Shortly after midnight Morgan was ripped from sleep by the damn dog howling. Groggy, he felt around the sweat-dampened sheets for Doreen, his heart catching at the emptiness before he remembered she was six months gone. He sat up, uncertain at first of which world he was in: dream or waking. Sometimes they braided together and he had to dig his nails into the calluses on his palms to draw the world back to him.
Nugs’s wails echoed across the soggy fields. He shoved a pillow over his head, but it did no good. Goddamn that dog. He flung the pillow to the buckled hardwood floor. “Shut it!”
He clambered downstairs. Evening beckoned through the windows. Beside the crab apple at the end of the garden he saw movement, but when the clouds opened, he realized in the grim light that he was mistaken. He rubbed his thumb over the rusted hook-and-eye latch at the screen door and crossed the yard, the dewy grass licking his bare feet.
Nugs was a demonic shadow near the barn, fur spiked along his neck, and his mouth lathered into vicious foam. The hair along Morgan’s arms pricked. His eyes slipped over the pasture, faint in the gloom, intent on catching a coyote shimmying through the yard or town kids sneaking off.
This had been happening for months, since Doreen had passed. Each time was the same: Nugs jolted him awake. He moved from window to yard, his eyes roaming the dark, but always he saw nothing. His leg slowed him, and whatever was in the shadows vanished before Morgan could catch it.
Abruptly, the howling strangled in Nugs’s throat like a wire snapping on a piano. The dog dropped his head to his paws with a whimper. The chilly silence sped up Morgan’s heart. He coaxed Nugs to the house and poured three fingers of whisky into a coffee mug, his twisted leg a dead appendage propped awkwardly on the floor. Before Nugs had jilted him awake, he was certain Doreen lay beside him, her breath warm on his neck. He swore he heard her flutelike whisper, her words like music just out of earshot.
Afterward, there was never any chance of sleep, but he had been a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps and was used to ticking the hours off long nights. He hunched at the kitchen table with his whisky and his dog while his thoughts retreated, sending him into the swelling heat of the desert that dropped cool at night. He heard again the eerie yipping of wild dogs, feral twitches against the jagged teeth of the mountains that sat at the desert’s edge. He saw again all that had gone wrong.
The night Doreen had died, the coroner made a point of saying she was gone as soon as the other pickup hit her. She felt nothing, he assured. No pain. Just out like that. He snapped his fingers, like Doreen dying was as simple as cutting off the lights. Morgan didn’t correct the guy, but he knew there had been shit-pissing fear as death barreled at her full on. He had witnessed enough near-death to know fear was a chokehold on the heart, had known it again and again at Al-Saqr. Knew it the day on patrol when he committed his unforgivable mistake. Maybe she had died on impact but that didn’t erase the terror stronger than pain. It didn’t ease the raw emptiness tearing at him now.
His bum leg began to itch where the graft lines hardened into white puckers, the hairless skin a translucent sheath of pink. The docs had told him to stay off his leg as much as possible, but they didn’t understand he had a farm to run, a livelihood to make. The farm income barely filled the hole of his reneged military pension. The crops didn’t stop growing because of a little nerve damage.
He tugged at his greasy red hair and lit a cigarette. At the screen door, there was a scratching. Morgan looked out, surprised by a tiny hiss from the dark. Nugs smacked his lips and growled. Crouched on the porch was a small black cat with a dab of white on its chin, its yellow eyes shimmering in the ripple of light as he opened the door.
He lured it in with a puddle of milk on a teacup saucer, part of the fancy wedding china they had never used. The cat paced back and forth before it crept forward to lap the milk with flickers of its pink tongue. Morgan stroked the kitten and it stretched toward him with easy trust, whiskers wet with milk. Its eyes shone with feeling at being saved, a dart of intelligent hunger in the yellow-flecked orbs.
The house moaned in the swelling heat of the following day. The breeze carried the sharp smell of manure, and the air plumped with the promise of unneeded rain. Morgan’s demons receded in the day, cooled and soothed by the farm routines, though he was sore and exhausted from his night without sleep. He ground three aspirin in his teeth and splashed a generous helping of whisky into his coffee.
The little cat slinked across the linoleum to rub its head against his blue jeans. He scooped it up with both hands, its body soft and delicate. He gently rolled it over to look at its sex, determined it was a she, and scratched her chin, the kitten wriggling in his hands to right herself.
“You little devil,” he said. She mewed softly. In a way, she reminded him of Doreen, who had been good with animals, loved them like children. Her heart had been larger than his. Two strays had showed up since her death and he’d shot them both.
Morgan tucked the kitten’s head under his chin and made his mental lists for the day. First the chickens, then the stackyard. He would help his farmhand, Charlie, with field spraying after lunch. Run the horses. Tinker with the lazy combine. Find money to fix the cultivator.
Outside, Nugs dozed with muzzle buried beneath paws. The cat leapt onto silent feet and vanished into the damp twilight of the barn where the swallows agitated the eaves. The air held the ripeness of animal dung and sweat. He patted the mare and gelding as he passed. Their wet eyes tracked him. The horses had always seemed to be suspicious of him, though he tried to walk and talk soft with them. Some creatures had no trust.
The farm rustled with sound: The ache of cicadas and hum of crickets. A blue jay’s shrill, its ostentatious display whipping past. The low baritone notes of the clothesline posts made of hollow pipe, sentinels guarding the house. Morgan added his own sound, the high notes of his whistling cracked, his throat cotton-dry. The day’s early heat gnawed at his bum leg. The nurses had told him he was lucky to be alive, though luck had a strange way of morphing into a curse.
At the haymow, his tune dropped silent when he saw them. Black slashes crisscrossed the beams, hard-scarred burns that glinted with menace in the slip of sun that pushed through the wall slats. The slashes darkened the wood, spreading like fungus. When he turned his glance, the burns rippled as if alive.
Anger exploded in his chest. It wasn’t right to sniff around a man’s land at night like a coward, no matter what you thought of him. He knew folks didn’t think much of a man with a limp, but this was his property. Here, he was the head motherfucker in charge.
Charlie’s pickup rumbled into the yard. He had hardly dismounted the cab before Morgan rushed at him spitting curses, his hands punching the air.
Together they stared at the marks that spilled down the drive bay.
“Those would be tall kids,” Charlie said. He was skinny with large hands and an impassive countenance. His words rolled with an easy, matter-of-fact cadence. “I couldn’t stretch on my tippy-toes enough to reach some of them.” He fanned his red ball cap for a makeshift breeze and bent to scratch Nugs’s ears. The dog exhaled, blubbering air through his teeth, and rolled onto his back for a belly rub that Charlie obliged.
Morgan touched the nearest scar, surprised when it pulsed warm like a living thing. He snapped his hand away. The heat throbbed along his palm and slid into his skin.
“You didn’t see nothing? No one?” Charlie asked. Morgan said nothing about Nugs’s nighttime racket. Charlie fit his ball cap on his head, ears protruding like burls. “May’s got Lestoil and ammonia that should clean things up. Can’t do much about the wood scarring though.” He looked off and coughed. “Also meant to say that May’s having a baby.” Charlie nudged the ground with the toe of his Red Wings.
The news settled between them heavier than a baby should weigh. He and Doreen had not been blessed with children, though a secret gratitude had nestled in him for he did not think this world was a welcoming place.
A crack of swallow’s wings startled them both as the bird dropped from the eaves and swooped out the barn door, a black gash against the blue sky.
“Well, that’s good news for you both, I hope,” Morgan said, his distraction blunting his words. His mind tipped heavily toward the vandals. “Congratulations.”
Charlie shoved his hands deep in his pockets. “It is, thank you. We’ve been trying.” He blushed, as if making love to his wife was an embarrassment. “May won’t be able to work much after a point, and I’ll need to be around more.” Charlie nodded in agreement with himself. “I’m not ungrateful to you. It’s just time to be on my own.”
So that was it then. Charlie was leaving him. Good, reliable Charlie, who hadn’t yet learned how life could hurt. He’d come up in Doreen’s English classes at the high school, and of anyone at her funeral, Charlie had said the kindest words. He thought to clap the boy on the back, maybe buy him a drink at Duke’s, but instead gestured to the surrounding fields. “The work’s not doing itself.” Charlie pulled his cap to his brow and made for the tractor.
Morgan loaded the wheelbarrow with a bag of chicken feed from the crib, and his uneven gait rocked the wheelbarrow wildly. He grit his teeth as a streak of pain pierced his hip joint and rode the circuits round his good leg. He was only forty-one, but his body belonged to an old man. But there was no changing being a cripple. It was his burden for what he’d done.
The black kitten leapt gracefully onto the feedbag, yellow eyes flickering. “Enjoying the free ride?” Morgan asked as he rolled the wheelbarrow to the chicken coop. The burns in the drive bay throbbed with energy. She held up a paw and licked her black-and-pink-speckled pads.
The chicken coop’s tarpaper roof pulsed with the sun’s heat. He ripped opened the feedbag and sliced a paper cut across his palm that sprang a dark rivulet of blood. He drew his palm to his mouth and sucked, the kitten watching him. Then he tossed the bits of seeds and crushed oyster shell into the enclosed yard. The hens emerged from their lazy morning to jostle one another with half-open wings. Their claws tore at the dirt, eager for the feed. Chickens were stupid animals destined for a beheading and the dinner plate. He held no sentiments toward them.
The feedbag slipped from his hands, a yellow-white pool spilling at his feet. He cursed and struggled to pick it up, his leg stiff. The hens flurried, gullets bobbing. His legs locked and he toppled headfirst into the birds.
The ground was littered with chicken shit, and the birds reeked of it. The feverish sun rolled sweat down his brow. The hen nearest adjusted her feathers with a cooing trill. He pushed up on his arms and teetered to his feet, only to have his bad leg buckle, sending him down again. The sinewy legs of the chickens fenced him in. He covered his face with his hands, afraid they would peck his eyes out. His goddamn leg. He tried a final time to stand before he gave up and yelled for Charlie.
Morgan sunk his head into his hands, the loud buzz behind his eyes fed by the grinding of Charlie’s rusty thirdhand Dodge, windows rolled down because the AC was busted. The wind roared between them enough to make conversation itself, though he turned to Charlie at a point and asked, “Does May ride in this?”
“Yup. We bring the dog,” Charlie pitched above the ruckus.
The round trip from the VA hospital in Beckley was four hours, plus two hours waiting to be seen by a doc who spent three minutes with him and hadn’t told him anything new. Like the folks who said Thank you for your service, they didn’t really see him. They saw only the trail of surgeries in his file and his OTH discharge, as if his twenty-three years as staff sergeant meant nothing. Jesus, wasn’t he only human like everyone else? His one fortune was having the VA medical facility access at all. It was Doreen’s doing, her hours on the phone pushing for reconsideration, her determination like flint even after the court-martial had called what he’d done indiscriminate. No pension. No disability pay. His words turned against him.
Morgan stared at the pulpy prescription note crushed in his palm. He had not wanted to go, but Charlie had shut him into the pickup before he realized, and now fiddled with the radio dial, his ball cap pushed high on his forehead for driving, his sunglasses black holes on his face. Morgan watched the fields and distant blue-shadowed mountains beyond, feeling the scorched wind and ceaseless sun.
They stopped in at Becker’s Grocery and Pharmacy, where he kept two accounts: one for his medicine and one for drinks to help keep the medicine down. The springs in the bench seat squeaked as Morgan leaned forward and hung from the cab, searching for solid ground. He steadied his weight against the truck, then thumped into the store, one good leg, one bad, like a monster.
The store’s narrow aisles pressed at him, and he had to turn sideways to make his way past the canned vegetables and boxes of food. He felt the stares. His bones knew the feeling of eyes pressed against his back.
At the pharmacy counter he rang the bell. Mrs. Becker, the old lady who ran the place with her son, tittered when she emerged.
“Bless you, Morgan. How’ve you been keeping?” He smoldered under her warm voice and pushed the doc paper at her. She looked at the notations, then at him. “Never a rest with farming, is there? This won’t take long. Have a seat while you’re waiting.”
“Think I’ll stand,” he said. “No need for charity.”
She shuffled along the narrow galley behind the pharmacy counter, talking at him like she would to her grandchildren. Her words mingled with the pleasant tones on the radio. “This rain’s no good. The church has been praying for you and the other farmers. Praying for a bountiful harvest. You’ve had your fill of bad luck, I know.” She whistled on, a forgotten teakettle, and tapped pills from one bottle to another.
The radio broadcast switched to the local affiliate. “This hour’s breaking news: Prosecutors announced a guilty verdict just minutes ago for Mitchell Cain Compton, convicted for the brutal slaying of a family in Sophia last March. Speaking from the Raleigh County Courthouse, the lead prosecutor on the case . . .”
The pill bottles clattered on the countertop. Mrs. Becker clasped her hands, her eyes on Morgan. “Oh, the Lord has seen he gets what he deserves. He heals all wounds.”
“Except mine.” Morgan gestured to his twisted, fucked-up leg.
Mrs. Becker’s mouth set firm. “He heals,” she repeated.
Morgan flared at her insistence. Nothing healed—not God nor Jesus nor the well-wishers who didn’t know what it was like, who couldn’t possibly have sat with his wounds. What was healing—what was justice—in war? Morgan knew he hadn’t intended to kill the kid, but intention wasn’t proof. It didn’t matter. He would never be whole again, and he couldn’t undo the past. He had escaped the dirty mines by signing up with Uncle Sam, but he had to fight. Pickaxe, gun. He had seen what was out there and it was shit, big and confusing and full of people who hated each other. And in the end, the recruit he’d murdered was in the ground same as those people Mitchell Cain Compton had murdered—same as Doreen—and there wasn’t anything more to it than that.
A car door slammed in the parking lot like a gunshot. He bucked at the sound and crashed backward into a shelf. Packages of Band-Aids and aspirin tumbled to the floor. He snatched the prescription bag from the counter and fled. At the exit, he passed a guy in an oil-stained flannel who looked like a marine he had known in Alpha Company. He had seen the marine’s head blown off by an IED, and for just a moment, he thought a ghost stood by, watching him.
That night, he was toweling off from his shower when he saw it glowing on the washbasin’s white skin: Doreen’s favorite piece of jewelry, a bronze barrette with a small, nested pearl. He had received it in a clear plastic bag from the coroner and had buried it in the storage closet under the stairs, locked and untouched since her death. He sucked breath through his teeth. His bum leg, though the docs said it was cauterized of feeling, began to burn.
He dragged his body to the closet at the house’s center, its heart. He rattled the doorknob impatiently, the lock an easy open with his thumbnail. The smell of decay clung to the walls. He covered his nose with his hand and felt in the dark for the chain switch to the bulb.
Dim light scraped at the corners of the cramped space. He spotted a tangle of tattered paper bulleted with black pellets of scat. The rotting smell shrouded him, clung to his skin. Varmint had got in the closet. They had dragged the barrette upstairs. He touched the walls and dragged his fingertips across the low ceiling, a hum niggling his stomach. Varmint, maybe. But something was amiss. It wasn’t visible. It was a feeling. Presentiment.
He unscrewed the light bulb from its socket and smashed it on the floor. He backed out of the closet and locked the door.
She wasn’t meant for it. He spoke to the dark that had eaten him since her death. I wasn’t ready for her to go. The barrette dug into his hand. Maybe Doreen was his punishment for killing the kid. But what did it mean that she was returning to him piece by piece? First as a presence that lingered from his dreams and now here, with the barrette. He held the metal thing to his chest and closed his eyes. She was trying to tell him something that he couldn’t quite hear.
The summer days grew longer, and his nights began to creep into his days, his thoughts more and more leaving the farmwork to retreat to the past, returning to things he preferred to forget.
He was a West Virginia boy, born and raised, and he had been proud when he enlisted instead of going into the mines. Despite his OTH, he was still proud to call himself a marine. Oorah. But he didn’t know anymore who he was. He had joined the marines to get out of West Virginia but had married Doreen eight years into his service, and she tied him right back to the land he had wanted to escape. He loved her, but now she was dead and he was stuck, plagued by memories he couldn’t shake.
May’s Lestoil and ammonia mix hadn’t been able to fix the strange burns in the barn wood, but he liked laying his hands upon them, soaking up their healing touch. They seemed to ease his body’s revolt: the headache that pulsed behind his eyes, the tremors that shook him in daily possession. The docs didn’t believe any of it was real. They said it was all in his head, as if that made it less true.
The welts were the worst. Two or three inches long and more each day, the boiled red streaks rose like burns across his skin, rendered it raw. He thought at first it was heat rash, familiar from his tours of duty in sandy, searing climates, but nothing improved them. Neither calamine nor milk worked, and the welts swelled and burst with yellow pus before they scarred over, as if the breathing heat was captive in his body and his boiled skin was merely the manifestation of a fire within.
Charlie sauntered down the drive bay. He would be gone in two weeks, May soon to give birth, and Morgan would be alone. Once Charlie left, there would be no one to help with the harvest and the tilling, the preparations for the long and dark winter months.
“You feeling all right?” Charlie asked.
Morgan raised his eyes, took in the dusty rafters painted with white streaks of bird shit. “Healthy as a horse.”
“I know it’s been rough lately.” Charlie stared at him, an uncomprehending slit to his eyes. “If you’re not feeling good—”
Morgan cut him off with a flap of his hand and gestured that there was work to be done. He watched Charlie amble down the drive bay with a bag of feed tossed over his shoulder.
The angled cut of the barn doors framed the sky in a rectangle of charcoal blue. The sun slid behind a gray stack of clouds that moved in from the west, and the humidity deepened. The sweat dripped across the new welts that had emerged that morning. He was alone. He had nothing.
As if to remind him, the kitten crept into his lap with a yowl and nudged under his hand, her body warm against his thigh. He petted her, calmed by the motion, his thoughts halted by her tiny face and black nose, her long whiskers that faded to white at the ends. Nugs sniffed nearby, nose to ground, trailing a scent only he knew.
Charlie yelled, his voice sagging in the humid air. Morgan huffed and gamboled down the drive bay, Charlie’s red ball cap a floating speck that grew as he limped closer. Clouds pummeled the sky. The shrill squawking of the chickens pierced the disquieting hush. Morgan grumbled at the farmhand as he approached, but Charlie only stared open-mouthed, pointing. Morgan turned to look.
Black spray paint marred the barn’s cheery red face. He stared at the uneven, jagged lines as they resolved into letters that scrawled a word: M U R D E R E R.
Charlie’s mouth moved but the world had dropped silent. Morgan had gone temporarily deaf in the days after the incident, the cathedral whispers of the hospital muted to an eerie nothing.
A loud crack of thunder brought the world rushing back. A downpour fell around them, the rain like pellets from a BB gun. The thirsty ground drank what it could and released the excess water into a gelatinous pool that ran in streaks over the dirt and collected in thick puddles in the low spots. The kitten sat in the doorway of the barn, its eyes shining with each flash of lightning.
Charlie grabbed his elbow and shouted his name. The black letters screamed at Morgan, each letter stroke a puncture to his core.
The young recruit was about Charlie’s age, green and a little slow. Morgan had heard of marines who choked, marines who couldn’t hack it, whose minds gave out, who retreated into cowardice and fear. He had done none of that. Either you were a marine or you were a weak little pussy, and what he had done was only an accident. An accident.
He awoke in the barn uncertain how he had gotten there. Was he dreaming? The breezeless air hung like a woolen coat over his body, but the hard-packed dirt of the barn was cool against his feet. He pulled his hands over his face, his palms wet with sweat. Between the cracks of his fingers, he saw the burns glisten wetly in the gloom.
His hands reeked with the sharp sting of gas, and his T-shirt was soaked through with sweat. He was awake; he had been sleepwalking. He stumbled through the dark, kicking a jug of diesel fuel and upturning it. He cursed. Charlie must have left the jug in the barn.
Morgan paused at the sawdust bucket to listen to the insects chatter. The hens were quiet in their roost. He dug the scoop into the bucket, stopping when his shovel hit an object. He dug out a canister of black spray paint and rolled it between his hands, listened to the clack of the metal ball inside its body.
The motherfucker who had defaced his barn had the gall to leave the empty can behind, as if they didn’t care whether he found it. The fucking motherfucker. He heaved it into the dark and heard the ricocheting echo as it hit something in the distance, metal on metal.
He stalked the perimeter of the yard, Nugs trotting alongside. The stars were too weak to hold off the night’s emptiness, and the tractors were jagged ghosts against the deep blue-black of the sky. The cat swayed inside its inky coat and skittered across the gravel.
He had lost his family young: mother to cancer, father to a mine collapse. With no one to take him in, he had lived in a boys’ home, a rough and violent place that taught him how to fight. He perfected his skills in the marines. He would show whoever was behind this. He would hunt the bastards down.
The clock had run dead, its hands stopped in the sliver of time before dawn. His watch had run out, too. His hand fell across the sheets, the hard metal of a rifle nestled beside him. He couldn’t recall putting it there. He opened the chamber and saw it was loaded.
He stumbled into the bright daylight and vomited into the azalea bushes. The yard smelled like a rank, festering sore. He careened toward the western field and watched Charlie traveling the rows. The tractor swung around in the headrow, returning in his direction, and puttered to a stop few yards away. Charlie jumped down, ball cap in hand.
“Things okay, Morgan?” Charlie scratched his arm, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses. “It’s nearly noon and the first I seen of you all day.”
Morgan felt the world shift and tilt, and the bitter, dead taste on his tongue soured his words into silence. Charlie had no right to pry.
Charlie slid off his sunglasses and stared at him. His right eye was a bloody red orb. A monster’s eye, as if Charlie wasn’t fully human.
“Busted vein,” Charlie explained at Morgan’s stare. “Should clear up in a week or so.” Charlie reached for his shoulder but Morgan jerked away, his balance tipping.
Charlie replaced the sunglasses, and Morgan saw his distorted reflection in the black lenses, his face stretched and bent to odd proportions: his gaping mouth and taffy skin pulled longways, his nostrils flared into large disks, and his eyes shrunken to pinpoints. He patted Nugs, who stood guard at his side, and said, “Things is good, things is bad. That’s how life goes.”
Charlie nodded. “Life goes all kinds of ways we can’t predict.” He returned to the field to spray the wheat with what little fertilizer was left.
Morgan dragged a bucket of bleach water to the barn and scrubbed at the heinous word, but the paint had been absorbed into the wood. No amount of elbow grease would fix it. He kicked the bucket and the water ran its fingers across the dirt. The ground stained with a patch soon sucked dry by the sun. The air held no memory of yesterday’s sudden thunderstorm. Morgan closed his eyes and leaned against the barn wall. He couldn’t think straight, could hardly think at all.
He began to walk. The movement felt good and soothed the black pain that was like tar. He walked to the farthest edge of the property, his leg pulsing with its own heartbeat. He discovered a half-full flask in his pocket and pushed on. When he reached the line fence he paused, putting his hand for support on the crooked yew tree bent into the row, then crossed into the next field, which belonged to Charlie and May. The muddy ground slopped around his boots, the suck of the mud a strange balm. Morgan made it to the copse of trees at the field’s far end before he collapsed.
In war, you were always lucky at the end of the day to be alive. Threats loomed everywhere, though you acclimated to the constant danger and settled into the long moments of boredom, knowing they would soon be sliced open by the unexpected. What he had done was one moment in thousands and the recruit hadn’t moved fast enough.
The secured road. The convoy. The limping beggar who leaned into his crutch as he crossed and slowed them just enough to fuck their shit up. The company scattered at the enemy fire and the onslaught of explosives, half on one side of the road and half on the other. They fired back at the motherfuckers responsible. Morgan had reached into his training and let his reflexes take command. The bullets ate the air before him. He didn’t hear the PFCs yelling or see their arms waving as he pumped round after round, a grin smearing his face at the satisfying kick of dust curtained between him and the enemy. The not-enemy. The young recruit. And the explosion. He woke with an IV in his arm, his body bound in a sheet, and no feeling in his left leg. His fate sealed.
The sun dipped low. Charlie picked his way across the field and Nugs trailed behind, nose to the ground. Morgan’s leg had the tremors and his eyes stung like they were filled with sand. He hoped the boy wouldn’t see.
Charlie rocked on his feet, his boots smeared with field mud. He lifted his eyes toward the horizon and asked, “You going hunting?”
Morgan coughed. The rifle lay in the grass, though he didn’t remember carrying it.
“Protecting the farm. The varmint come out at night,” he said. He snapped his fingers for Nugs, but the dog circled a dark smudge nearby and didn’t listen. Two crows flew low overhead, their wings casting grotesque shadows. Nugs began to paw the quackgrass furiously.
“What’s that damn dog got into?” Morgan muttered, struggling to stand. His joints needed greasing, but he’d emptied his flask hours ago. Charlie offered help, but Morgan waved him away.
As they drew close, he recognized the body of the black kitten, curled and bloodied, its head severed from the body.
“Did you do this, you stupid mutt?” He thwacked Nugs’s snout with the butt of his rifle. The dog snapped his teeth.
Charlie stepped forward, his eyes hard. “You know Nugs isn’t the type, Morgan.” He bent to examine the kitten’s body, which had begun to turn in the heat. Maggots crawled through the eye sockets and along the raw stem of its neck. “A coyote wouldn’t leave it out in the open like this.”
“Something else then,” Morgan said.
“Something else,” Charlie repeated.
He asked for help burying it. Charlie looked surprised but fetched a shovel from the barn. They interred it in the fencerow, the hole an easy dig in the wet ground.
Dusk crept through the front door and filled Morgan’s chest with dread. The house inhaled, sucking in the dark things that stretched their limbs at twilight. He locked the door, ridiculous since nobody in the county—even after the Mitchell Cain Compton murders—kept a locked door. He wrapped his hand around Doreen’s barrette for luck.
Morgan barricaded the bedroom door with a dresser still packed with her clothes. He leaned her tall, oak-framed mirror against it. If someone tried to get in, he would know.
He propped his body on a stack of pillows. Nugs curled on the floor. Morgan searched the sheets for the lightness of her scent, but her pillow smelled only of his sweat. The rifle shivered on the pillow beside him. Metal wife. Makeshift wife. He pulled the blanket up and draped a hand across his heart with a heaving sigh, his body overtaken by the exhaustion that crouched in his bones since her death.
In the dream, the recruit stepped through the shroud to greet him. He looked whole, fixed. Morgan started to apologize, but the recruit lifted a hand and shook his head no. He tried a second time, but again the recruit stopped him, then shrugged, a slow grin spreading across his face, his lips pulling back in a grimace, his teeth bloodied and broken. He turned to walk away, and the back of his head was a terrifying black hole.
He was startled awake by the clatter of the empty bottle on the wood floor. The TV glowed blue and flickered strange shadows on the bedroom walls.
The bedroom door was ajar. The dresser had been shoved aside and the mirror lay shattered on the floor. His body stilled; his senses thickened. Goosebumps puckered his arms.
He heard the unmistakable sound of small noises creeping from downstairs. He gripped the rifle, its lightness a toy after the GPMG he had used in Iraq. He felt something draw its attention to him. Outside, the bright half-orb moon emerged from the clouds, its pure light splitting around the barn’s peak. He heard the popping crackle of fire. Smoke crawled through the open bedroom door.
Nugs growled a low warning from the bedroom floor. Morgan tensed. The dog was all he had left. Then, Nugs howled and exploded past, his yips shredding the dark.
Morgan jumped from the bed with a scream, rearing like an unbroken stallion. His left foot quaked as he slid over the broken mirror and rushed to the landing. Smoke hung thickly in the air. The shadows shifted and morphed, the night blurring. Whatever it was, if it hurt Nugs, he would blow its head off. He fired two warning shots into the dark.
He thumped toward the sound of heavy gasping in the living room, his hands itching to pull the trigger again. He wanted to kill the thing that haunted him, but the shadows were disorienting and flickers of movement alighted in every direction. Fire licked at the kitchen door, pushing from the porch through the screen door, calling him.
Morgan coughed from the smoke and gripped the rifle. The metal burned in his fingers. Nugs was hidden and silent, but a whispery laughter swelled to fill the house and danced into the yard. It pinged off the aluminum sides of the silos and echoed back to him with a preternatural din that pricked Morgan’s skin and ate into his heart.
His dog. He had to protect his dog. Doreen had chosen Nugs at the shelter when he was just a tiny runt. She’d held him in her lap the entire ride home, her fingers gentle against his soft head while the pickup rolled down the potholed highway.
The memory ignited in his brain as she floated in front of him and then receded, gone, replaced by the laughing recruit who reached for him, alive and looming in the burning orange shadows. Morgan’s throat spilled with his sobs. The rifle’s barrel rested against his chin. The snapping and hissing of the fire burrowed into his ears like tiny critters as a tunnel of heat and smoke rose, and the swirling flames surrounded him with a delighted whoosh.
The sun reflected brightly off the silos and lit the yard in a golden blaze. Charlie parked his Dodge behind the barn and jumped out. He whistled for Nugs. The hens and horses were quiet. He whistled again, both for the dog and for the comfort of the sound.
Nugs was hunched and shivering in the barn, his eyes glassy. He had been shot twice and had licked the wounds on his hind leg clean of blood. He limped toward Charlie with a heavy wheeze. Charlie scooped the trembling animal into his arms and laid him on the floor of his truck, his heart twisted at the thought of a person shooting a dog. The vet was thirty miles away, and Nugs had begun to shiver. He passed back through the barn toward the house to tell Morgan the bad news.
Charlie gasped when he saw it. The house’s charred limbs rose toward the blue sky. The broken windows gleamed jagged in the sun, a menacing face that beckoned him closer. Fire had consumed the house’s insides. The roof had collapsed over the kitchen, and the smell of singed wood clung to the breeze.
He looked through a blown-out front window that lay smashed and glistening in the grass, until he saw the fire-blackened sole of a boot. The singed butt of a rifle. He traced the barrel. The metal was twisted and clasped by what looked like cylinders of soot. He moved his eyes up, past the charred black skin. Up, up to the remains of a jawbone that opened wide. To the yawning nothing beyond. 
Lacey N. Dunham is a writer and editor whose fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Witness, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Midwestern Gothic, and Wigwag, among others. A first-generation college graduate originally from the Midwest, she now lives in Washington, DC.
