Stray Bullet in Dry Season

(content warning for gun violence and gore)

When the howling started, no one questioned
it. How it echoed across ravaged fields, 
cut through pine and oak, sat at our door 
and hummed against the windows—
We had all been praying for rain, 
for the crops to somehow unfold themselves
from the cracked clay. Desperate cries,
familiar: the animals and the plants too, 
everything pleading for the sky to open. 
When my sister and I became afraid 
of the sound, we were told it was coyotes, 
but everyone knew the woman down the road 
had locked her dogs in the barn for weeks. 
Knew the howling only stopped in the early 
part of the morning as if the sun slipping 
through old wood gave the dogs hope 
someone was coming. We didn’t know 
the woman was dead. Rotting in her kitchen, 
blood and brain spreading across the linoleum, 
filling in the cracks of her uneven floor. 
Clicked by a firing pin miles away, a bullet 
missed its target, found its way through her 
open window, her skull—no broken glass 
or scream, so magnolia leaves drifted in 
and haloed her crumpled body, clung 
to the dish soap crusted on her hands—
she was like a painting, something about how life 
switches off without warning, or how trees that fall 
with no one around still thunder and quake, or maybe, 
something about the kitchen sink and how it never
stopped running and the dogs, still howling.

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