the man who sensed him. When the man turned, he was hard in all the places where the woman was soft. Leathered, crevassed skin twitched on his face. Steely gray eyes burned over a mouth that started gnashing up and down. As Kris backed away, the boy ran to him and stood between the two. The woman appeared from the house and ran to take up a place next to the boy. With her back to him, Kris couldn’t see what happened. But eventually, the color in the man’s face reduced to a soft pink. The woman led Kris from the garage. When they were out of the hard man’s sight, she pointed back toward the garage and shook her head. The woman trusted Kris with Little Bear, in whom he sensed a kindred remoteness. Their play was simple, usually involving a chase, the dog harrying them at every step. When the boy grew bored, he followed Kris through the bosque. They leaned over the river, minnows and catfish caressing their hands buried in the water. They sat in cottonwood trees, playing with the lengthening cotton beards hanging from pods. When coyote scent alerted Kris to a den, he showed the boy where glimmering yellow eyes peered out from a dark hollow. And Kris tried to point to the differences in the sun’s light as it reflected off something. Such a reflection caught Kris’s attention the day of the accident as the car swerved up Highway 67 toward Little Bear. No longer playing a game, Kris ran like never before. But the boy saw it as a new challenge, looking over his shoulder just enough to see his pursuer but not the approaching car. Pumping his little legs at the pedals with a new urgency, his wild dark hair fluttered in the wind. The sticky asphalt, softening in the summer heat, grabbed at Kris’s feet and the dog nipped and nudged him. He had pulled even with the bicycle and was reaching out to grab the boy, when he felt the air around him change. There is a vacuum that surrounds a collision, as though the atmosphere is inhaling in anticipation. The bicycle crumpled and Little Bear was pulled down out of reach. Kris stepped back as the car slid around him, the driver’s eyes bulging at him through the car’s side window. Before the car skidded to rest on the dusty shoulder, Kris
SIXFOLD FICTION SUMMER 2016
Mac McCaskill
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