The man’s children, when they were children, carried the cats like sacks of grain and dressed them in doll clothes. They watched the slick births of the kittens. Once, when they touched a litter too early, the mother ate the kittens in front of them—four soft bodies gulped whole.

Behind the man’s house was a pond. Early evenings, he cast a line into it. He hooked little fish with worms, then chopped them into bait for bigger fish, which he boned, gutted, beheaded, and fried.

He’d hunted the deer—made stew and jerky of them—but now he watched them from his armchair with a blanket on his knees. The deer forgot to be afraid and grazed brazenly on the lawn.

In the kitchen were his wife’s honed blades and copper cookware, her coddled crockery and polished cutlery—but the man, alone, used only an old cast-iron skillet, a flimsy tin fork, and a camping knife. His humble cookery tended toward scalded. While he ate, he tried to conjure his wife’s elegant preparations, but there was only the perpetual smell of burnt meat.

After his children left and before his wife found a large, hard lump in her thigh, the man rode the gelding daily, at dusk, to his property’s boundary and back. They’d round the pond and cut through the woods, past the collapsed house where a pastor’s family perished by fire in a prior century.

At the top of the ridge, the valley yawned wide. Willingly, they walked into it.

One night, coming back, the gelding grunted, then bolted. The man struggled to stay seated as the horse crashed through the brush. Then he saw the reason—four coyotes flanked them. Their mouths hung open. They looked at the man as they ran. They seemed to take some measure of him.

The man’s house appeared on the hilltop—every window lit. In the kitchen, his wife stood at the sink, washing. When the man looked down again, the coyotes were gone.

At dinner, his wife was excited. The man smiled but got up from his unfinished plate to stand at the window. When the witchy yipping of the pack began, he strained to see but could not get past his own face in the glass.

Before bed, she sat brushing her hair. Her husband rarely shared anything fearful—she was happy.

But later she woke to a wailing she recognized. The raw cry—it gripped her. It dragged her from bed, down the hall, out the door. She walked quickly toward it, her arms stretched straight ahead. Like the cramp of a lost leg, she felt the old burden of milk in her chest.

For a while she could be seen in her white nightgown, but then the dark—it swallowed her.

VICTORIAN WEDDING PORTRAIT

His intentions seemed very good, but often balked when harnessed. He could speak intelligently about a number of subjects, but most often he wandered the field alone. Nothing to be done: he would always be easier with men than with women. Recall the story of the poor girl-child playmate—reviled, ridiculed. Disfigured by a pot of ink.