. . .

The fire was out, and I felt embarrassed for having remembered such a story. I stood and brushed the back of my jeans off and stretched. I grabbed the beer I’d chugged and took a sip of an eyedropper’s worth of booze from the bottom and then chucked the can into the woods. After stepping on the fire and making sure it was out, I started for the boiler room, even though I was thinking about the couch.

It was dark, but I found the path and followed it. Every few feet, I tripped over large roots or jutting rocks. The path forked, and I went to take the left so I’d come up behind home, but I heard footsteps down the other way, heard branches snapping and the sound of rummaging. I went right.

It was way darker down that path, as if all the trees were pressed too close and the bare stripped branches too tightly tangled together so as not to permit any light, even from the moon, which was up above behind the clouds that periodically broke away to light the place in a blue hue. I walked slow on the bumpy dark path toward what sounded like someone cursing.

He was nothing more than a standing shadow, swinging a stick back and forth in the air at a tree.

“Meekew?” I said.

The shadow jumped and dropped the stick. He bent down and picked it up.

“No, you fucking idiot,” Fellis said. “Get a stick and help me.”

I asked what for, but he didn’t answer me. I kicked around the ground for a stick. Three times I thought I found a good one, but they were each short and wet and brittle.

“There’s no good sticks,” I said.

“Christ,” Fellis said. “Use mine.”

He handed it to me, got close to me, and in the dark I could not see his face but something else.

“Fellis,” I said. “I’m sorry about your—”

“Don’t worry about it, Dee,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Just swing that stick.”

“Swing it at what?” I said.

“Look up in the tree.”

I looked.

“You looking?”

“Yeah, I’m looking.”

“What do you see?”

I looked hard. The moon came out and shone but not enough to see anything but blurs of branches. “Nothing,” I said.

Fellis rustled around the ground for a stick. Finally, he found a long one—at least fifteen feet—and when he turned holding it I had to back up out of the way.

“Watch this,” he said. He hoisted the stick above him and pointed it right up in the tree. He sent it flying, and it crashed through the branches until gravity pulled it back down. Debris fell over us, and the stick whacked the back of my neck.

We looked up, and I finally saw the prickly animal sitting on the highest branch. It looked down at us, terrified.

“Did I hit it?” Fellis said.

I told him no, that it was there staring at us.