Sleepwalker
By William Beeker
The coyotes treat the wall surrounding our town as more of a suggestion. At night they vault off one another to leap twelve feet in the air, arcing like moonbeams over the barbed wire lining the top of the wall, and land softly on padded paws in the dirt. This happens at the outskirts of town where no one is watching. Then they roam freely up dark roads and across lawns, snatching small dogs, somnambulant children, handbags filled with packaged treats, turning over trash bins in search of T-bone scraps, gristle on the bone, developing luxurious tastes, leaving cheaper meats for the rats and raccoons. They stroll past the defunded animal control center and slink by dozing policemen who serve more as documenters of aftermath than protectors. The coyotes know there is no one to stop them.
We hear maybe 20 circle the house, howling and yipping with the gleeful violence of a pack of teenage boys. They’re cocky together, egging each other on. They jump off the walls of the house and paw at the windows, trying to get a rise out of me. They know food lives here.
I try not to picture the 8-year-old boy whose red skeleton was found beyond the wall near their den. I try not to remember the mother in Town Hall pleading for someone to do something for god’s sake, while we all looked at our shoes, silently thinking, she should've been more careful. After all, she knew her boy was a sleepwalker.
In the living room, with a kitchen knife in hand, I usher our two girls into my arms, while you fetch the .22 from the basement. It's not much, but with the right aim it could kill. Our Maltese is barking at the sliding backdoor, while a coyote paces in front of the glass like a tiger at the zoo.
"Maxie! Come!” I shout.
"Get over here, Maxie!” shout the kids.
They hear fear in my voice and know I need help. My mind is miles ahead of me as I imagine the kids being mauled to death in a swarm of teeth like that boy, their eyes peeled wide as they experience the horror at the heart of this world, their final terror cementing my failure as a mother. I imagine their funerals, their toy coffins lowered into the earth side by side, then our empty house and the guilt that will turn my chest to a pitcher of water, ice cubes clinking painfully against the glass. My arms and shoulders are shaking. The children feel this and their faces crumple like tissues.
“Mommy,” they cry.
“They'll go away soon,” I tell them.
They don't believe me. There are snapping maws at both windows to our left. Four more coyotes are standing on hindlegs, trying to break through the sliding-glass door. Maxie barks faster, louder.
“What if they don't go away?” the children ask. I wonder that, too. What if death has come for the four of us tonight and will not leave unfed? What if we are all reduced to thoughtless remains like that boy? Every parent ultimately fails to protect their kids from death, don’t they? But some fail faster than others.
I shut my eyes and hot tears gather on my lashes for that mother in Town Hall. I see clearly that I could’ve been her. I might be her soon. And I accept the possibility. There is nothing else to do with death. So, what now?
I imagine the loneliness that poor boy must have felt in his last agonizing moments, and I feel my own kids shuddering under my arms, faces buried in my sweater, and I know what I need to do.
But I’m still shaking. The dog is still barking, the coyotes still yipping wildly. Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others, I think randomly. I set the knife on the carpet and breathe in the scent of palm oil shampoo from their lunar scalps, the detergent smell of their pajamas like white grapes. I hold it in. Then I exhale my fears of failure and loss and death. I let them all go, just for now, while I’m needed. My shoulders relax, my arms steady.
“It's going to be okay,” I tell the kids and now they believe me. The oldest goes over and picks up Maxie, eight yellow coyote eyes tracking her, and brings the dog back to our huddle, stroking her spine and saying, “It’s going to be okay, Maxie.”
Then you come up from the basement, loading our lone rifle thin as a curtain rod. You turn it over in your hands like an artifact, fingers trembling, helpless.
Glass cracks, then shatters.
Maxie squirms out of Lilly’s arms and runs for the back door, barking.
The children scream, but I hear only my own breath. I pick up the knife, moonlight glinting off the blade. You meet my eye and I beam my calm into you, a telepathic force stilling the rattling molecules between us, slowing everything down, calming the room like a warm wind. When it hits you, you breathe it in deeply, then exhale your own fears, so when you peer down the iron sights at the beasts pouring through the shattered door, one already with Maxie in its jaws, your aim is true.
THE END
Author Bio: William Beeker is a fiction writer living in Boston. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, decomP, (mac)ro(mic), and The Arrival Magazine.