Joseph watched the moonlight in the yard. The distant city emitted the palest glow. Outside, shadows were moving at the edge of the yard. At first Joseph thought nothing of them. The darkness had a way of playing tricks sometimes. He had been spooked many times in the woods by piles of leaves and half-hidden stumps, thinking they were dead bodies or sleeping hobos. Even when the shadows moved again, he assumed it was just the trees. But then dark shapes emerged from the brush and took on human forms. Ronnie, Tony, Michael, carrying paper bags.

The old man coughed, tapping deep pockets in his lungs, a hissing, rattling susurration appended to each hack.

Joseph gazed out the window as the boys drew close to the house and pulled rolls of toilet paper from their bags. Silently they began to hurl the rolls into the air. Long white strands unspooled in the darkness, crossing paths, falling to earth like shooting stars. The ribbons sputtered as they rose, catching in the branches of the plum tree in the garden, coating the bushes and plants along the side wall.

Joseph heard the soft flumph of the rolls striking the shingles and tumbling down the opposite incline. When the boys depleted their loads, they opened backpacks to reveal more and cranked their fresh rolls high into the gloom. Then, as quickly as they had materialized, they were gone, leaving Joseph at the sill.

“Just a little longer now,” the old man said, rubbing his chest. “And you know what happens then? You know what happens when the world is done?”

Joseph stared at the maple tree’s mummified trunk and made no reply. His breath clouded the window.

“The wind,” the old man said. “The world ends, and we become wind. I thought I’d told you that before, Joseph. You have to listen.”

The Coast

THE COAST

MY WIFE, JUDY, loved the coast. When we first met, back in our twenties, we went out there all the time. She was a para legal then, and I worked at a bookstore, and we’d take off in the late afternoon so we could make it to Oswald Park by sunset, and end the day roasting hot dogs and playing guitar under the pulsing stars. In the winter we prowled from Astoria all the way down to Coos Bay looking for cheap hotel rooms, and took midnight walks alongside the frigid surf in search of glass buoys and whatever else the current might deliver. We spotted our share of deer, eagles, whales, and burnt-out ceramicists on those trips. One night in Depoe Bay we befriended a teenager and his pet rat, and saw a barn owl swoop down in the moonlight and pluck the animal right off the kid’s shoulder.