Fog Wolf

A spin off of Carl Sanburg's poem "Fog" and inspired by almost true events.

The fog comes on

little cat feet.

 

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

 

Carl Sandburg

 

 

It was a good thing they took him out when they did because even before they got home it started to rain and he hated walking in the rain. The woman shrieked and giggled as the wind blew the cold rain under the collar of her coat and she rushed ahead. The man, tethered to the dog as he was, was slowed down. As soon as all three of them, man, dog, woman, made it to the porch the clouds really let go.

 

It can only rain like that in Florida. One second the only hint that a storm was on the horizon was scuddy swift moving clouds running like tattered shrouds across the full moon and the next you couldn’t see for rain. The palm trees bent nearly in half and thrashed in the wind, losing fronds and smacking into the walls violently. Later, the damages would be calculated. For now, the small family of three went inside to get warm and dry.

 

It rained all night.

 

In the morning, the woman woke up first and looked out into the slate gray wall of water still coming down. It was unnaturally dark in the house because of the rain. It looked like seven in the morning and it was already ten. The rain should have cooled everything down, but this was Florida, it was muggy and sticky.

 

“Come on, puppy,” she called spiritedly to the dog. He opened one eye from his spot on the bed and looked outside the window, assessed the situation, and rolled over. The woman laughed as one would laugh at a small child.

 

“I guess you have the right idea,” she said. “Hopefully, it’ll stop raining soon.”

 

She got out of bed, leaving her two sleeping boys under the covers, and went to make a cup of tea and butter some toast. She was reading the slightly damp newspaper when her husband meandered into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and yawning.

 

“Has he been out yet?”

 

“He wouldn’t go out with me,” she said.

 

He sighed.

 

“Fine, I’ll try, then.”

 

She shrugged and went back to her newspaper. It was still raining hard and she knew that the dog wouldn’t go out. It took her husband fifteen minutes of asking, cursing, threatening, coddling, and begging for him to come to the same conclusion.

 

“Fine, mutt, if you don’t want to go out I can’t make you,” he said. He took a shower and got dressed and they started the day.

 

They couldn’t go anywhere without getting wet so they stayed inside all day. He drew and she wrote. In the afternoon they watched TV. Periodically during the day, when they thought the incessant rain had let up a little, they tried to get the dog to go pee, but were unsuccessful.

 

The cat, too, came inside. The two of them, brothers only when it was cold or rainy out, curled up next to each other and slept all day, pausing only to bathe every once in a while.

 

“At least the cat has a litter box,” she said.

 

“He’ll go out when he needs to,” he said.

 

It was dark outside now and the dog had been not been out for nearly twenty-four hours. Even that was too much for one small dog, as determined as he was, and so when they weren’t looking he lifted his leg on the tile in the mud room.

 

“Damn it!” the man cursed. He raised his hand to spank the dog, then saw him cowered, tail between his legs, and stopped. He lowered his hand with a sigh and the woman grabbed the mop.

 

“At least he went on the tile and not the carpeting,” she said.

 

“Yeah, but damn it, why couldn’t he just pee off the porch?”

 

She put the mop away and touched his arm.

 

“Well, you don’t have to pee in the rain, do you?”

 

 

The next morning it was still raining. The drains were full of dirt and leaves now and the water was coming up to the backyard. The huge communal trash bins were floating down the river that had once been their alley.

 

The dog refused to go out again. He whimpered and looked worried every time they tried to go near his leash hanging by the door. They tried to let him out but he stuck fast to the tile and stayed indoors. He peed on the floor and went back to bed as they cleaned it up.

 

The cat was getting restless, too. He paced around the house, looking out the different windows as if he were going to see a different scene out of one of them. He meowed until the woman picked him up and held him to her lap to pet him and he fell asleep purring.

 

It was another productive day for them. Thankfully it was the weekend and they didn’t have to work. So, they stayed indoors and played chess. He won. Then, made love sometime in the

afternoon and went to bed early.

 

Sometime in the night something screamed once. The sharp cry was over so quickly that the woman, who was a light sleeper, didn’t have time to register what it had been that disturbed her sleep. She woke up in a panic but could hear nothing in the darkness. She decided it had been a bad dream that she couldn’t remember, went to the bathroom, and went back to bed.

 

She was asleep before the thing in the night growled at her window.

 

 

“He needs to go out,” the man said. He woke up determined. The poop on the mud room floor and the stench of pee had made him determined. The dog would go out. This was getting ridiculous.

 

“All right, I’ll go with you,” the woman said.

 

She had to go to work in this weather and she wasn’t looking forward to it so she was avoiding the reality. She put on her coat and galoshes and grabbed the leash.

 

“Come on, puppy, come on, sweetheart,” she said. She bent over, tapping her leg, talking spiritedly.

 

The dog wasn’t convinced.

 

“Come on, baby,” she said.

 

He inched forward.

 

More coddling, more baby talk, and finally he allowed her to attach the leash to his collar. She beamed, hopeful, and opened the door with confidence. Even her confidence wavered as she looked at the wall of water coming down. It was a white curtain, the backside of a waterfall. She hesitated and the dog noticed and the porch was as far as he’d go. He peed on the cement and turned around to go back inside.

 

“Well,” she said. “At least he went outside.”

 

“That’s something, anyway,” the man said. He kissed her and they laughed when they unhitched the leash and the dog streaked back inside, shaking the wet off him.

 

They walked inside, too, and didn’t see the dark shape in the rain.

 

 

The rain finally stopped around sunset and the scuddy fast moving clouds were bright like an oil painting by the Highwaymen. The man and the woman stood out on their front porch and watched as the sun went down in a purplish haze. He held her by the waist and she leaned into him, sighing. The dog was inside, whimpering, they ignored him. There are perfect moments in the world, they don’t have to be in French chateaus or Italian vineyards, but they are fleeting.

 

The rain had pushed dirt and water far up into their yard. A thick layer of this compost obscured the neatly laid out garden. They didn’t mind. The dirt would settle and the plants would push through it. Tomorrow the man would clear the sidewalk.

 

The thick fog rolled in a little while later. The two of them had never seen the fog that thick in their lives. It was a living thing roiling over them and illuminated eerily sepia as if by sulfurous gaslights. The woman felt as if she were looking out into Victorian London. She laughed but it made her uneasy. A lot of things could be hidden in fog that thick.

 

“I’m going to take the dog out for a walk,” the man said.

 

The woman opened her mouth to say ‘in this?’ and closed it.

 

“Sure, I’ll go with you.”

 

“You don’t have to.”

 

She knew she didn’t have to, but now she wanted to, just to make her feel more confident, less scared. After all, she was being silly, wasn’t she? The eeriness of the fog was just making her uneasy but they lived in a well-lit, well-populated, and affluent neighborhood. Their neighbor to the left of them was a computer programmer, the one to the right, she thought, was something in the medical field. These were not scary people.

 

She shrugged on her coat. It wasn’t cold out, it was actually a little muggy, but she felt she needed the extra layer, like when she was a young girl and thought the blanket would protect her from the monsters. The man didn’t say anything though he was thinking that she must be in one of her moods.

 

“Come on, mutt,” he said to the dog.

 

The dog was sleeping on the chair in the living room and opened one eye. He seemed to shake his head and then closed his eye and went back to sleep. He was feigning it, though, the man could see, his ears were pricked up and alert.

 

“Come on, let’s go for walkies,” the woman said. The dog’s ears pricked even higher at the beloved sound but he didn’t move.

 

“It’s not raining anymore, silly, let’s go,” the man said. The dog didn’t seem to care. The man, impatient, grabbed the dog by the collar and gave him a gentle tug. The dog obeyed and jumped off the chair, shaking himself as if he had just woken up from a long nap.

 

“Let’s go for a walk around the school,” the woman said to the dog. He wagged his tail hesitantly but didn’t move towards the back door. “Come on.”

 

“Puppy, let’s go,” the man said. He grabbed the collar again and the dog whimpered but had to follow. They wrestled the leash onto the metal ring and opened the door into the fog which had become even thicker than it had been earlier. The man stepped into it without thinking but the woman hesitated, her eyes skirting the sides of the porch where something seemed to be moving. The dog sensed it, too, or sensed her hesitation, and stopped, sat down and whined.

 

The man stopped and looked back.

 

“What’s wrong with you two?” he asked. He was impatient. He didn’t want to be out here, either, and was being held up by them.

 

“Nothing, I just thought - I thought I saw something,” she said.

 

“What?”

 

“Nothing it was a trick of the light,” she said. She stepped closer to him to show him that she wasn’t afraid, that it had been nothing. He tugged on the dog, who slowly obeyed.

 

The cat stepped out from shadows and stood just in the light and stared at them. He stared at the dog and the dog stared at him, neither of them moving. The cat’s back was ramrod straight and his tail curled gently around his feet. He didn’t blink.

 

The woman, because maybe she was in one of her moods, thought he looked like a martyr who had just announced his sin and was waiting for the sword to fall. She shivered.

 

“Let’s just go for a quick walk tonight,” she said before she thought the words.

 

The man nodded. He tugged at the dog and they set out into the fog.

 

The thing detached himself from the dark and followed them.

 

 

The dog behaved himself on the walk and the cat stayed unnaturally close, not bounding ahead reveling in his freedom. The man and the woman didn’t speak. There was no sound on this walk. Even their footsteps were distant and too soft. They felt as if they weren’t walking at all, but maybe floating along, already ghosts. It was an eerie feeling and the man, especially, felt like taking off his shoes to feel the ground just to make sure. He didn’t.

 

They both strained their ears to hear something but there was nothing to hear. The dog and the cat would have been able to tell them that this thing made no sound. It had no smell. It was nothing.

 

The dog peed but it was mechanical, something expected of him that he did to keep up appearances, whistling in the dark, he took no pleasure in it. His instincts were to not to leave his scent, and so not relieve his bladder or bowels, but he knew better with this. He knew that It saw him, smelled him, knew where he was. He knew it was hopeless. The cat, too, knew it, and he walked quietly with the knowledge.

 

They also knew when it would attack.

 

The humans didn’t know this. They saw the light of their porch coming through the dense fog, a lighthouse beacon, tiny but just as powerful on this night. They felt like the ancient sailors when they saw the lighthouse light, a lifting of spirits, a buoyancy, they smiled, even chuckled. They didn’t understand, then, the slight hesitation in the gait of the cat, or why the dog paused to sniff one last smell. They tugged him away in their haste to reach the house and the safety of that light in the roiling sea of fog.

 

They were one step away from that tiny circle of light when it separated from the shifting gray. A gray thing with sulfurous yellow eyes. The woman screamed once and woke their neighbor who decided it had been a bad dream and went to pee.

 

And the fog on silent wolf feet moved on.

Reviews

[Larry Dyson]

hmm...back and forth like watching a bad game of table tennis.. fog illuminates the darkness of IT..nice play on the eerieness of the otside..and weather reinforces the feelings of quiet dred..nice one..