by Milo Abrams
his brain. My animals have been acting weird. The long list of predatory animals that wandered the Ohio countryside ranged from everything from coyote to black bear. “You can’t just go charging in there, what if there’s a bear in there?”
Ruby fought a battle on two fronts. She struggled physically with her husband’s grip as he held her in place, protecting her from potential harm, but also found herself in a mental fight between her logic and heart. She knew that Will was right, but the sound of the goat crying out split her wide open.
“I will go,” Will told her. She wrestled him for just a second until the words sunk in. His grip released and she stood before him, wide-eyed and afraid.
She didn’t know what to say, she just licked her lips as her heart beat around her chest like a shoe in a washing machine. They stood together in silence and just looked toward the barn. There were no more cries from the goats. As far as Ruby knew, they were all slaughtered inside, or gone altogether.
“I want you to get into the house,” he said kissing her on the forehead, “just in case. If there’s a bear or something in there I need you to be ready at the door when I come running.”
Ruby sucked in her lips as the anxiety began to swirl. Her feet were cinder blocks and all the blood had drained from her hands, leaving them cold. Will nudged her gently and finally she ran for the porch.
He examined the ground as he slowly walked toward the barn for a large stick or anything he could use as a weapon. Unfortunately for him, he had cleared the entire yard just days earlier. He would have to approach whatever was in the barn bare-handed. He felt helpless.
“Will,” Ruby yelled from the screen door on the porch. He turned to see her visibly shaken. “Please be careful.”
He nodded and then continued forward. As he reached the front of the barn he could hear something scuffling around inside. The sounds of feet moving and scratching the dirt within the goat pen made his skin ripple as the adrenaline surged through him. One step at a time, he slowly crept around the front opening of the barn and looked inside. It was still dark, with the goat pen encompassing the entire back half. He would need to walk half the length of the barn before he would reach them. In the middle of the barn, a wall divided the front half from the back on just left side. Will had intentionally built it that way to keep the goats from immediately being seen by anything through the gaping front where the barn lacked doors. It gave them a sense of privacy and allowed Ruby to be in the front of the barn without hearing them constantly calling out for her.
He tiptoed through the front half, past all his tools, the tractor, and bales of hay, until he reached the dividing wall. Licking his lips, he could taste the dirt that had been kicked up by a scuffle in the pen. Along the wall, he saw a large metal pipe and quickly grabbed it in case he needed to defend himself. The last thing he wanted to do was fight for his life over the stupid goats, but he knew that they meant so much to Ruby. He pushed forward.
As he walked through to the back of the barn, the goat pen looked empty as every one of the goats huddled together in the corner furthest from the pen door. As soon as they saw Will they began bleating uncontrollably. He scanned the remainder of the back and as he passed the pen door he noticed the latch had been lifted. The only thing keeping the pen door from being wide open was a gentle nudge from the inside. Relatching the door, he walked through the back of the barn and out the back side. Nothing. He looked around but saw nothing. There wasn’t a single track or paw mark anywhere around the barn or inside. He ran around the barn and back toward the porch, not giving Ruby any sort of clue what was going on by the lack of expression on his face.
She immediately flung the door open when he hit the porch and jumped back into the kitchen. He calmly walked inside and closed the door.
“Is everything okay? Did you see anything?”
He shook his head and then shrugged. “I didn’t see anything, thankfully.”
“Are the goats okay? Are they all there?”
Will nodded but he had forgotten to count them. He was too busy at the time searching for whatever had upset them, but he knew that if he told Ruby that he had forgotten, she would have been thrown into a panic.
“What happened?” she asked as she looked out the window through the blinds toward the barn.
“I don’t know. I went in there and they were all huddled in the back corner away from the gate. Something definitely spooked them, but there aren’t any tracks or anything. I looked. There’s no paw marks or hair or anything. Everything looks completely undisturbed, except for the goats.”
Ruby frowned. “I’m glad they are okay, but I don’t like this. I don’t like the idea of something running around out there stalking my goats, Will.”
“I know,” he said. He hadn’t even told her about the gate being open. Maybe she had forgotten to close it before they left that morning, or maybe whatever scared the goats had opened the gate. He wasn’t going to make any assumptions. Will was a man of reason and evidence.
“What do you think it could be?” she asked. “I want to go out and see them. Is it safe to?”
Will shrugged. “I guess so. I’ll go with you.”
They walked out to the barn and as soon as the goats saw Ruby they went nuts. She threw open the gate and ran inside, hugging them as they ran around inside the pen butting each other and bleating. Will looked around, searching for clues, but came up empty-handed. He walked to the outside of the barn and looked out toward the cornfield. Something finally stood out. He walked to the edge of the cornfield and noticed a single cornstalk was broken. It was bent over and lying on the ground as if something had stepped on it. Ruby noticed him crouching down and looking at it.
“Whatever it was, it took off into the cornfield, didn’t it?”
He turned and looked at her. “I guess so, it’s the only thing that looks out of place.”
She took a deep inhale hoping the fresh air would help settle the buzzing in her chest and walked toward the house. Will left the broken cornstalk and chased after her.
As the sun began to set that night, he called to her from the kitchen. “Come on, let’s watch the sunset together. It’s already halfway down the sky. You’re going to miss all of the colors.”
“I don’t want to,” she yelled from the living room. “After today, I just want to stay inside. But you go.”
Will’s heart sank. He opened the screen door and walked out to the porch. The swing was empty, waiting for them to sit together and enjoy each other’s company like it always had. It looked so big and empty there all alone. He sat down and leaned back as the swing awkwardly began swinging in an uneven pattern because he was sitting on the end. Sitting in the middle just didn’t feel right. They each had their side, and it was never a thing that he did alone. As he stared out into the sky over the cornfield, watching the orange and reds overtake the blues, he felt cold. His lower lip jutted out unconsciously. He couldn’t sit there more than a minute. It just didn’t feel right. He wasn’t an individual like he may have been more than twenty years ago. Ever since he had found his one true love, their individual lives had not only grown together into a new life, but their separate identities did as well. They may have been two people in two separate bodies, but Will knew without a doubt that only half of him was out there on that porch with the sunset. The other half of him was inside, and unless he was in there too, he couldn’t feel whole. So, he went back inside.
Inside, Ruby was sitting in the chair and staring blankly at the TV. The news played in the background but she was hardly paying attention.
“Police responded to an emergency call last night at a manufacturing plant in Bugby,” the newscaster read from the prompter. “A witness claimed to have seen a young boy with a fox wandering in a wooded area behind the plant.”
Ruby looked up at Will as he entered the room. “Could it be a fox?”
He nodded. “Maybe. Or maybe a coyote. There’s all sorts of things out here. But I don’t know if even a coyote would bother
with so many goats in there. Five against one just seems awful intimidating.”
Ruby thought about that for a minute. “But what if there was more than one? A whole pack of them would try, right?”
Will thought back to the gate being opened. He didn’t believe that there was any way that wild coyotes were smart enough to open the pen door, no matter how hungry they were. “Maybe, but I doubt it. I’m no hunter or anything, but I didn’t see any tracks or anything. Don’t you think that if there were a pack of coyotes running around inside the barn that they would have left some sort tracks behind?”
Ruby frowned and looked down. “I guess you’re right. I just wanted to know what it was.”
Will did too. There seemed to be an awful lot of unexplained happenings in his life lately. First there was the fireball, which he attributed to just a random astronomical anomaly until Ruby mentioned the lack of news and police sirens. Then there was her sudden recoil into extreme anxiety which was causing their relationship to begin to fray at the ends, and now something seemed to be stalking the animals at both Dell’s farm and theirs.
“I wonder if whatever was here was the same thing that was at Dell’s farm,” he said.
She looked up at him. “Did he say that something was stalking his animals?”
“No, he just said they were acting weird. But