Enmeshed Magazine

          Ninety-six degrees. 

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          Hot, sweltering—the heat, living, crawls under the skin of any living thing and makes its home there. It fills all space, even shaded ones. There is no escaping the heat, and there’s some comfort in that. It’s stable, solid, inevitable. The harsh Louisiana atmosphere thickens with the smell of rot under that unrelenting sun. 

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          I lay on the side of a worn down road. The heat crawls under my skin. It’s like a blanket, the earth beneath my body a bed. I feel like the cicadas, those creatures who sing no matter day or night, to nothing and nobody. Alongside the cacophony of crickets and crows, they’re singing now. It feels like my skin is sweating off and peeling into a cicada shell. A perfect preservation—one should pray for it. I know people who do. Across the expanse of asphalt, I stare into a dead coyote fallen in the tall grass next to a ditch. Not so perfectly preserved. I stare right into the space where its eyes might have once been. Its pelt is matted with blood. The heat has reduced the fluid to clumps of mud that cluster and crust around the gaping bullet wounds littering its thin-boned body. Its skull has given way to a heap of maggots and the heat radiating from the ground distorts their gluttonous wriggling. It gives a faint impression that the coyote is still twitching. Maybe seconds away from its last breath. But buzzards have long since picked at it, and the flesh has turned to decay in the hands of heat; there is nothing left worth consuming.

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         I am laying on the side of that road in heat’s palm and I am staring at the coyote as I pick at a scab on my arm. The scab is ugly, pulsing, and red from the irritation caused by the nail on my index finger as it burrows beneath the crust. I pick at the scab and bite at my lips until I feel hot blood fill the space between my nail and finger, the space between my bottom gums and my top row of teeth. I roll the piece of skin between my sticky fingers. I chew on my bloody bottom lip. My mouth is dry and the blood makes a second layer of my inner mouth. The blood winds around the hair on my arm and dribbles into the hard, cracked earth. I imagine myself the coyote, bullet wounds flooding the ground beneath me. 

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          As a child, I remember my mother hated coyotes. She spoke of them like she did the Devil. She said they did nothing but kill anything that breathed. Malicious, she said, malicious, malicious, rubbing her rosary between her fingers. She carried that thing everywhere. When I was five and playing in the backyard, a coyote locked its jaws around my chubby little leg and tried to drag me into the fields surrounding the acre of land around our house. I’ll never forget the way my mother shrieked. I can still smell the sting of gunpowder, nestled somewhere deep and untouched. I still hear the poor thing yelp, its teeth loosening on my bleeding flesh. My mother didn’t let me five feet out of her sight for years after that. I walked funny for the rest of my childhood; I still do. My mother never got me a cane, but she hung the pelts of those coyotes up in the barn and on the fence posts like a warning sign.

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          After the incident, I was never sent to preschool. Most of my time was spent with my grandparents, though my grandfather died when I was very young. I was homeschooled by my grandma until I turned 11 and stopped talking. I refused to do any lessons no matter how many whippings I was subjected to. I wouldn’t utter a word, not even with red-faced screaming, yelling, spit flying upon my face. They told me I was a troubled kid, didn’t know how to use my words right or keep still, and I believed them. All the sentences would rush up into my mouth, so quickly and with such strength they’d get clogged in my throat and I’d be left opening and closing my lips like a fish out of water. My grandma called me disturbed. She became more adamant about taking me with her to church on Sundays and convinced my mother to send me to the city. They spent so much time trying to get me to talk again: speech therapy, and when that didn’t work, the belt, taking away all of my toys, refusing me dinner. I don’t think they ever asked why. Finally, my mother took it upon herself to enroll me in a public middle school in Baton Rouge. She thought maybe seeing how other kids acted would make me normal again, if all else failed. 

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           The school was a two-hour commute from the farmland my family inhabited and much less green. All gray bricks and layers of cancer in the sky. It smelled bad. My mother sent me to my first day of school in jean shorts and a frilly blouse with my hair painfully pinned up. The first thing a classmate asked me was where the scar on my leg was from. I took out a notebook and scribbled the word on a blank page—coyote. Over time, that’s all my classmates came to know me as. Sometimes it was to mock me, I think. Mostly, people didn’t know what else to call me. Maybe the name my mother gave me didn't fit.  My grandma would always rap a ruler upon my knuckles when I refused to answer to my name; the teachers just sent me to the counselor. They told my mother I might be mentally challenged. She took it like a personal jab, hid my body behind her, an iron grip on my arm. She spit in their faces in her rage and said I was perfectly capable.

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          The first time they told her that was the day I broke my silent streak. It had been a month since I’d started at the school. She was driving me home after a parent-teacher conference. With her face simmering as we ambled down a busy highway, she cursed some nameless stranger who cut her off. Her eyes were her biggest tell. They were boiling-bright-blue in their anger, though I could never tell where that anger was supposed to go, even if I always ended up catching the brunt of the spill. I was sitting shotgun. Trying not to look at her, I quietly told her the kids at the school called me coyote. My voice didn’t sound like my own, but like something foreign that had rooted itself in my body because I didn’t have the courage to say it myself. Coyote, she repeated. I wrung my hands together when she didn’t say anything more. Then—as the light turned red and our minivan came to a jerking halt—my mother told me, loudly, that was stupid and that I was who I was, that I should tell those kids to fuck off, that they were just stuck-up city kids with no brains from hours spent on their cellphones. Godless people. 

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          I don’t think she understood what I was trying to say. I went back to being quiet. 

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         On the other side of the road, the coyote’s smell of rot has reached me. I breathe it in and feel it settle in the pit of my stomach with the still water and the factory fumes. I gag. Ninety-six degrees leaves no room for clean air, so I keep gagging, stumbling to my feet, staggering back to my truck parked on the side of the road. The sun shifts its weight from my back to my shoulders and presses its lips rough against my face. I brace my hand on the truck bed and throw up into the reeds growing out from the ditch. My stomach broils in the heat like rotten stew. I haven’t eaten and the bile burns coming out of my throat. I keep gagging, pressing my arm up against my mouth and nose to stifle the stench. My lungs squeeze under the pressure, and then the coughs start rattling up my throat before I can stop them. I’m coughing, bile on my arms, gasping for breath, and I start to cry. I can’t help it. Once I start crying, I keep crying. The tears burn against my face. The heat holds my cheeks in its hands and wraps its arms around my body. The cicadas sing. I squeeze my eyes shut and feel the heat fill every pore of my body. 

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​         Before she quit drinking (long after I moved out), my mother would sleep in my bed with me when she got too drunk and my father got pissed and went to my grandparents’ house for the night. I laid on my side and stared at the wall as though it were a mirror. My eyes made monsters out of the darkness. She’d sidle up behind me, stroke my hair and sing me lullabies. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. She smelled like cigarettes and her breath was all Bud Light and all I wanted was for her to let me sleep. But I knew she was lonely. Sometimes, we’d sit up in my bed and go through old photobooks together and cry. I never cried around my mother when she was sober, but I cried with her then. I think we were both crying for different reasons. You make me happy, when skies are gray, she’d sing, her tears dampening my hair, my tears dampening my pajama shirt. One time we were crying and I asked her, shakily, why she killed the coyotes. She sobbed then, told me she thought she’d lose me that day, her only daughter. My baby, my baby, she cried, I didn’t want to lose my baby. I wondered how many coyotes had lost their babies. The next morning, my mother was hungover and yelled at me for taking too long to tie my shoes because we were already running late. As she knelt down, she yanked my ankle towards her until the muscle popped in its strain and tied my laces so tight it cut off the circulation in my foot. She didn’t talk to me the entire drive to the doctor’s office. She bought me a McDonald’s Happy Meal after. 

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         We used to have cameras up on the back porch to watch for the coyotes. I’d wait, sometimes, until my parents were asleep. I’d listen for the music to stop blaring from the back porch, then the arguing would dwindle to a slammed door, and I’d finally hear my father’s snoring from where he slept upon an armchair in the living room. Quietly, I would slip out of bed, tiptoe down the hall. The hallway floors were creaky, but the deep, throaty sounds of my father’s sleep would cover the whining of the wooden boards beneath my feet. Past the living room, next to the front door, was where we kept the rickety old desktop. Bathed in the blue light of a bright screen, I’d navigate to the security camera application. The back porch would come into view in shades of black and white: two old chairs, a rusty grill, styrofoam ice chest, empty beer cans littering the floor, then the yard, right past the steps. And I would sit there, sometimes for hours, waiting for the coyotes. I don’t really know why. Maybe I wanted confirmation that they weren’t all dead. It’s not like I hated them, or blamed them for what happened to me. What was happening to me. They were just hungry—scrounging around the porch for scraps, sticking their noses between the cracks in the boards… When the camera would make a sound, they’d jerk up, staring at it, their eyes glowing a sickly night-vision green. Like zombies. It felt like they were staring at me. 

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           Now, I’m staring down at the coyote. Closer, I can see how much death has taken of it. Each pockmark where a bullet has invaded its body wriggles and writhes with maggots. They are spilling out of its head. The grass around it is depressed beneath the little weight left of it. I’ve tied my t-shirt around my nose and mouth and I am standing there in a sports bra and jean shorts. I’m staring down at the coyote. It is staring up at me. I can’t tell if it’s female or male. I don’t really think it matters. It’s neither now, half-earth, half-rot, half-girl, half-boy. I crouch and the smell starts to seep through the fabric. In retaliation, I press my tongue up against the roof of my mouth, clench my teeth, and push my hands into the dirt beside the coyote’s body. I start to dig. 

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        One night, my father caught me at the desktop. 

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        By the time I heard his loud, shambling steps, it was already too late. I hurried to close out the camera, having a sudden feeling like I was doing something wrong, but I was too slow—or maybe the desktop was too slow, my heart hammering in my chest, the mouse key lagging across the screen to that red X in the corner— 

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         I don’t really remember what he said, but I do remember the way his hand clamped on my shoulder. My heart came to a staggering stop, then. Maybe he asked what I was doing, disgruntled and bleary-eyed, and didn’t wait for a response. Maybe he grumbled something incoherent, yanking me from the chair and tossing me aside. I stumbled, almost fell. Maybe he said, Go to bed. And I skittered back down the hall, half-limping, half-running. Fuckin’ coyotes, he cursed, as I tucked tail. Minutes later, I heard my father open the back door and I heard three rounds from a shotgun ring out into a quiet winter night. I was 14 then, and it was the last time I ever snuck out of my room at night. But it wasn’t the last time I ever thought about the coyotes. 

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         Freshman year of highschool, I went to summer camp in Lake Charles after my mother caught me smoking her cigarettes. It was Catholic, of course, and hosted by a church my grandparents had attended before. I made a friend there. I had other friends, but they weren’t in real life. They were just avatars on the cracked screen of a hand-me-down cellphone, and the camp leaders made everyone turn in their devices for the whole three weeks we’d be there. The friend’s name was Nevaeh and she lived there, in Lake Charles. She had long blonde hair and had dyed the tips of it with blue Kool-Aid. Her eyes were brown. She was a sophomore. She went to a private Catholic school and around her neck hung a golden cross on a chain. The first day, she walked right up to where I was sitting out of the game of sharks and minnows. Scribbling in my notebook, I’d found a place to curl up in the only shaded spot beneath a large willow tree. She asked me what my name was. 

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          I told her people called me Coyote. 

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          She said that was weird. She sat down next to me and told me, My name’s Nevaeh. It’s ‘Heaven’ backwards. I said nothing, and we sat there in silence until we were called back into the community center for lunch.

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          We bunked together that summer because we were the only highschoolers of the group. I don’t think we would have gotten along otherwise. Nevaeh talked a lot, even during mass. She’d lean in close to me and whisper, her breath warm against my ear and smelling strongly of spearmint gum, while the priest droned on. We got in trouble for that more than once. At night, she’d crawl down the ladder where her cot was and sit on mine. She’d whisper to me about anything, really: she thought the other kids were annoying, she thought the youth pastor was cute, she’d heard the priest was actually a murderer who used to be on death row but got out and turned to God for salvation, she couldn’t wait for summer to be over because she was starting at a new public school in the fall. Sometimes I was too tired to listen, but Nevaeh became a constant in my life, and I liked the routine of it all. 

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          One night, the last night, Nevaeh asked me if I’d ever had a boyfriend. We were sitting criss-cross atop my bed with a low-light lamp positioned on my notebook between us. It was supposed to be lights out, but everyone else was already asleep. I shook my head. I was embarrassed. Nevaeh always talked about how many boyfriends she’d had, and most of all, all the drama that came with it. She asked me if I’d kissed anyone before. I don’t know why, but I lied and told her I had. I’d later confess that to the priest and say three Hail Mary’s at the altar for forgiveness, but at the moment, I think I just wanted to escape the shame. She asked me how I could have kissed someone but never had a boyfriend, and I felt the words dry up in my throat. I just have, I said, croaking. She asked me who my first kiss was. I don’t remember, I said, my voice barely a whisper, my voice a parasite, that same foreignness having taken its space. She ordered me to prove it. I think she knew I was lying. I asked her, How?, and she looked at me for a second. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Then, she told me to kiss her. It’s not gay, she said at the look on my face, her tone all sharp, defensive, maybe, I just want you to prove that you actually know how to kiss someone.

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          I must have not reacted quick enough—Nevaeh said she was just kidding anyway, the words all rushing from her mouth and jumbled together. Minutes later, she got up from the bed and climbed back up the ladder. I tried to go to sleep, but I’d always been an insomniac. I think Nevaeh thought I was asleep, but I heard her quietly crying into her pillow. I remember thinking in that moment that I should have just kissed her. 

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         That last night in Lake Charles, I heard the coyotes. Like an omen. I heard their yowling as I clutched a thin pillow to my chest, un-sleeping, and I wondered what it was they were trying to say. I closed my eyes and imagined a world where they were speaking to me. Did they curse me for what I had caused? I wondered how many coyotes had died in my name. Nevaeh was still crying. I wondered if it was worth begging for forgiveness. Eventually, the wondering wore me away into sleep. I never got an answer. Like many nights before, I dreamed of dead coyotes and woke to an alarm system of cicadas. 

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         After that summer, Nevaeh and I never spoke again. She didn’t come back to summer camp. She has a husband now. I know because we’re friends on Facebook. Three months after that summer, I told my mother I was gay in a letter that I left on the kitchen counter. It was never brought up again, but I went to Lake Charles every year. 

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         Until I moved out.

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         I was 20 when I finally mustered up the courage to leave. When I graduated high school, I didn’t go to college. Instead, I stayed home and got a job alongside my father stocking grocery shelves. It was the closest I ever got to a relationship with him. After long, repetitive shifts, he’d sit on his chair and I’d sit on the couch, and we’d let an endless stream of superhero films lull us to sleep. When my mother expressed her disappointment at my choice to stay home, I took online classes through a local community college and pitched in 30 percent of my paycheck each week to make up for the space I was burdening. I didn’t see my mother often, but sometimes I wasn’t sure which of us was avoiding the other. The house was nearly always empty, save me and my mother’s old cat, a gangly thing that had always hated me. She’d never stepped foot outside—coyotes’ll eat her up quick, my mother would say, and she had no interest in the backyard anyway—but in the last few months I spent at home, she’d spend each night scratching at the back door and yowling like it was the last thing she’d ever do. My mother would yell at her, my father would kick her; it didn’t matter what they did, she’d just keep screaming. 

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         I remember her vividly, the night I left. I was laying in bed listening to her cry and cry and cry. The soft shushing of her paws against the back door sounded through the crack in my bedroom door, just as it had for weeks before. The ceiling above me was dark and I traced the blotches of water stains with my eyes. I made monsters out of those stains, and they scratched and scratched and scratched at the ceiling prison they were confined to. I was exhausted. It smelled stagnant, like mold from the last storm creeping in through the wallpaper. I wrestled myself from the bed and stumbled into the living room. My father wasn’t home and my mother was working, so it was empty except for her. The cat. Shut up, I shouted, Shut up, shut up! And she hissed, loud and clear, her back arched and her ears pinned back. I swayed there, tired beyond belief and staring at the cat—a stand-still. She stared at me for a moment, and then turned back to the door. A rough, crooning mewl ripped itself from her throat and she dragged her claws down the wood over and over and over again. I dug my nails into my skull and ripped at it, feeling the frustration coil inside of me. Anger struck quick, like a rattlesnake in the brush, rushing up from the wound in my leg and burrowing itself between my ribs. My hand shot out. I grabbed the nearest object and hurled it at the door. At the door, not at the cat. Not at the cat. The candle’s casing shattered as it dented upon the door, spraying in a million shards over the living room floor. 

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          The cat scampered away and I was left with the poison of regret festering in my heart. It flooded out of my eyes. I shook with the force of it and folded over the arm of the couch. It smelled faintly of my father’s cologne. I cried, and cried, and cried, and the cat, moments later, was crying and crying and crying. The chorus of her claws played us out. I pushed myself up from the cushions and crept closer to her shaking, mewling form. Sorry, was the only thing I could say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Her eyes were wide and wet, pupils so dark they could have held constellations of stars. I kneeled down in the puddle of glass. Little bits of crystallized tears pricked the hard bone of my knees and she jumped, slightly, pressed up against the corner by the door. I reached my shaking hand towards her.The cat scampered away and I was left with the poison of regret festering in my heart. It flooded out of my eyes. I shook with the force of it and folded over the arm of the couch. It smelled faintly of my father’s cologne. I cried, and cried, and cried, and the cat, moments later, was crying and crying and crying. The chorus of her claws played us out. I pushed myself up from the cushions and crept closer to her shaking, mewling form. Sorry, was the only thing I could say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Her eyes were wide and wet, pupils so dark they could have held constellations of stars. I kneeled down in the puddle of glass. Little bits of crystallized tears pricked the hard bone of my knees and she jumped, slightly, pressed up against the corner by the door. I reached my shaking hand towards her.

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          Quick, so quick—her claws, sharpened from their time spent against the back door, sliced into my arm. Blood flooded out from the rip of skin, so red, falling in streams down to the glass. It was stark and I cried out at the sight more than I did the sparking pain. The red was staining the glass, the tears were staining my shirt, and the cat was screeching, mewling, reeling back to scratch at me again. I scrambled back, falling on the small of my back crying. Glass embedded itself in my palms and the bottoms of my feet. Such sharp, sharp stings I felt then, and the pain in my arm climbed to a crescendo. I couldn’t stop trembling. The blood filled the crevices of my palm as I pressed my hand against the wound to staunch the rivers of red flowing down my wrist. I staggered to my feet. The memory staggers, too, lost in a blur of heavy emotion. I remember swinging the back door open, and I remember watching the cat sprint out into the yard through a watery film. I watched her run into the field. Into the dark, open blackness of the night. Into the coyotes. I watched her disappear. 

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         Then, full of glass and blood and regret, I packed a bag and I left. 

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         I left then, that night, and I didn’t come back for a long time: not for holidays, not for special occasions, not for the memories I’d left behind or the family that had grown bitter with my loss of contact. I didn’t come back for the voicemails from my mother screaming that I had killed her cat, or for the endless flux of proverbs in my Facebook messages from my grandma after she saw the ‘Atheist’ tag in my bio. But I did come back, eventually. Once, now. My body’s since spit out all the glass from that night. It’s funny, the healing process. I’d think it was over, and then one night as I laid alone in a cold, hard bed, I’d dig a fresh shard from my thigh. Still all glittering and clear, a memory in physical form. 

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          I don’t know why I’m back now. Here, lifting the coyote’s rotting body and placing it into an unmarked grave where nobody will ever mourn it but me. I don’t know why I was expecting to see anything but this; a corpse. A seed of anger curls in my chest and is reduced to ash in the sunlight just as quickly. My nails are cracked from tearing at the weeds and the clay of the earth. They’re embedded with a second layer of dirt that pushes into my skin. I feel it lined in my fingerprints as I hug the mound of dirt inward, and it falls over the grave. The coyote disappears, into the womb of the earth, and I force myself to stand as the sun weighs down on my shoulders. In the blistering heat, I shamble back to my car. Ninety-six degrees has wormed its way into my vision and made everything bleary and stagnant. Piercing is the pain dug into my skull, but it is hardly noticeable in the heat. I clamber into my truck, dazed. The engine grumbles to life. Shades of roadside ditch and dead oak trees blur through the glass of my windows as I drive down the dirt road. 

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          I drive until I see the curve of patted dirt that leads to my childhood home. I keep driving until I pass it by. I drive far, far away. But I think my body stays behind, curled around the ribs of a dead coyote.

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