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  • Cryptozoology
  • Patrick Lane (bio)

I. Shelter

Provenance Island, Florida

When Hurricane Gunther came through, Paul Coble, his wife, and their three-month-old daughter evacuated across the causeway to the mainland with everyone else who lived on the island. Because of the baby, Cynthia insisted that they drive the two hours up to Sarasota to stay with her parents rather than go to Fuller Warren High School, their local shelter. By evening, the storm had moved on to starve itself on the Carolinas, and Paul drove back to see if their house was still there.

They had disagreed that morning over where they should go. Paul had been up on the extension ladder trying to get the back windows covered against the approaching storm while Cynthia badgered him from the patio doorway, Dina cradled in her arms. The plywood panels he was using had warped from their previous exposures to the weather, and he had to wrestle them into position. He would get one corner into place and the other would pop out; the task was not unlike arguing with his wife, except that he could eventually get the wood to bend.

Of course, Paul knew that the shelter was not the best place to care for an infant, a delicate, squishy little bundle of needs. Never mind that going to Cynthia's parents put them at a considerable distance from their threatened home. Never mind that, alone, Paul would have to negotiate the drive back down the battered coast to check the damage. The storm had hit the shoreline hard, but passed quickly. If they had been at the shelter, he could have been at his house twenty minutes after the initial all-clear, when it was still light out. But no, Cynthia was right. Dina's welfare was a trump card. Those were the rules of the game.

The drive down was more or less as bad as Paul had expected. The power was out in most places, which turned a lot of the small-town intersections into free-for-alls. But, fortunately, traffic was light. He crossed the causeway around ten o'clock. The gas station was dark, the roads were empty. As he pulled onto his street, with its wide lots [End Page 17] carved out of marshland, the houses set far back, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was the only person on the island.

He had to park on the gravel shoulder in front of his house because a large piece of plywood lay across the driveway. That was a bad sign. The panel was the size of his patio door, which is what it should have still been covering. A couple of long wood screws stuck out of two of its corners. He dragged it onto the lawn. The ground all the way up to the house was spongy and made hungry sucking sounds as he walked across it, the grass glistening in the circle of his flashlight.

He had to put his shoulder to the front door to pop it open, it had become so swollen with moisture. The house was doomed; bad wood, the whole thing. His only hope was to sell it within a couple of years. Even then, he and Cynthia would barely recoup the closing costs, if they were lucky.

Paul waited for his eyes to adjust, but the living room remained completely dark except for the faint rectangle where one half of the sliding patio doors was uncovered and unprotected. Outside, the night was dim and storm-washed, the patio door discernible only as a hint of navy against the flat black interior. Paul flicked the flashlight's beam across the floor, the coffee table, the sofa and loveseat. The place was a wreck, stuff everywhere. But the door wasn't broken. The room was still. This was their own mess, the baby's mess. No insurance claim would take care of that.

Crossing over to the doors, Paul's foot came down on some small thing, lumpy and plastic, and he stumbled and cracked his shin on the edge of the coffee table. He barked; he bellowed. A pacifier or toy or other typical...

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