But I am curious.

Also, I don’t really want to get dressed before going out there and, if I go now, I can just pj it up. The sun is bright gold over the yard out back and before I know it I am stepping over the blades of grass, getting drops of dew all over my flip-flops. It’s not that easy to tell where the outside of the pantry would actually fall, but I’m trying to triangulate a little from the kitchen windows, to the living room windows, to just in between.

Ah, yes, here it is! The pantry doesn’t have windows so it must be here. Right here, clearly the other side of the pantry, facing out toward the field.

It really doesn’t look like there’s anything there so I turn around and happily, gladly, trot back to the kitchen steps. See? It was all just a funny little figment of my imagination. Probably too much Ancient Aliens burrowing its way into my subconscious. Mystery solved. All logic restored.

I am just about to ascend the stairs when I notice a little thing, out of the corner of my eye. Just a tiny thing, not really anything to write home about.

There, not on the outside wall of the house but underneath it, underneath the place where I was looking for scratches, is something uneven. Something bumpy in the dirt and the morning dew grass.

And now, as I get closer, I begin to make it out.

You see, there are little bits of crabgrass all over the side of the house, a pale green, some of it almost seeming gold in the morning light with the dew reflecting the sunlight. This blanket of crabgrass surrounds the house and wades off into the field where there are taller reeds and weeds and a few stray dandelions. But it’s a consistent covering, almost like a light green rug, around the outside of the house.

Except underneath the outside of the pantry—over just a bit from where I’d been looking. That seems to be the exception. And it’s not that the crabgrass had just stopped growing at that very spot. No . . .

It’s more that it’s been ripped out.

It’s more that the crabgrass that was there before was suddenly disturbed in a most cruel and unusual manner, leaving chunks of dirt and grass and roots to the side and all over the ground nearby.

And, if you look closer, it starts to appear that the reason why such damage was done to the sweet little crabgrass is that something was . . . clawing at it.

Something substantial.

Something much, much bigger than a cat.

It looks, almost, if you step away and look at it with an objective eye, as if some thing was, dare I say it, actually trying to dig its way down under the wall.

Under the wall and into the house.

And, whatever it was, it seems like it was pretty desperate, pretty adamant, about getting in. On a kind of mission.