The Garnering by Dylan T. Bosworth

The Garnering by Dylan T. Bosworth

Just after dawn, the clock chimed for six in the morning, and my knees and back were already screaming. My livelihood was on the line, though, so an early rise was what the day called for. My joints having their way with my nervous system was only slightly drowned out by the dread looming over the day that I couldn’t rightly explain.

I sipped my coffee looking through the window at John. He was a good kid. I smiled, thinking how overnight he seemed to wake up bigger and stronger than me. I watched as he saddled the horses, brushing them out, and checking the pads before laying them on. He tightened their straps like I showed him, sinching the front before the back, and leaving a little slack on the rear girth. Everything looked straight from where I stood, and the horses seemed happy, albeit a bit restless.

 The sun already had the sweat forming above his brow shimmering like diamonds when he turned just right—reminding me of when the kids were just kids and they’d have their papers and crafts all over the living room floor, not a stitch of furniture or skin in sight that wasn’t covered in glitter.

Back then, the coffee I was drinking would have had a few splashes of whiskey in it, Laura calling it Irish. I’d be watching the sun come up just like this, trying to chase the hangover from the night before away, and my head would be screaming at me with John and Angie running around, their mom putting on breakfast for them while I looked out the window. Laura, she would keep shooting me these nervous glances, wondering when my poise was going to break. Wondering when I was going to snatch John up by his arm and slap him around, telling him, “You’re not my son,” or some other thing about how he didn’t look enough like me.

Hell, even almost a grown man, he still didn’t look like me, and he knew it. Where his face was thin and angular, mine was round and gruff. I’d always had this sandy sort of red hair that seemed to bleach out in the sun, and John’s was black as the country night.

Angie, my daughter, my sweet little girl, she was married a few years now, living in the city with a few kids of her own. She had my red hair. My face, especially how the brow hung over the eyes. She looked just like me—my little twin, people used to say—and now, all her kids looked like that too.

John wasn’t mine. Of this, I’d never been surer. I used to tie one on and get madder and madder, seething and raging all over the house about it. Grabbing Laura up by her shoulders, shaking her, like trying to rattle the truth out of her downturned mouth. If John was unlucky enough to try to be brave for his Momma, he’d get the back of my hand square across his jaw.

There was an old cow hand I used to hang around with when Laura and I had first gotten hitched, and I brought him on under me when I got my own ranch going. I got my start courtesy of Laura’s daddy and all his oil money that’s passed through his family since, shoot, a hundred and thirty years ago.

Anyway, that boy’s name was Michael, and his hair was so black it looked blue in some light. He was big, a whole head taller than me, and wide. I don’t mean wide like overweight, either. I mean wide like a door. Thin, but roped with muscle, and shoulders like cannon balls.

Wide like John.

One day I woke up, and Michael’s truck was gone and Laura was sat at the kitchen table crying her eyes out. I told her it would be all right, and that we’d make things work, same as we always had, but I couldn’t get her to stop. To just calm down and see it wasn’t so bad, just us working the ranch. Angie, my girl, she was two at the time and Christ, I got so far behind on the work trying to look after her on my own with all the crying Laura was doing, I almost told her to leave. That’s when she told me she was pregnant.

I’m not a smart man. Never claimed to be. So when she told me that, I chalked all her crying up to hormones raging through her body, and I didn’t think about Michael until 8 months later when he was spat out.

I took one look at that boy, and I swear, the look Laura gave me told me everything I needed to know. John was born with that long face, that jet black hair, and none of my Goddamn Neanderthal-eyebrow, cave-dweller good looks.

No matter how much I screamed, Laura never gave in. John was mine, and that’s just the way it was. And Lord, I hated him for it for a long time. Laura, bless her, she stayed even as the drinking got worse. The meanness. All the times I’d wake up in the morning, not remembering anything about the night before, Laura limping around with her eye swollen shut, she never left.

Even now, watching John with the horses, I had to bite back tears thinking about that. I’d come to forgive Laura over time, but never Michael. Never him. As far as I was concerned now, John was mine. More mine even than he was Laura’s. He wasn’t just the boy I’d raised or some working hand, no, he was my best friend, too. And if Michael ever came back looking for him, like suddenly deciding to be a dad, well, I’d been waiting. Seventeen years, I’d been waiting.

& & &

With a spool of wire rolled up and strapped to Dolly’s rear, we set off while the dew was still misting in the morning heat. When I was checking up on the cattle the night before, I saw one of them must have brushed too hard against one of the fence posts and knocked a whole line of wire down.

Seemed like smart enough of an idea to wait until morning and have my boy give me a hand. These cows we were going to see never roamed too far, so I didn’t expect we’d be having to round up a bunch of the herd.

“How bad was it?” asked John, before spitting a glop of brown chew-spit down onto the hard-packed clay beneath the horses’ feet. “The fence?”

“Oh, not too bad. I’d say we got two posts to replace. Re-run some wire, and they should be right as rain.”

“You thinkin’ we need to call Uncle Cal on up? Walking into that barb, shoot, hard enough to crack over posts, we probably got one of them up there that’s pretty tore up, huh?”

“Well, we’ll see when we get on up there. You know how busy he is with Terry and Donna’s mess out past the ridge.” I shook my head. “Damn fools settin’ up in that patch.”

John spit again, not having nothing better to add, I suppose. His face said otherwise, but I let the boy be.

The Edgels who ranched the other side of Razor’s Ridge had a mishap with damming up their creek to free up a new patch of land, and they misplaced a whole slew of snakes they didn’t know were there.

Cal was up there doing what he could, but the way town was talking, didn’t sound like there was much could be done anyhow.

We rode on up the dirt path for the better part of the morning. My land stretched from the bend in the Woatan River, about 783 acres to the west crags of Beau’s Bluff, north to where the land dries up harder and goes to fallow.

This herd usually stayed close to the lane, butting up near the fence all the way down to the creek that ran north and cut east through the property. That’s where I had found them the night before. About an hour’s ride left west to the river, settling on top of the hill that ran down toward the muddy bank.

They’d stay there until there was nothing left to eat, and then they’d move on. I figured we’d have a few days before they set out for a new spot, so I was confident we could get in there and look over my cows, check them for gouges. Should be able to set the new posts and run the line before too long. Home before Laura set out supper.

John kept glancing over at me like he wanted to say something, and then he’d turn his head and spit his nasty habit in the dirt.

“All right, c’mon now. Out with whatever’s bothering you.”

John chuckled to himself, saying, “You always can tell, huh?”

I tipped my hat toward him. “What is it?” I said.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. Went to town the other day and caught up with Randall; you remember him?”

“Terry’s boy, right?”

“Yeah, that’s him.” John took off his hat and ran his hand through his black hair to wipe the sweat out. “He said it wasn’t snakes that were laming his cows.”

I hadn’t heard that one yet. There was all kinds of talk around about what was going on over at the Ridge, but most the rumors still were about snakes. Only thing that changed was how many and where they came from. Even Cal told me when I ran into him at the pharmacy. Snakes, he said. Neurotoxins and rot, heck of a thing he had going on out there, he said.

“Now, wait,” I said. “I just talked to your uncle not a week ago, and he told me about the snakes. Had to get all the boys over there out with their shotguns and clear the grass to the new dam. What do you mean it wasn’t snakes.”

“Yeah, there were snakes. Some. He said one or two cows had the bites on the legs after they really got looking into it, but that was it. Said the other ones were fine one day, and then they weren’t.”

“‘And then they weren’t’ what?”

John took his hat off again, and this time held it close to his chest. “Well, that’s what’s got me a little worried out here today, Pa. Randall said he saw them cows out there killin’ each other themselves. He said, looked like there must’ve been something in the water, making ‘em go mad like that. Said he watched one just bite the throat out of another. Some of them biting, some kicking.”

“Lord Almighty,” I said. “Some parasite, maybe? Something they stirred up when they clogged that creek?”

“Don’t know, Pa. But Randall said one day he counted twelve of ‘em missing out there. Just twelve of his herd were gone. Went looking for ‘em and found em lying dead back up by the river. Just lying there altogether, starting to rot when it couldn’t have even been a day.”

“Jesus Christ, John, why you telling me all this? What’s this got to do with our herd knocking over one damn line?”

“Shoot,” he said, and then spit again. “I’m hoping it ain’t nothing. Just weird is all. Randall said he knew those dead cows. Markings, you know? He said he saw ‘em lying dead and rotten, and the next thing he knew, they were back, those dead cows. Same markings and all. He said they were the ones doing the biting. Doing the kicking.”

I couldn’t help it. My heart was pounding in my chest. I didn’t want to believe a word of it, and if Randall had told me himself, I would have told him to sober up. But coming from John, it was different. John was a good kid. A good man. And I trusted him and his judgment.

Still…

“Randall drinking that day, John? You guys meet up at the bar?”

“Sober as a judge. I’m telling you, that’s what makes all this so strange. I haven’t seen Randall without at least a few drinks in him in, hell, ever? Not since I’ve known him—that boy’s always lettin’ a bit loose.”

John got quiet suddenly and peered off into the sky.

“You know Randall. He’d fight a cougar for looking at him wrong’s all I’m saying. He was fuckin’ scared.”

“Ay,” I said. “You watch that mouth, son.” I don’t know why I still reprimanded him—not now that he was a head taller than me and as wide as a house. Still, he listened. Gave me a sorry, dad sort of nod. That was about all I could think to say to him. Watch your mouth, like the curse was the only damn thing I heard from his whole story.

I didn’t know what to think about any of it, and I had even less to say. So along we trotted, our horses bobbing their heads and just clopping along. Oblivious to how the air seemed to change after hearing about the Edgel boy’s story.

I thought about the broken fence, something my cows hadn’t done in I don’t know how long—same time as the cows just over the ridge started acting up.

Killing each other? Had that really happened?

No. I couldn’t believe it. Randall was a drunk, and whether he seemed sober when he told that story or not, it didn’t give me any reason to take his crazy words seriously. Still, when I closed my eyes, I kept picturing coming up on my herd, all of ‘em piled up and chewed on.

I shook the thought away and spurred my mare a little faster.

& & &

When we hit the spot on the trail where my herd was grazing and the fence was hanging over, barbs dug into the ground, it was full noon, and my neck was itching under my collar.

Dust kicked up by the wind and caked to my sweat, and I was uncomfortable as all hell, made worse by the fact that now my own cows terrified me because of that drunk Edgel kid’s stories. I knew it was fool stuff, but I couldn’t help but look at ‘em cockeyed as we trotted up to the fence line.

Seven of them stood on top of the little hill that ran toward the water. They watched us while John dismounted, and I looked at the damaged wire and the broken post. Luckily it was just the one post, and the hole wasn’t ground out too much from where it toppled.

The fix would be easy, and I was glad for that, but where in the hell had the rest of the herd gone? I walked up the hill to check the seven I could see for wounds, and when I approached, they all turned their heads and looked at me in unison. It was like they were linked together on a string, some unseen hand yanking them along, all following together on that invisible marionette.

I’d be lying if I wasn’t more than a bit unnerved. And John down by the fence was feeling it as well, as even though he hadn’t said a word, he had his rifle drawn off his horse and slung over her shoulder. He looked around, holding his hand up over his brow to block out whatever sun his hat wasn’t catching, and I saw him frown.

“What is it?” I yelled down to him.

He shook his head and rubbed the scruff of his beard. “Aw, it ain’t nothin’ I guess. Looks like some of these cow tracks head on over the trail and down toward the ledges. Kind of strange here in the dirt.” He kicked at a clump of gravel, sending a gray cloud floating along in the breeze. “Almost looks like they had a scuffle. Better find ‘em before we get to fixing the fence. I’m thinkin’ they got to fighting, and that’s why the fence got knocked down. The bloodied ones headed south, it seems.”

“You got blood down there?”

He spit. “Yup.”

“Goddammit.”

The cows I was checking weren’t roughed up. No gouges or anything, but when one of them chewed its cud next to my head as I looked her over, I saw red all dried in her mouth. I didn’t want to know what kind of stuff she was grinding down, and I didn’t want John to know either. But I grabbed my rifle off my horse too and set south with my boy.

Sure enough, there were tracks, and they trailed thick drops of drying blood. I bent down and touched it, and it was still tacky.

Not too far over the brim of the trail, nestled deep in a thicket of briars, we came upon one of my bulls. He was dead, lying on his side, eyes glazed over already going white.

“Well, there’s your culprit, Pa. Look at his legs.”

Sure enough, both his hind legs were sliced to ribbons, the tendon above his hoof on the rear left side, completely cut through. I bent down for a closer look and found a section of wire with the barbs jammed to the bone.

“Looks almost like this big bastard tried to jump the fence and missed,” I said. “Caught his back legs and carried that wire down into the dirt.”

“Dad…” John started to point something out but quickly covered his mouth with the handkerchief around his neck like he was gonna spit up his breakfast.

I came around the front and saw what he was gaping at.

The bull’s throat was ripped out. Not cut like he slid his neck on the fence. It was bitten out. Chomped down on and torn away. The flesh hung there in ragged strips, and the off-white color of his windpipe stuck through the stringy mess of gore that swelled over the wound.

The flies were already on him. Taking pieces from his wound. From his open eyes, just staring up at John and me, like looking for help even in death.

A shiver went through me then. This majestic creature, strong enough to rip down a barn, just lying there. Pathetic. Broken and mutilated. These tiny uninvited critters would eat him to the bone. Reduced to nothing by a pest.

I took my hat and held it over my heart. “Goddamn shame,” I said.

“Ay, Pa.” John cleared his throat, and shakily pointed deeper into the thicket. “Looks like others went through here. You want to follow?”

I didn’t want to, but I knew I had to. If something bad like this happened to some of my others, I’d need to get ‘em to the trail, find a way to get Callum up here, like right now.

& & &

Beyond the brush was a clearing where the dried grasses and briars faded to packed dirt and brittle weeds. John and I were cut up from the thorns and itching all to hell from the crisp flakes of the dying brush and the dust that swirled through the clearing.

After braving that messy thicket to get to my cows who could be injured, I wasn’t prepared for the sight before us.

In the dirt, there were four glistening mounds that looked like mucous melting in the sun. Standing before them was one of my bulls.

“What in the—”

“You watch your mouth, boy,” It came out before I could let John finish, the scene before me making my breath weak and my concentration short. “You just stay quiet for a second, okay.”

“Ye…Yes, Pa,” he said, and I heard him click the safety off his rife.

I couldn’t explain it, but it seemed right. Like him pulling that safety made the most sense in the world as we stood in a space that made no sense at all.

That bull that stood in front of those sticky-looking blobs in the dirt was the same one that lay dead in the briars with its throat hanging out of its ruined neck.

I knew, and I wiped my eyes and squinted hard at it just to be sure I knew. It had a chip out of his left horn, and the black patch that circled his eye ran toward his chin like he was always crying. The rest of his face was white as the calcic horizons on the ledges, and I had no other bulls like that, not one.

This one here shouldn’t exist. The world spun around me, and the only thing that kept me from thinking I was dreaming was the ruby-dotted scratches that burned on my forearms.

The air seemed to suck out from my lungs, and blood pumped in my ears, quelling all the other sounds. John was talking. Hurriedly, he was talking, yelling something, but Christ I couldn’t hear what he was trying to say.

That bull in front of us, he lowered his massive head, and blew a huge gust through his snout, billowing the dust in front of him. Stamping his feet, the bull started jerking its horns upwards in a stabbing motion—each stamp of his massive hooves reverberating through the dirt, pounding in my chest so hard I couldn’t feel my heartbeat.

Suddenly, he charged.

The beast was a hair aware from goring my face with its cracked left horn, and I was frozen, unable to raise my hands in front of my tremoring body to save myself.

A great cracking BOOM shook me from my stupor. Blood sprayed in an arc across my face as the giant’s head sagged sideways and plowed into the dirt beside me, narrowly missing impaling me on itself.

Smoke rose from the end of John’s shaking rifle, and the world came back into focus like a crashing wave. My ears rang and everything sounded like I was deep underwater.

John was shaking me as the sound came back, and I heard his yelling.

“Pa. Pa!” He was saying. “Are you okay?”

I shook him off me and sat on the dirt to collect myself. I dropped my rifle I hadn’t even cocked to my side. My boy saved my life. This boy who wasn’t even my blood, he came through and protected me when I failed him so hard. I’d been failing him my whole life, and now, I couldn’t even look at him.

I froze. Why? I asked myself. Over and over, clutching my head, all I could ask myself was why. I saw the thing rearing up to charge us and I did nothing. My cow. My ranch, and this boy who wasn’t even mine, hell, wasn’t even a man yet, had saved my life.

But no, that wasn’t right. I raised this boy. Why was I even thinking about that—thinking about his momma and Michael again—how this kid didn’t have a gene of mine in his blood? It didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter.

I can’t explain it now, but it did. In that moment, all I could think about was some other man’s blood running through those veins, and it was those genes that acted. Those genes that protected us.

I swiped tears out of my dirt-strewn eyes and stood again.

“Dad?” John said.

“I’ll be all right, boy; just give me a minute.” I tried to force a laugh, but it came out weak and wrong sounding. “Ain’t every day you almost get run down by one of your dead cows.”

“I thought I was crazy,” he said. “You’re saying what I’m thinking though, right? That bull is the same as that one lying back in that patch, right, Dad?”

He walked over and peered into the hole he put in the cow’s head.

“He’s marked up the same, I swear,” John said, getting closer to the bullet hole.

From where I sat, I could only see John’s back as he looked at the bull he shot, and I had to crane my right ear toward him to hear what he was saying. The ringing in my left was so loud and piercing, I was sure then that it wouldn’t ever go away. I was surprised I didn’t have blood leaking out of my ear and down my neck, but when I reached up there, my hand came away dry.

I thought I was in shock, hallucinating, as I saw the dead bull’s legs start to move in the dirt. Not a death twitch. I’d seen that before. This was a creature waking up. Trying to stand again.

I watched, still barely able to hear as John began to stand and step backward. I tried to reach out to touch him, to guide him away from stepping on me where I sat immobile, but he kept coming. Before I could scoot out of the way, John tripped over my legs and fell on his behind.

As soon as he touched the ground, full sound came roaring back to my ears as suddenly the great bull stood and reared on its hind legs. His head where John had shot it began to split. It opened vertically and spread apart like a giant, sideways mouth—the bones of the skull twisting and sliding, snapping into place to form massive, pointed teeth that lined the new pincer jaws.

It dropped back to all fours and advanced on us, John and I scrambling to get out of its way. My boy pulled me to my feet, and just in time before the hooves could crush it, I snatched my rifle off the ground.

The bull reared up again, its new alligator-like mouth, flapping like clapping hands lined with razor-like bone. I slid the bolt of my rifle back and chambered a round as the creature fell on me, guiding its split face to devour me whole.

I used my rifle like a stake as the mouth came down around me, driving it upwards into the throat of the beast. The buttstock slammed into the ground, stopping the mouth, and I squeezed the trigger.

The cow’s tiny brain blew out the back of its fractured skull in an explosion of blood and bone. The monster collapsed to the ground, its split maw enveloping me like an open tent held up by the length of my gun.

I felt John grab my wrist and pull me out from under the thing, scraping my shoulder on one of its teeth as I slid out.

“Is it dead?” John was asking. “Is it dead?”

I slowly stood, brushing the dirt off my vest, and helped John to his feet.

“Ain’t the water,” he said, sniffing and shaking his head.

“What?” I couldn’t think straight. Nothing about this day made sense. Not one Goddamn thing, and Jesus Christ all I wanted was to run, to get on my horse and head into town, slip into the bar, and never leave that stool again. I’d drown in whiskey, and I’d drown happy to forget whatever the hell had just happened out here.

“Not a parasite from that goddamn Edgel screw up, is it?” John ripped his hat off the dirt and put it on his head. “No, that dam is miles east. Over the ridge. Nothing out here could ever touch that water, Dad. Wasn’t no Goddamn parasite. Not a snake, either.”

As John tried to reason it out, I wandered the clearing. I made my way over to where the blobs of mucous sat baking in the sun.

They were like clear sacks, like looking through a film of the thinnest flesh. The cows underneath the film distorted like they were under water. All four were the same. My cows, curled up, fetal-like, cocooned in what looked like some translucent egg.

As John processed things just out of earshot, I tried to motion him over, away from the dead monstrous thing that attacked us, over to where I was, unable to articulate what I was seeing.

The film that formed these cocoons began to shimmer and shift. They rippled, sequential waves, like responding to movement. Suddenly the mucous began to slide, sloughing off my dead cows, where it piled in the dirt.

It began to form shapes where it rippled and writhed on the ground, and it raised upward, growing in height and girth, gaining color, first cream-like, then yellow, into brown and black spotted flesh. The substance glistened as the black and white hairs began to poke through, coming out covered in slime, and the form took shape. Loud cracks and snaps made me jump as the thing’s bones shifted and snapped into place.

As John lamented over the atrocity of the dead thing lying at the edge of the clearing, I watched as a foreign jelly mutated to become another of my dead cows.

“John,” I said, slowly turning, not wanting to make sudden movements.

The cow’s eyelids opened, first showing pure white eyes that slowly rolled down to glisten with blackness that took me in, sized me up.

“John,” I said again, walking backward as the slime covering the other three dead cows began to lurch and wriggle.

The newly born mimic of a cow began to advance toward me, and I turned to run. Adrenaline fired in my veins, and blood coursed through my muscles. I exploded into a run, turning, catching John suddenly noticing, suddenly seeing what I had been trying to show him.

His eyes went wide, and he dropped his rifle and ran into the brush. I was right on his tail, but so were the cow creatures, whatever they were, and I didn’t want to look to see how close, didn’t want to slow to pick up our guns.

I jumped and loped through the brush and the briars, ripping my flesh to pieces on the pricker bushes and the dried, thatch-like veinous strands of dead brush. I could see John bobbing and ducking as he pushed through the thicket.

Behind me, the crashing slowed, and after what felt like hours of running and slicing myself, and wishing I’d worn thicker sleeves, the noise behind me stopped altogether, and I began to feel the weight of my legs, and the burn in my lungs. I slowed to a jog just as I popped out of the brush onto the berm that lined the trail.

John stood there, his hands on his hatless head. He stared down at our horses. They were covered in the thin, fleshy membranes that covered the cows, curled like uteran babies.

“What…the…” John tried to catch his breath between words, and I could see tears spill down his cheeks. “Dad,” he said. “How—”

Before he could finish his thought, something fell from the sky. I saw it as it came into my field of vision, but I couldn’t react, couldn’t even think. There wasn’t any time.

This flat disc-looking thing slid down from the sky like a coin dropped in water, and it splatted on top of my boy’s head, cutting off his words.

I jumped, heart lurching into my throat, but I sprang forward and grabbed John by his shirt as he thrashed at the thing forming to his head. I tried to grip the mucousy membrane on his face, pulling it, tearing holes in it, only for it to reform and close whatever space I had made. I could barely hear John’s screams as the air he breathed plumed the mucous into a bubble, and I watched in horror as that bubble sucked in, forming to the inside of his mouth, sliding down his throat like an open tube. I ripped my hands away as the mucous gripped my skin and tried to pull me in, too.

John collapsed to the ground, and my eyes blurred as I sobbed. My boy. My son! The sticky mass surged over his body and squeezed, folding him up, curling him into himself, and through the translucent, writhing mass, I saw John’s face contort into a final scream and go still.

The seven cows on the hill stood quietly, chewing their cud, staring apathetically. They watched as I sat next to my boy in his cocoon.

Part of me wanted to run back through the briars, grab my rifle, and stick it in my mouth. Instead, I looked to the sky, begging, pleading with my creator.

Instead of peace, instead of comfort waiting for me in the clouds as my prayers rose with the wind, I saw discs of flesh. Hundreds of them. Thousands. So many they distorted the very sky. I lay on my back and turned my head to face the slowly whitening eyes of my son who had always been mine. My boy.

& & &

A few miles to the east, Laura was working on dinner as the radio crackled from music to a grating alarm. It had been happening all morning, and this time, she shut the thing off. It was too much—to be alone waiting on her boys and to have an emergency broadcast suddenly telling everyone to stay inside. Some weather event, unseen, or something or the other.

Laura could barely listen.

She paced circles from the stove to the living room, from the window back to the kitchen, each time hoping to see John and Daniel riding up over the hill, kicking up dust as they sped back home.

Each time they weren’t there, she worried even harder, to the point where she grabbed hot pans without a mitt and mistook her sugar for salt.

After a while, she had her roast keeping warm in the oven, her veggies snug under a warm towel, and she sat on the porch and watched the beginnings of dusk rolling over the grassy fields.

She wiped her tears with the back of her hand and blew her nose. Just as she stood to go inside, she heard the familiar clop-clop-clop of a trotting horse. A single rider appeared over the hill and galloped down the path to her door, and she stood on the porch peering in the dim light, trying to see if John was on the back of what surely was Daniel’s Dolly, with her oversized saddle bags and that spool of wire still clinging on.

As the rider approached, his face seemed to shimmer in the low light of the coming dark, and when he passed through the shadows, Laura saw that sleek black hair she could never forget. That jaw line that drove her crazy as a girl. Michael didn’t look like he had aged a day.

* * * *THE END * * * *
Copyright Dylan T. Bosworth 2024