Wolf

When the dogs first came crashing through the fence, Melly didn’t even try to stop them. She laughed, at first, to see them—their humped backs like whales, their gritted teeth—because they wanted so badly to get into her backyard, and she didn’t know why anyone would. She’d been sitting on the lawn chair all day with Kailey Ann, drinking sodas and telling lies and swapping answers for math. When the dogs came, it sounded like the great rustling of something sinister gathering itself up and racing through the park—through the slanted blue aluminum houses and potted cacti, through the tire swings and weed gardens, through the cars with duct-taped windows and toothless men with beers at noon and children screaming in the sand—to kill something. “Sugar!” said Kailey Ann. “They’re going to eat us!” But they didn’t. They went straight for the Chihuahua, Sammy, and they went after it as though the little dog had insulted them somehow, or owed them drug money, or had ratted them out to the cops. There was a mew and a squishing sound. Melly grabbed the stick she’d been using to make the quadratic formula in the sand and ran toward the dogs. “You get out of here!” she said. “You leave Sammy alone!” She waved the stick in the dogs’ faces, made herself big and tall and angry. Making yourself big, speaking in a loud voice, might make them think she was the dominant male in the group. Wolves, she knew, worked that way—although these beasts were like the bastard stepchildren of wolves, ruined by horrible intervening genetics, their wildness collapsed into something frenzied and frantic and disgusting. They were barely related to wolves anymore, the way some people are barely related to the rest of humanity. Still, she tried, she yelled, she made big aggressive stick gestures, and Kailey Ann gave a yell from the safety of the lawn chair. After a few moments the dogs, by collective decision, turned around and went back the way they came, through the fence, their sloped backs flashing silver in the baking sun, making blood footprints on the concrete.

“What the heck was that?” said Kailey Ann. Her family was Mormon, and Kailey Ann never swore.