen for ten dollars each and Cecelia’s mother had made a bad decision because she had the right to. She’d saved the chickens’ lives. The Reddings were getting out of the hobby and Cecelia’s mother got in. She could have company like everyone else. She could have something going on. She could do something Cecelia wouldn’t approve of. She’d come home with live chickens she meant to keep alive rather than dead steaks she meant to put over a fire. She’d never had a pet in her life, probably another reason she’d bought them. It wasn’t nuts to have some chickens. It was only nuts to have chickens if you were nuts anyway, without the chickens.
Cecelia’s mother looked at the fence from one end to the other, still standing on the back step with the kitchen door wide open, and she saw no breach. The fence was perfect. She realized that there was no blood, not a drop anywhere. The sky in the distance, above the peaks, was stained red. That’s where the blood had gone — far off, high above. Cecelia’s mother stood there wondering whether she would rake the feathers up. That seemed disrespectful somehow, to rake them up like leaves. Maybe she could pick them all up with her fingers and drop them in a big sack. She could leave them alone, let the wind carry them off a clutch at a time. She didn’t know if she wanted anyone else to see this. This was hers, not Cecelia’s or the neighbors’ or her brother-in-law’s. She stood there, her kettle starting to make its noise.
SOREN’S FATHER
There was an open lot not far from the clinic where hot-air balloons launched. The sky was clearer than it had been. Soren’s father watched several balloons take shape and cling to the ground until they no longer could and then float out over the flatlands, and now he watched the crew struggling with a lavender vessel that must’ve had a leak. They could get it only so full before it listed and collapsed.
The nurses had not been permitted to throw out Soren’s father’s mail, but they’d kept it from him in a canvas laundry bag. They said he had to be the one to empty the bag down the trash chute. There hadn’t been near as much mail since the nurses had been stewarding it as back when Soren had first fallen into his coma. The mail didn’t nearly fill the bag, but was only something in the bottom that caused the bag to swing when Soren’s father carried it to the end of the hall. He watched the envelopes tumbling into the dark, glimpsing return addresses in New Hampshire, Utah, other places.