He was already moving.

But two doors down and huddled in a doorway to smoke, Coyote wondered why he hadn’t just paid the extra ten dollars to keep sitting in the bar and watch the comedy show, and have someone else make him dinner, and where he could chat with the bartenders a bit, and have another beer and another shot, and not be trying to walk the two blocks home in the season’s first thunderstorm with a five pound bag of onions and a bag of plain chips to tide him over until dinner.

But he was already moving.

“And the nightmares?” the neighbourhood mystic asked from the other room, lighting some kind of incense.

Coyote waited until the siren alerting parked cars for snow removal moved down a block or two. And the mystic to come back to the kitchen table.

“The other day I had one. Can’t remember what about. But I know when I woke up I thought, at least that’s out of the way for tonight.”

The siren appeared again and they both went to the front window to frown at those people ignoring it’s call.

“People used to smash their ships against the shore.”

“How am I doing? I bought coffee at the corner store for christ’s sake. I was just there for smokes. And junk food. And I was only reminded that I didn’t have the one thing I needed until a kind of cute woman walked in and walked by and walked over in that direction. If that’s not an indictment on the status of my well-being, then I don’t know what is,” one said.

“Jeez. Have you heard about this other thing? It doesn’t have anything to do with what you just said, but I’m uncomfortable,” the other one didn’t say.

Boar looked out over the backyard, and the the ghosts of memories that resided there, and pulled his rubber boots over his pajamas, and stomped out to clear everything out. The swing set, rusted, and swingless was the first to fall. Then he set to chopping down the scraggly apple tree, and when felled, he took shovel to not-yet-thawed earth and dug out the stump and roots.

The phone rang all afternoon, but Boar either didn’t hear it or ignored it and when his son arrived in a panic after dinner, he found his elderly father standing before a bonfire.

The drunk stumbled in and asked for a stout. The bartender poured him half a glass and said the keg was taped.

“It’s on the house,” the bartender said. The drunk raised the glass in thanks drained it. He turned to the woman sitting at the a bar a few stools down, reading in the dim light.

“Given the opportunity, a bullfrog’ll eat a bird.”

“Like a baby bird that fell from the nest or something?”

“Nope. Full size. Nothing wrong with their wings either.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Stranger things have happened,” the drunk said, sitting down beside her.

Coyote stirred too much sugar into the coffee the neighbourhood mystic set in front of him.

“I’m concerned,” he said, to the mystic’s back. “About what it means to be a decent human. Because decency doesn’t seem like it’s enough against the waves of whatever else everything is.”

“Do you smell that?” the mystic asked. “That awful smell? It’s been lingering since last night. I did the dishes and washed the floors and it’s still there.”

Coyote sniffed and said he couldn’t smell anything.

“It smells strongest right here,” the mystic said, standing in the exact middle of the kitchen.

There were footprints in the freshly fallen snow out on the back balcony, like they were looking in the rear window. But nothing leading to or away. Toad swept the snow and some of his suspicions away.

He texted an old friend.

“This is so strange,” they replied. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Were you the one looking in my window?”

“Are you ok?” they asked. But, when he tried to answer the next day, Toad realized they’d blocked him.

The back window frosted over, even if it wasn’t that cold out. The phone rang, but he didn’t answer.

We looked away for two seconds. Something happened in the water. A near miss between a swimmer and surfer maybe. Two seconds. A seagull swooped down and plucked out the baby’s left eye. Like it was nothing more than a french fry. He wailed. We screamed. the bird screeched.

We waited for the ambulance. Waited to see a doctor. Waited during the surgery. Still in our bathing suits. Sat on the plastic chairs in the waiting room. Shivering.

“Maybe we should have just thrown him into the ocean,” one of us said, hours later. “Am I terrible for thinking that?”

He liked to wile away his time. Knowing that wasn’t how it was spelled, but liking the idea of tricking time to shuffle on by.

“That’s no way to live,” the old timer at his elbow, both belly up to the bar, said after he slurred out his theory.

“Or that’s what someone else should tell you.”

The bartender asked if they wanted to roll dice for shots.

“Gotta do something, clock’s watching. Ain’t that right?” the old timer said and winked.

Later time got had its revenge, as it stopped moving after he texted someone he probably shouldn’t have.

Once home, Toad wondered if maybe he could have surreptitiously slipped a sock from his laundry bag, so the woman walking her dog towards him would find it and hopefully holler he’d lost something.

Later at the bar, after the sun and the rain, twice over, people tried to talk to him, ask him what he was reading, draw him away, but he was twenty pages from the end, and these weren’t the people he wanted to speak to.

Even later, a toddler ran around the playground, barking like a dog, while his father asked him what was the matter.

There was wine and writing. But later, once they and the words dried up, and he’d finished the half bottle from yesterday, he’d have to wax and waterproof his boots. He’d been meaning to do it for weeks.

Earlier he heard a song he had loved and completely forgotten until just now when he heard it. And he wondered why that was. That you can just forget. Something like that. Then later. Boots still not waxed, by the way, he wondered if maybe we didn’t forget on purpose so one day, sometime, we could find it and be amazed again.

first it was gloomy brown
then it was so sunny he could stand on the balcony for the time it took to smoke
then it was the grey storm that looks worse from a bus
it cleared up again
then it was a blizzard. with the kind of flakes that stick to your coat and pants and anything they touch and everyone is covered after walking down the block
or it might be more appropriate to say they’d
emerge. that’s what it really was. because it was snowing so much and everyone was covered you couldn’t tell what was what.

A gaggle flew by complaining how they should have left long ago, before the snow fell and has been falling since yesterday. The first real dump and still white enough to reflect the street lights back into the sky so that what would be usually be pitch black was something more like dusk.

Coyote stubbed out his cigarette and figured he’d enjoy it.

The last couple months had been dark enough already. It was as if the sudden heavy the snow had landed on the raised seat of his inner teetertotter and made him feel just a little bit lighter.