Jesse

I asked her how she knew fear was dangerous.

She said because Pearl had told her that the thing reacted to fear.

Pearl said the nights she went to the door angry, with the shotgun, were the nights it stayed at the tree line.

The nights she went to the door afraid were the nights it came closer.

It could tell.

It could feel what you were feeling, and it moved toward fear the way a dog moves toward food.

I spent Friday doing chores.

I split wood because there wasn't enough on the porch for the coming week.

I fixed a hinge on the chicken coop door.

I cleared leaves from the gutters.

Physical work, to keep my mind in my body and out of the dark space it wanted to go.

In the afternoon while Mama napped, I walked down to the creek.

I told myself I was checking the water level, but I was really looking for tracks.

The creek was about 40 feet wide, shallow, running over a bed of smooth river rock.

The banks on both sides were soft mud and sand.

I walked along the near bank, looking down.

I found tracks about 200 yards upstream from the house, where a game trail came down from the ridge and crossed the creek at a shallow riffle.

The tracks were on the far bank, in a patch of grey mud between two sycamore roots.

They were foot-shaped, roughly human in outline but elongated, with toes that were too long and too widely spaced.

The print was deeper at the ball and the toes than at the heel, as if whatever made it carried most of its weight forward.