I felt sorry for the coyotes. My neighbours hated them, because they dragged dogs and cats out of backyards and ate them. But that was just their nature. I had always felt a certain kinship with them; mangy interlopers in middle-class suburbia. My neighbours somehow forgot that the wilderness was just a block away. At the end of our street, the city gave way to badlands. The bottom of an ancient, inland sea where a vertical mile’s worth of sea creatures settled atop one another over millions of years, condensed, and liquefied into crude—which explained some of the three-car garages and grotesque McMansions in neighbouring subdivisions. If you looked at our city at night, from space, our suburb was like a little finger of light, poking out into the dark. We were at the far northern edge of the sprawl; of civilization. And the edge wasn’t sharp. In fact, it seemed to be getting blurrier. Sometimes the wild crept in and overturned garbage cans after sunset, or shat on your front step. Other times it was the neighbourhood boys going feral. Howling and smashing beer bottles against garage doors or firing Roman candles down the street.

Claire?

I startled and turned. Paul emerged from the shadows holding a golf club. What the hell is going on? he asked. I was standing in the middle of the street, barefoot and in my nightdress. I couldn’t imagine any neighbours were up at this hour, but we would’ve been quite the sight—me standing there below the streetlight, and my husband advancing towards me with a long iron.

Bear, we’ve been tearing the house apart looking for you.

Ashley’s up too?

Yeah, we’ve been beside ourselves. The power’s out.

I apologized and rubbed my face. I hadn’t meant to turn this into some big production. It was nothing, really, just a barely audible noise, and now all of us were awake at four in the morning, and Paul was holding a golf club, a golf club? I finally registered this and started laughing.

I woke up and couldn’t turn on the lights, he said, drawing closer. I couldn’t find you anywhere. I thought someone was in the house. The front door was open, the furniture was all—It’s not funny, why are you laughing?

So you thought you’d grab—

It was what was at hand!