Wes Coffey

I could see, I could actually see, the salt line move a little on every exhale.

grains shifting, pushed by the air.

It stayed there breathing for a long time.

Then it said one more thing, and this is the part I can't get past.

It said, you never came.

That's all.

Four words.

You never came.

And I understood, sitting there on the kitchen floor with the rifle shaking in my hands, that it wasn't talking to me.

It was talking to my grandfather."

through the door across four years because he hadn't come that fall or the next fall or the next and here somebody finally was on the land in the cabin and it thought for a minute at least that it was him it had been waiting the whole time then i heard it walk away just walk

off into the leaves, back toward the hollow.

The sound faded, and then it was gone.

I did not move until the sun came up.

At first light I loaded my truck.

I didn't wash dishes.

I didn't sweep.

I didn't even close the door to the wood stove.

I grabbed Papa's notebook and the old ledgers out of the crawlspace, and the 3030, and I threw them all in the truck.

I left the cameras.