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Jim Burns was awakened at 3:30 AM by the wailing of the coyotes. It was the full of the moon in December, and the view out of the window was nearly as clear as in the daytime. He knew he would not be able to again achieve sleep. So he slipped out of bed silently so as not to arouse his wife Elizabeth.
His Mr. Coffee had been filled the night before, and he pushed the brew button. He needed something to help his nerves through until daylight, when the dreadful outdoor chorus would cease. He wanted a cigarette (a taboo his wife frowned upon,) but he did not want to venture out onto the back porch to smoke it. Scared? Well, yes, he guessed he was, not of the varmints but of the inner thoughts that ran way down deep in his mind. Usually those thoughts stayed deep, but those damned wild dogs! God, how they got on his nerves. Elizabeth knew nothing about this. She just knew he had occasional bouts of insomnia and laid it to various causes. He had been pretty much open about the life he had led before meeting her in college, skipping over just one major
factor: the memory that made him sweat at night.
GODDAM THOSE COYOTES! They sounded like all the lost souls of the dead come forward to torture him into Hell. Yip, yip, yaheeeeeeeeeeee...yip, yip, yaheeeeee!
Jeez, it was like babies screaming, his two little girls, the twins he would
have had if he hadn't made (OK, forced, coerced) his girl friend JoAnn into having a late term abortion. He had been so sure that was what he wanted that he hadn't let her have opinions, smothered her maternal feelings, made her into a slave until she had done whatever he told her to, even to doing away with the unborn twins.
Was that what made it so horrific? The fact that they were twins? Or was it just the horror in her eyes at what she had done, or the way she started screaming when she found that she had carried twin little girls, started screaming and kept screaming as they led her away to be sedated? Every time she came out of sedation, she started screaming anew, until finally she had been locked up at Bangor Mental Health Institute. He had wanted to visit; to tell her he was sorry, to tell her that her life would go on - but he had never worked up the courage. Once he had started driving in that direction, but his guts had turned to water and he had never tried since.
There went the bastards again...yip, yip, yip, eeeooooooooo...Jim hoped they didn't wake his wife. He didn't want to face her tonight, to answer the obvious questions that would come to her lips. The funny thing was that that they were both in good health and had tried hard, but he had never been able to impregnate his wife. She was stoic, but he knew it bothered her. He was sure his burden of guilt was to blame.
There went those damned coyotes again. Yip, yip, aheeeeee, aheeeeee, dadeeeee, dadeeee! WHAT THE HELL! Some of them were talking to him calling from beyond to their cowardly father.
Dadeeeeeeeee.......dadeeeeeeeeee.......He rushed out onto the porch. He must find a way to quiet them, to stop those dreadful cries. His voice came out of him as he left the yard. " No, nooooo...." But it was answered by the awful cries, "Dadeeeeee.....Dadeeeeee."
"No, NO,NOOOOOO..." he screamed as he ran down the hill through the woods. The wail of the wild dogs was all around him, deafening, and then his slipper hit the patch of ice and he was sliding over the edge of the granite bluff and falling seventy feet to the boulders below.
The coyote pack became silent then, for it was afraid of the smell of man and the big smacking noise that he had just made. They would leave now, and check the body again in the starving time of early spring. If no one had dragged it off, it could then be eaten as carrion.
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