Laura, the protagonist in Olivia Crandall’s debut short story, “Wild Boys,” has the perfect life: great husband, cute baby, a job she likes. But things unravel, beginning with her encounter with a coyote that’s quickly upstaged by a disturbing viral video of her ex-boyfriend. The story begs the question: What are we willing to give up to get the life we want?
The first time Laura saw a coyote in her front yard, she almost dropped Louie on his head. She was walking down the steep steps from the bungalow she and her husband had moved into before the baby was born the year prior. She was running late to her first day back at work. Louie’s thick legs smacked against her hip like a baker’s hand against a doughy slab, the skin underneath her organic linen pants numbed to this daily beating.
It was thirty-seven steps from the bungalow to the street where she parked the Subaru. She didn’t see the coyote—who was standing there all this is my yard, you gentrifier—until step twenty-one.
The coyote didn’t move when they made eye contact. Laura muttered, “Shoo,” her voice cracking. She spat out, “Get.” Then louder, shouted, “GOOO.” She glanced at Louie, wishing she had those headphones hipster babies wear at music festivals, but decided to trade an assault on his tiny ear drums for the safety of his tiny body. She screeched, “PLEASE LEAVE,” as sweat pooled deeper into the merino wool shrouding her lower back. The coyote’s ears flattened, and it turned to go.
Laura’s back sweat wasn’t only from the coyote, nor was it the September heatwave enveloping Los Angeles. The sweat began early that morning, when Laura saw the video. It came in via DM from an old best friend she hadn’t spoken to in a decade.
Oh my GOSH?! the friend wrote.
Laura had watched every second and immediately forgot about responding. She didn’t roll her eyes as she usually would have at the small-town Ohio use of gosh. Seeing Dave, Laura’s high school sweetheart, on film wearing someone’s (or something’s?) skin on his face while screaming her full maiden name in a Taco Bell Cantina—that was worth taking the Lord’s name in vain. Arguably it deserved a hearty fuck.
Laura sunk into a well of panic as she watched the short video over and over. She obsessed over the shaky camera footage, how it was uncannily crisp, giving it a scripted feel, like a professional wrestling pre-match skit. The way Dave grabbed the poor Taco Bell Cantina cashier by the collar and sputtered directly into the teenage boy’s mouth —wordless yelling at first, then a jumbled cascade of howls: “…LAURA LEIGH BROWN…I KILLED YOU—YOU UPPITY BITCH…WEAR YO FACE…ON MY FACE…FOREVER.”
The footage cut as tears began prickling beyond the mysterious skin mask around Dave’s eyes. Laura kept playing it back, trying to parse what he was blubbering about. She noticed other details too: How the fluorescent lights and odd angle rendered Dave’s body larger than life. How whoever filmed the video could be heard snickering to themselves, at one point whispering, “Shit should we call the cops?” to an off-camera bystander. Laura couldn’t stop fixating on the hands, so unmistakably Dave’s—sturdy and tanned, the tip of his right forefinger missing just as it was the first time he reached down her pants.
Laura didn’t want to think about past-Dave, though. So she googled fake skin mask and PCP side effects and why would someone confess to a murder they didn’t commit before proceeding to deal with a two-factor authorization nightmare in removing her maiden name from its final resting place. The top of her LinkedIn profile could cheerfully shout “(nee: Brown)” no longer.
The coyote skittered down the block toward the neighbors, the ones with the pale blue house. They had a three-year-old girl who Thomas had called “baby Shrek” after they introduced themselves at the corner coffee shop. Not to the little girl’s face, but when Laura and Thomas were back home on the couch, Louie tucked neatly into his bassinet. It was a tiny flash of the before, when Laura and Thomas spent most of their free time alternating between languid hours in bed and shit-talking people who crossed their mutual path. They were experts at creating controllable bursts of drama that gave their conversations the good kind of friction. She wished the video was happening to one of the women she and Thomas were both loose acquaintances with. It was the type of gossip they’d have relished tucking into together, back when the lives they were leading—fully separate in hindsight—were still woven together in a picturesque braid.
She often missed the quaint and luxurious messiness of life before Louie. Because she chose Thomas, Laura had a beautiful life. As a girl, she dreamed of escaping her alcohol-soaked town and moving to a big city like Columbus, Ohio, where she’d meet a man who, if she were lucky, would drink sensibly or not at all. She didn’t even consider owning a home or having equitable domestic labor, yet Thomas had insisted these and so many other grown-up activities were important to him when they started dating in their late twenties. So they’d done these activities. They’d purchased the domestic tasks card game and they’d bought the house (or rather, Thomas’s family bought the house). She had nothing tangible to complain about, no blatant injustice to rectify.
Thomas had never once yelled at Laura. The mere idea of him hitting her was laughable. But she swore he silently judged her when he’d come home from the architecture studio and find smashed banana leftover from breakfast staining the vintage rug he’d sourced from France. He’d rub the debris between his fingers and raise one—just one, always just one—of his tawny eyebrows. Not pointedly at Laura, but he rose that eyebrow nonetheless. He’d never say it, but Laura was convinced by these tiny gestures. That he really meant, I could do this better.
He could not, but that was beside the point.
In these moments, she would imagine the other universe where she lived in a trailer in Kentucky and did not know what kombucha was. She would bury her exhaustion and Louie’s tiny daily disasters and her occasional wish to run for the San Gabriel Mountains and never return. It was best for all involved. She was an adult—a different one than she ever thought she’d become—an adult who carried on with grace.
Laura’s phone chirped again as she folded Louie into his car seat. Surely a DM from another person she hadn’t spoken to in years. The video replayed on loop behind her eyes.
Where would one even obtain such realistic looking skin? In LA, at a prop house or from a makeup artist with an aptitude for latex, most likely. But in central Florida? Prosthetics were expensive and Dave was destined to be broke. It made no sense. Dave’s howls echoed, pulling her body back into that first rush of adrenaline as the video played on her phone’s tiny screen.
“LAURA LEIGH BROWN!”
He’d always hopped over the A in Laura, smashing LaurLeigh down into a tight mass, her name an empty can of Busch Light, folksiness still dripping from its crushed lip. His hollering in the video was no different.
Louie fussed in his car seat, clawing his fingers against the straps. She needed to trim his nails again. Maybe after bath time tonight.
“That’s so good, my love!” she cooed, kissing his silky forehead. “We’re gonna go see Miss Katie! You like her so much! Mommy will pick you up after she goes to work! You’re gonna have so much fun!”
She gingerly navigated the car down the winding hills toward the Pasadena day care. Thomas was still disgruntled that she’d missed the signup window for the Silver Lake pre-Montessori program, but Thomas was not the one dealing with the side effects of a brand-new SSRI on registration day. In fact, it wasn’t until six weeks after the deadline that the thought to get Louie on the list even occurred to Thomas, the same way Thomas never considered what it would be like to go back to work. Men like Thomas never go back anywhere. Only forward.
There was no further sign of the coyote, although enough of them lived nearby that there were regular posts in the neighborhood group about the importance of vigilance for small dogs and young children. She was fairly confident she could fight off a wild dog, even one more aggressive than the one she’d encountered that morning. Once, she took a kickboxing class with a group of coworkers. That it was mostly jumping rope and that she never returned because the parking was a nightmare—these things were irrelevant. Mothers possessed wells of special strength.
Louie was quiet in the backseat, his mouth full of Sunnie, a matted blanket attached to an even more matted stuffed sun.
Her phone chirped again. This time she saw the text preview from where the phone was securely perched in its dashboard holder.
Another DM from an old acquaintance. Someone named Britt, who could either be from high school travel volleyball or from her freshman year dorm. It was a link to a video called “WEAR YO FACE ON MY FACE (rap remix by Lil’—” The rest was cut off in the message preview. Laura didn’t need to see any more. Her screenings of the original video were plenty. She’d worked adjacent to media long enough to know how virality worked. She could even imagine the exact bit of Dave’s screeching that this moderately famous rapper had sampled. Her stomach turned molten.
She glanced back at Louie, as if he may have caught her distracted driving. It was only a matter of time before her indiscretions became tattle fodder, or worse—grotesque calluses on his eventual masculinity. The baby books never included a chapter on how to keep these daily nicks from turning into infected wounds that’d fester on your child’s personality.
Nature versus nurture was a debate she and Thomas used to have while watching reality television together. They’d laugh at the bimbos and himbos, joking about their open vats of mommy and daddy issues, how if only their parents taught them to read, they’d be less desperately insecure. Laura was now convinced it took far less effort to poison your child. Just last week, she’d given Louie mashed potatoes without letting them properly cool, and as he scalded his tiny tongue, she imagined him all grown up, a villain on Love Island. There’d be no one to blame but herself as he sucked and fucked his way toward a lifetime of death threat direct messages, if such a thing still existed in twenty years. The direct messages, obviously. Death threats and public humiliation seemed pretty eternal.
* * *
Laura’s office was as she’d left it. She’d expected the small glass room to be filled with mustiness, her look, I’m fun! tchotchkes to be sprinkled with fine remnants of skin and sadness and whatever else dust is made of. She had two minutes to chug a break room coffee and read the emails marked HOT! before her team’s morning stand-up meeting.
Instead of doing either of those things, she opened her phone. She swatted away notification after notification and typed her full legal name, not the current one, but the one her parents gave her, into the internet.
It was never clear whether googling yourself was the same experience as someone else googling you. The internet was always, and increasingly, a mirror straight into the most depraved bits of whoever was summoning it. Her shoulders cinched tight as she filtered by News.
Florida Man Wears Mask Allegedly Made of Ex’s Face
Florida Man Has Hannibal Lecter Meltdown at Taco Bell Cantina
Florida Man Officially The Most Florida Man to Ever Exist
“He’s not even a real Florida Man,” Laura grumbled under her breath. “Southern Ohio is basically Kentucky, but it’s no Florida.”
Yet the internet does not care about the backstory or provenance of its characters. If a man who lives in or is visiting Florida does something debauched, he is but another Florida Man.
Without thinking, she was scrubbing through the video again. She pinched the screen to zoom in on Dave, as if a closer look of the pixelated footage would reveal signs of psychosis-inducing drug use. Really any explanation for how this relatively average boy from her youth might have become such a barrel-bodied brute. In high school he had dabbled in cocaine, sure. But so did Laura, and she became a grown woman with a 401(k) and zero murder investigations to her name. There had to be some other twist of fate between when she last saw him junior year of college and now.
She zoomed in again on his filthy hands, further to that missing fingertip. She remembered how he drunkenly stroked it down her face one time in his parent’s basement and told her theirs was the only love in the universe that was real and raw and true. It was more than fifteen years ago and she was browned out at the time. But witnessing Dave acting like a maniac on her phone while he wore those same high school basketball shorts—from the way her intestines churned, she knew she said it back.
She wished she could say she hadn’t thought of Dave since they’d dated, first in high school, then at their state college, before finally fizzling out once Laura realized she could use a relationship for desires beyond sex and love. She used to be embarrassed by how long it took her to grasp this concept most women seemed to be born knowing. Now, she considered it proof of inherent virtue she otherwise wasn’t sure she possessed.
All that to say, she had thought of Dave. Many times. She regularly stopped just shy of doing an internet deep dive. Not because she thought it inappropriate, but because it would ruin one of the few untarnished pieces of masturbation fodder she had left—her favorite was that time they went camping in Hocking Hills. The trail grit on her bare back. The rain on the tent. The finger in her ass (not the short one, he’d used his other hand). If she discovered he was an ICE agent, or even a normal Southern Ohio man who’d developed a beer gut right on schedule, she’d have to start watching porn for those rare times she let herself go over the edge. It sounded like more trouble than it was worth.
Instead, she was suddenly face-to-face with his present-day body, bulging out of a sweat-stained T-shirt plastered with the logo of an autobody repair shop. She could feel the way his stubble would bristle against her fingers if she were to reach underneath the bologna. Was it in fact deli meat? It could be pig or cow skin. He had been in 4H, after all.
Natalie knocked on the windowed wall; a pink donut box was perched on her laptop. Laura held up a pointer finger and pasted on the biggest grin she could muster.
Swirling around in her office chair, she pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath. She felt like a stock photograph of “stressed woman,” but what else was she to do? At least there wasn’t a photo of her in any of the articles she’d thus far skimmed. Dave was still the main event.
Her phone dinged. The day care: Hi mama! Louie had a blowout. He seems totally great, but a heads up that he’s wearing a pair of Sadie’s bottoms since there wasn’t an extra set in his bag. <3
Of course she forgot. She crafted a reply, Thanks for letting me know! So sorry about that!! An excuse should have come next, but her brain was a wall of mist. And her entire team was now outside, staring at her like she was a goldfish in a Ziploc baggie, fresh off the prize wall at the county fair. It’s not that she wanted to go home, that a change in location would remedy anything. She wasn’t like Thomas, couldn’t leap between work and home like a cartoon gazelle, the kind voiced in a children’s movie by a raunchy male comedian. Everything slid off Thomas’s back. Laura’s felt as if it were covered in crunchy peanut butter.
* * *
The junior copywriter, Mark, would not stop talking. Laura would have never hired this overgrown child, but she was not there to make the decision, and now she was doomed to deal with its ramifications.
“Bro, what?” he said, pointing at an art director’s mock-up. “What’s this corny-ass nonsense? Their followers don’t give a shit about mutual aid.” His laugh was like a date rape drug in audio form. Laura blamed her exhaustion, which was compounding by the minute, for having such vulgar thoughts.
“What do you think we should pitch, then, Mark? Let’s get some more actionable ideas. Nothing is too stupid or bad. Floor is open.” Laura nodded around the table, praying Natalie or one of the others would jump in with anything better. It was organic social content for their hard seltzer brand account. The goal was not artistic merit. It was to slurp from the same teat as a hyper-specific and audience-relevant slice of the internet before that teat ran dry, then repackage the milk to help their client create shareholder value. And to do it over and over again.
One of the art directors piped up. Laura could never remember if his name was Aiden or Austin. “Have you guys seen that Florida Man thing? We should riff on that.”
Laura froze, mentally flipping through the arsenal of panic-reducing techniques her doula taught her. She’d learned in the early days of creative directing to always let her reports play out their own bad ideas. If she got involved or pushed back too soon, they’d fight harder to convince her. And she could not have that now. She parted her lips a fraction of a millimeter to do her breathing exercises undetected.
“Like it’ll get you drunk enough to feel like you’re wearing your ex’s face—but without all the riff raff,” Mark said. “All killer! No fill—or wait, no killer problems?” The other boys hooted.
“Wait, what?” squealed another new hire, a designer with a pink buzz cut named Dylan. “This nonsense clearly hasn’t made it to my internet yet.”
Laura prayed it would never make it to Thomas’s internet either. Her husband’s internet was full of cantilever bridges and Marxist criticism of the Constitution. On a rare occasion, his internet would glom onto a scandal. Usually, it would be about artists or people with the title Creative Director whom Laura had never heard of, as they worked in fashion or interior design, not anything so crass as social media advertising for mass-market booze. Not a soul on Thomas’s internet was wearing human skin—real or prosthetic—on their faces while having a meltdown at a fast-food establishment.
“Here, I got you,” Natalie giggled, proud to be in the know, even if only for her algorithmic luck. She projected the video onto the conference room’s seventy-five-inch monitor. “We could do like… Cash out without the crash out,” she pitched over her phone’s audio of Dave’s tinny yelling. They still hadn’t fixed the room’s sound system during her leave. Incompetence could occasionally be a blessing.
“Nat, yes!” Mark fist-bumped her. “I still can’t believe that guy! What a fucking legend. Taco Bell Cantina? He defo killed her, had to.”
“What was the name he screamed again? The ex?” Natalie moved to the white board to start notetaking for the group. “We could do something with that? Turn it into a seltzer flavor pun?”
Mark stood up from the conference table, faking intoxication in every limb. “I KILLED THAT BITCH. LAURA-LYNN BURKE, HER FACE ON MY FACE FOR LIFE!”
Laura wasn’t going to correct him on the name or the way he didn’t get a single line correct. His vocal impersonation, however—it was better than she wanted to admit.
“El oh el!” Dylan said. “Oh my god, what if it’s Laura?” They looked Laura up and down, pausing when they reached the drawstring of her linen pants. “That you, babes?” The chirpy familiarity turned Laura’s stomach, rocketing her back to the social hierarchies of her middle school lunch room.
“Do you know how many Lauras are in the world? No way our favorite enigma knows that freak,” Natalie piped in. “Laura is, like, mysterious and smart—you think she fraternizes with meth heads?”
Laura performed an exasperated eyeroll. It was almost time to step in and call it. Separately, Natalie needed to watch herself before the rest of them turned on her for this unabashed boot licking.
“I was obviously joking, Jesus—”
“Guys, I’m right here. Can we focus?” Laura flicked her attention to her laptop, pretending to be composing an email. She was never sure about taking Thomas’s last name. Now, it felt like the biggest gift she could have given herself.
Her phone buzzed against the table.
Hey, mama. Another accident and looks like Louie’s got a bit of a fever! Any chance you can pick him up? No worries if not!! Just don’t want to get any of the other littles sick if it’s a bug! <3
“Okay, keep going with this. Mark, you take the lead on the deck.” She knew Natalie would end up doing it, no matter who she assigned. “And please, some ideas that don’t involve this whole face thing. I’ll be back online in an hour or so. My baby…” She waved her hand around as she walked out the room, trying to seem unbothered. Pre-baby Laura had discovered that all it took for a bunch of insecure twenty-somethings to find you enigmatic was to say very little about your past. The real challenge was keeping it up in the present: Less is more. It didn’t matter if having a baby turned you into a desperate ghoul, always on the verge of blurting out an idiotic anecdote. Even other moms didn’t care about Louie’s latest growth milestones or tooth development, paying attention only because it meant they’d too get a turn on the pressure release valve.
“Of course,” Natalie said. She locked her eyes with Laura’s in a pathetic display of feminine solidarity. “Take all the time you need.”
* * *
When Laura pulled up to the house, Louie red-faced howling in the back seat, reporters were swarmed around the bottom of the steps. Multiple news vans. Several police cars. A handful of neighbors craned their necks around the columns of their porches.
Laura wished she would have killed Dave back when she had the chance. Minor bodily harm at minimum, anything to prevent this unfolding of events. It barely added up. Dave wasn’t remarkable in the grotesque way some men could be, where it was easy to imagine them hitting a dog or fucking a wife who wasn’t their own. Gun to forehead, if Laura had to predict which of her exes would have been most likely to have a psychotic meltdown on a national stage, it wouldn’t have been Dave. It would have been her second grade “boyfriend” who was now in prison for a string of burglaries, mostly homes belonging to senior citizens who couldn’t fight back. The wildest thing Dave had ever done in her presence was run a rat over with his car after doing a few whippets behind 7-Eleven. And that aforementioned finger up her ass, in the tent and a few other times, but everyone did that. Besides Thomas, that is.
A skirt-suited reporter, camera crew following her like a set of baby ducklings, accosted Laura the second she opened the driver’s side door. “Laura Leigh Brown, what do you have to say to Florida Man Dave?”
Another reporter, a reedy baby-faced man who looked like his name would be Alan: “Ms. Brown, is this normal behavior for Dave Schillinger?”
Another voice, this one low and loud. She was losing track of where and who the sounds were coming from: “Do you think he’s a killer?”
“Is he really your ex?”
“Have you heard the rap remix?”
“How does it feel to go viral?”
“What does your husband think?”
Luckily my husband will not be home for seven hours at minimum, at which time you will all be gone. And we do not have the same internet, so at least for today, this is no business of his.
Out loud, she merely grunted. It was either mommy-brain or self-defense. She yanked Louie from his car seat and adjusted his sweaty body on her hip.
Dave’s soaked T-shirt in the video flooded her mind, the way his armpits were dark masses spreading against the worn heathered cotton of his torso.
She scrunched her eyes shut as if that would stop the replay, focused on whether there was enough liquid ibuprofen for Louie in the bathroom cabinet. She hoped so. Asking Thomas to help, watching him effortlessly move toward a simple solution, would only push on the bruise.
Laura stomped past the reporters, a sick part of her pleased this was all happening on her re-entry into the world of adult human clothing. Being on the news was horrifying. Being on the news in bike shorts and one of Thomas’s old undershirts, braless and makeup-free, would have been borderline damnation.
Beyond the newspeople swarm, the police were waiting. Two officers. She kept her eyes down, focused on getting inside.
“Afternoon. Laura Brown, yes?”
“Technically no. Not anymore.” She rocked Louie from side. “But sure, yes, that was my maiden name.”
“Great. We just need to ask you a few questions, ma’am.”
Being called ma’am made her want to fill her pockets with Louie’s heaviest artisanally made blocks and wade into the Pacific Ocean. Then do it a second time for having such pathetic thoughts. “I don’t know anything about Dave. Haven’t spoken in years. But my baby. He’s sick.”
As if on cue, Louie grunted. A squelch came from his bottom. He grinned up at her. Laura glared at the officer then again at the fresh trail of diarrhea spurting down her leg. She meant it as a threat. Get away from me or face this shit stream!
“So if I’m not under arrest, I’ll be dealing with him first,” she continued. “And I’m obviously alive, so I’m not sure what you could possibly need from me.”
The officer with the stubbier nose, red and textured like the skin of a lychee fruit, gave her a vacant nod and pulled out his walkie. Laura raced up the stairs to safety, her awkwardly distributed load forcing her stern climb into a waddle.
* * *
“Babe, tell me all about the first day back,” Thomas said, wiping a splotch of avocado off Louie’s cheek. “Mama’s a working lady! A real boss!”
She tried not to cringe. Thomas was so attentive with their child. She reminded herself that she could be like the faceless horde of girls she grew up with, pushing forty and already on their third husband, a collection of restraining orders stuck to them like so many ugly and misspelled tattoos. Then again, maybe she’d need a restraining order too if the Dave thing kept escalating. Unless he went to prison, that is.
“My day was nice.”
“Oh, was it?” Thomas had on his joke voice. He was gearing up to do a bit. He’d want to joke about the twenty-somethings at her office or the absurdity of her work. But he wouldn’t grasp the strange way Laura respected them, how even bootlicker Natalie said what she thought without toiling in the mines of her neuroses. Laura had spent the day performing and had no interest in doing bad improv with Thomas. She wished he could either see the full her, or nothing at all. Getting clocked halfway was misery.
“Actually it was shit.”
He raised an eyebrow. Six months ago, they’d made a pact to never swear in front of Louie. “Mama’s gonna have a better day tomorrow! Work is hard sometimes!” Thomas cooed.
“No, sorry, I meant it was literally poopy. Louie had a blowout at day care and his fever is gone now, but earlier—”
“I’m sure he was only anxious to be away from you.” He tickled Louie’s bare toes. “Weren’t ya buddy! I’m also anxious when I’m away from Mommy! Looks like we’re all better now!”
Laura’s brain whirred like a slot machine. Dave’s crooked canine flashing under the mysterious skin mask. The bite of the overly air-conditioned conference room, which on second thought smelled like a rotting varmint. The swarm of reporters and police. The panic still coursing through her limbs. The terror at how panic itself, unchecked, could transmute into something that felt like a close cousin of arousal.
Yes, Thomas! All better now!
She stood, adjusting her leggings. “I’m going to go shower. Can you watch him? It’ll be quick.”
“Sure, of course. It’s guy time!” Thomas shimmied to the record player, where he put on Elvis. Louie beamed like all was right in the world, like diarrhea was a foreign concept.
Laura said a silent thank you to whatever god was listening that she married the kind of man who was pretentious enough to use a $700 non-smart phone and get his news exclusively from print editions of newspapers like the pope. She was lucky. Or would be until Thomas did his requisite Sunday coffee shop small talk with their neighbors. Maybe she could suggest a weekend trip to the beach, anything to stay inside the sticky vat of her secret a few days longer.
* * *
Laura laid awake long after Thomas was snoring. Her ear plugs were in and her melatonin had long ago been metabolized, but it was useless. She regretted not masturbating in the shower. She hadn’t done it in months and could never get the angle quite right while standing, even before Louie. But it may have helped scrub her brain clean. Then again, her preferred fodder was now compromised.
Turning on her side, the brightness on her phone as low as possible, she scrolled through comments on the “WEAR YO FACE ON MY FACE” rap remix. She’d already made an appointment with a lawyer, a stern-looking brunette with a glistening bob. She’d used the online form on the firm’s website. Tomorrow, she hoped she’d use the same form to cancel it. It would blow over, it had to blow over. Like life, what gave virality meaning was its swift and inevitable end.
A sharp howl pierced through the foam of her ear plugs. “Did you hear that?” she whispered to Thomas, nudging his back. He barely roused, a whisper that sounded like “’tis fine” and straight back to his blissful heavy breathing.
The howl continued, punctuated with higher pitched screeching. Yipping. Crying. She pulled her eye mask up to her hairline. The movement made her wonder what it felt like when Dave peeled away his skin mask. Did it leave a sticky residue? Did the officers who arrested him remove it when they put on the handcuffs? Or did its grip hold firm until right before his mugshot, where he removed it like a self-conscious middle schooler taking off their glasses before posing for their school picture? Dave looked wild in that mugshot. He’d always had that blocky jawline, but the feral nature of his eyes had grown over time. They were always too open, too bright, like if you let yourself be seen with that intensity for too long, you’d walk away with a third-degree burn.
Laura sat up.
Thomas grumbled, still not quite conscious. His sleeping abilities deserved scientific study.
“I’m just getting a water,” she whispered.
Laura padded barefoot into the kitchen, stopping at Louie’s door. He was peacefully sleeping, his tiny nose shadowed by the orange glow of the twee mushroom night light one of Thomas’s coworkers gifted them from Japan. For the first few months after she gave birth, Laura was terrified to leave him. Some nights, long after Thomas knocked out, she would creep in and doze on the crochet rug in front of the crib, keeping sentry. She’d make sure to be back in bed by dawn, rushing back in at the monitor’s first crackle as if she hadn’t been there herself mere moments before, their bodies connected by an invisible tether.
Beyond the sliding door of the dining room was the patio. Beyond that was their steep and awkward backyard, which pushed directly up into the foothills. Laura silently slid open the glass and stepped onto the pavers, the brick cool against the soles of her feet. Thomas had done the patio himself. It was an elaborate design he’d carefully laid, but he was yet to complete the final task of cleaning up his supplies. Laura had reminded him twice now, but a Jenga pile of leftover vintage bricks still sat next to the house. She held as still as possible, darting her eyes across the darkness. The yowling had stopped, but there was a soft growl, then a rustle from behind the avocado tree. A coyote strolled into view, confident and unbothered, only a few yards from where Laura stood.
She hissed, throwing her hands into the air. The coyote held firm, staring at her, seemingly judging her weak posture, her tattered flannel robe. She eyed the pile of bricks. The coyote was still staring, his face trained on Laura’s. When she picked a brick off the top of the stack, it was heavier than she’d imagined. Before playing out any consequences, she lobbed it at the coyote.
The brick, as if guided by a divine hand, made contact, a dull thud against the coyote’s mangy flank. The growling ceased. Laura swallowed hard and picked up another brick. This one knocked the wavering coyote down to supine, like a dog taking a nap on a family room rug. The growling returned, worming its way into Laura’s rib cage. It was only once she repeatedly brought down a third brick, the heavy mass crashing down into the coyote’s skull, releasing a rush of rotten strawberries from bone, that Laura realized the growling was coming from her.
The coyote was still. Peaceful.
She stepped back, crumbled down onto the patio and let the growl build deeper into her diaphragm. She swore she could hear more coyotes yowling in the distance now, and matched her pitch with theirs. Surely she’d wake the baby. And surely, hearing his mother’s animal cries would subconsciously seed a fresh and particularly twisted neurosis that’d ripen with age. He’d become more broken than a reality television villain. Perhaps a school shooter, or yet another a nameless Florida man.
Laura desperately needed to head to the garage, find an XL heavy-duty garbage bag, the kind they’d used when their old basement flooded. She’d clean the mess. She’d return to the warm quiet of the house. She would not wake Thomas. But for now, her limbs were electric. Her brain was scraped raw. So she stopped thinking, and re-opened her throat to the darkness.
Olivia Crandall is a writer from the Midwest who currently lives in Los Angeles. Her work can be found in Vulture, Cake Zine, Points in Case, and elsewhere. She has received support from the McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House), the StoryBoard Conference, and St. Nell’s Humor Writing Residency. More at oliviacrandall.com.