Coyote Night, by Brooke Martin

Coyotes Came Out of The Desert, by George Hibi Matsusaburo (USA b. Japan) 1945

​Coyote Night 
 
They prowl and hunt only at night. I hear their distant howls coming from the mesa. When the pack kills a sheep or jackrabbit, I absorb the deafening yelps from the death throes of their prey. I shiver in the bunk I share with my younger sister.  She tugs at our blanket. The oil lamp on the table burns low where my weary father sits in the evening to read the news in Japanese about the war. How I long to return to our fruit farm. To eat a sun ripened peach. To play my flute in my high school orchestra. To laugh until I cry with my girlfriends. The sudden howling at our doorstep wakes us all up. I scramble to the end of my bunk, rub the frosty window and peer out. I see lamps turn on in other barracks. The coyotes are prowling around in the packed snow outside our door. Their teeth are bared as they snarl at each other. My stomach tightens. The biggest coyote claws our doorstep. He must have smelled the bit of meat my mom cooked for us tonight over the lamp. The piece I stole from the guards’ scraps in the garbage bin. The four of us shared the scrap. Now the pack is barking, jumping at our door, lunging at our windows. The night guard hears the commotion. He lumbers across the road carrying a heavy tool. He stops under the streetlamp to get a better look, then breaks into a belly laugh. It’s all so amusing to know we are locked inside, frightened of the rapacious coyotes.  A cunning gleam in his eyes. The guard breaks open our door with his pickax.
 
Brooke Martin

As a baby, Brooke camped out in an oxygen tent with pneumonia. In kindergarten, she contracted mononucleosis, in grad school Rocky Mountain Spotted fever, as a young mother pharyngal conjunctival fever virus then Legionnaire’s disease a couple years later. She never got Covid. Go figure. Becoming a grandma was the impetus to write her stories. Brooke backed into an ekphrastic poetry class because flash fiction was full. Now she’s inventing ways to break walls between forms and create new ones. Brooke spent ten years as a docent at the Chazen Museum of Art. Her chapter “Ardent Rivals: Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin” was published in Creativity and Madness: Psychological Studies of Art and Artists Vol 3, AIMED Press. She divides her time between Madison, WI, Eugene, OR and traveling with her Argentine tango dance shoes.