Coyotes
David McArthur
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2026 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
Out here the nights are stitched together by sound—the low hum of crickets, the occasional groan of a generator on a neighboring property, and somewhere in the canyon, the coyotes. They start with a quick, sharp yip, an opening note like a matchstick scraped across stone. Then another voice joins, and another, until the dark becomes a choir of questions. My dog Ginger, now older than me in her own way, lifts her head but doesn't bark. She knows the difference between a threat and a conversation.
I stand on the deck barefoot, letting the boards cool my feet. The air smells of dust and white sage, the faint sweetness of tiny flowers dotting the open canyon in front of me. The sky is clean tonight—the kind that keeps its stars steady, bright. I listen to the coyotes trace the ridgeline, their calls ricocheting off the slopes in patterns I've almost learned to read. Some nights I can tell when they're hunting, their voices short and urgent. Other nights they meander, stopping to answer one another as if they're keeping roll.
I tell myself I'm only listening to them, but that's never the truth. My mind wanders the same direction theirs do—down the canyon, toward the city where the air glows orange and the sounds never settle. Somewhere in that sprawl my son, Colin, moves like a shadow with no fixed address, sleeping or not sleeping on sidewalks still warmed from the day's sun, in alleys that vibrate with the hum of transformers, behind dumpsters that smell of grease and sour milk.
He texts at odd hours—never predictable, always brief.
They're watching me.
Do you think this is a simulation?
The voices say I'm an angel.
His messages land in my phone like small collisions, quick spikes of light. I read them in bed, on job sites, at red lights, standing in this same doorway at dusk. I never know what state he's in when he sends them—fear, mania, loneliness, some place in his mind I'll never reach. He's twenty-two now, but in these moments I feel like I'm listening for the cry of a child lost somewhere in a forest he doesn't recognize.
The coyotes shift downslope, their howls thinning into distance. Ginger relaxes again. I exhale, not realizing I'd been holding my breath.
When he was little, he used to stand beside me on this very deck, feet dirty from running barefoot in the yard, hands cupped around his mouth as he threw his voice toward the ridge. It always amazed him that the coyotes sometimes answered. His eyes would stun open—astonished, reverent, certain the world had singled him out.
They think I'm one of them, he whispered once, pressing his shoulder into mine.
Back then everything was answerable. Every shadow on the hillside held meaning, every echo carried a message, every sound returned to you if you waited long enough. But now his messages come splintered, full of angles, impossible to assemble into anything whole. I read them three times, five sometimes, searching for a familiar thread. I send back what I can—I'm here. Where are you? Can I come get you?—but the replies, when they come at all, don't match the questions.
Tonight I walk the fence line to ease the restlessness. The ground is still warm from the day. The moon is low and thick, stuck in the branches of a large manzanita tree, like it's still deciding if it'll rise. My phone stays dark. I check it anyway.
It wasn't always like this. For years he slept in the room closest to ours. I used to wake to the sound of his breathing through the wall—a steady, soft rhythm. That's the kind of innocence you don't realize is innocence until the house no longer holds it.
Sometimes I try to remember the exact moment things began to shift. Not the first strange comment, not the first sleepless night, not even the first paranoia—those were ripples, not waves. The real beginning was quieter, the air around him changing one day without announcing it. A withdrawal. A distancing. A slight tilt in the way he looked at us, like we were standing half a step outside of reality.
One afternoon he asked me, "Do you think we're in a movie? Like someone's watching us?"
He said it casually, the way someone might ask whether rain is coming. I laughed at first, thinking he was joking, but he wasn't. His eyes searched mine for an answer that could steady him. I told him no, this was as real as it gets, but the relief I hoped to see didn't show.
I didn't understand then the scale of what was coming.
The coyotes erupt again, closer now, their voices braided into a frantic cadence. The dog stands, hackles raised, unsure whether this is the kind of sound that requires movement. I lean down and put a hand on her back. She immediately calms.
I whisper my son's name into the dark.
Just a breath.
A way of reminding the night we haven't forgotten each other.
The sound doesn't carry far.
But it's enough for me. A proof to myself that I still care.
The wind slows. The world settles. A moth bumps against the porch light, stunned, then tries again.
I lean against the railing and let myself picture him as he was at ten, barefoot, skin tanned dark. He was always more interested in being outside than playing video games with his brothers. I remember watching as he ran down the hill with his arms open like he thought air might lift him. The first time he cried out after hearing a coyote yelp—he thought it was hurt, thought we should go find it and help. I told him the wild has its own rules, its own ways of healing or not healing, and that we're just visitors here. He didn't like that answer. He wanted every creature reachable.
I didn't know then that I was teaching him something I'd later have to learn myself.
The city is loud even at night. Not loud like music or traffic, but loud in the way a migraine hums beneath the skull, the way fluorescent lights buzz when you've looked at them too long. When I drive down to find him, the air feels dense, metallic. People drift along the sidewalks in loose, uncertain lines—some talking to themselves, some arguing with the sky, some trying to outrun whatever lives inside them.
He blends in and doesn't.
He moves with purpose until he doesn't.
He looks like someone searching for a door only he can see.
One afternoon he texted me a location—a corner near a trolley stop. When I pulled up, he stood with his hood up despite the heat, swaying slightly, eyes tracking a pattern in the air. I got out, holding a paper towel–wrapped sandwich his mom made for him and a bottle of water like peace offerings.
"You need to eat," I said.
He took the sandwich, weighed it in his hand like something suspicious. Then, without warning, dropped it in the street into a rare San Diego puddle. Remnants of an earlier drizzle.
"There is something wrong with it," he said. "Even the rats won't eat it."
The sandwich dissolved slowly, the bread turning to pulp. He watched it with a kind of grim certainty, as if the world had proven him right.
"I just ate one," I said. "I'm fine."
"That's what you think," he whispered. "You just don't understand them."
"Who?" I asked.
He blinked at me, startled that I didn't already know. Then he shook his head hard, as if clearing a fog.
He walked away quickly, pulled by something stronger than hunger. I didn't follow. There's a point where following becomes pursuit, and pursuit becomes threat. I've learned to stay still when every instinct tells me to grab him and bring him home.
Other times he sends messages like confessions dropped through a crack in a door:
They say I'm an angel.
Do you think I'm an angel?
When he asked that last question, I could picture him exactly—shoulders hunched, hands rubbing together, eyes confused but hopeful, searching for evidence that the voice he heard wasn't lying to him. I wanted to tell him he isn't anything except a kid punished with a life he didn't ask for and certainly didn't deserve. I wanted to tell him he wasn't an angel, he was my son, and that should've been enough.
But I typed out something gentler:
I think your mind is telling you stories because it's scared.
He never responded.
There are moments, though—brief, flickering—when he seems to rise toward himself again. The time he texted, asking that I come see him. Standing by the lot at Petco Park, holding a paper bag filled with snacks and trinkets intended as gifts. He presented it like a treasure before walking away without explanation. The night he asked if I remembered the old deck and the coyotes answering him. The morning he said he'd had a dream where we were all on Aunt Christy's boat at her lake house, though he couldn't recall when exactly we were there for real.
These glimpses are dangerous. They make me believe he's within reach.
And then he slips away again.
The descent didn't happen in a clean line. It wasn't a steady slope. It was painfully slow, incidents strung into months into years. It was a series of clues, some small enough to ignore, others unavoidable. Lies became visible. Problems at school. Pills and liquor missing. Then the real collapse—the one my body still remembers whether I want it to or not—came suddenly, without warning, like a trapdoor opening beneath us.
He'd spent the day working with me. He was calm, even helpful. He'd walked to the store on his own and bought me an iced tea, my favorite brand. A gesture so odd and earnest it disarmed me. We ate dinner together. He laughed once, at something small. It felt like breathing after being underwater too long. He was making progress. We all went to bed and the house settled, the way houses do when they're tired. Somewhere in the night a sound cracked through the quiet—sharp, unrecognizable. A yell, then the crash of something heavy hitting the floor.
By the time I reached the hallway, another sound came—high, panicked, animal. It was in Colin's room. My wife shot upright behind me. His brother opened his door, confused and blinking.
When I pushed open his door, he shot past me with a force I didn't know he had. His face was drained of recognition; his eyes were rolling, unfixed. He punched the air in front of me, then a fist found my wife as she stepped forward by instinct, then our other son before any of us even knew what was happening.
Everything after that was motion—brutal, frantic motion. I grabbed him around the chest and he bucked, thrashed, kicked at everything within reach. The room exploded with sound: glass shattering, furniture tumbling, fists pounding into drywall. He bit into my arm, teeth sinking so deep the bruise rose instantly, black at the center. His nails raked across my back. He lunged for the broken mirror, maybe for a shard, maybe for nothing but direction.
I pulled him down with all the strength I had. Thirty minutes passed like that—thirty minutes that felt like a half marathon. My breath was ragged, my limbs shaking, sweat and blood mixing on my skin. I could feel his heart hammering against my chest, fast and desperate, as if trying to escape his own body.
My wife was on the phone, voice high with fear, calling for police and paramedics. His brothers helped hold his feet by sitting on his legs, trembling in their confusion.
When the officers arrived—five of them—it still took everything they had to restrain him. His body fought without intention, without direction, pure storm. When they pinned him, he bit the leg of the wooden table, teeth grinding into it until splinters littered the floor.
They carried him out like a man caught in a current. And then the house went silent in a way I've never heard since.
At the hospital they found no drugs in his system.
None.
Nothing external caused what we saw.
When he woke the next morning, cuffed to the bed, he didn't remember a thing. He looked at the swelling in his hands, the cuts on his knuckles, the bruises around his ribs as if seeing them on a stranger. He asked me what had happened, voice fragile, bewildered.
He asked if someone had attacked him. He asked if the cops had beaten him for no reason. He asked if the memories were stolen.
I answered slowly, carefully, like speaking near a wound.
"You weren't yourself," I said. He looked at me with a mix of shame and disbelief, as if the explanation made less sense than the hallucinations.
I showed him the pictures.
He shook his head, confused, ashamed, disbelieving.
"Dad...I didn't do that."
And for the first time in my life, I didn't know how to answer him.
You can love someone and still know you cannot live under the same roof anymore.
People don't talk about that part of parenthood—the line you pray you'll never have to draw, the one that says I will not surrender you, but I will not sacrifice everyone else to save you.
We came home after the hospital, but the house didn't feel full anymore. Every noise at night jolted me upright—the creak of the floorboards, the click of the refrigerator, the soft sigh of the air conditioner. My body responded before my mind did. I would sit there in the dark, chest tight, listening for a danger that was no longer there but had once moved through our hallway with impossible strength.
For months afterward, I carried that night in my muscles. My back flinched at sudden noises. My arm ached where he'd bitten me. My dreams replayed the thud of bodies hitting walls, the violent arc of motion, the moment I knew I was wrestling something none of us could see. My wife slept lightly too, waking at whispers of sound. Sometimes I found her sitting on the couch before dawn, hands clasped, staring at nothing. The younger boys walked around quietly, not wanting to step on memories. Trauma rearranges houses. It leaves corners you avoid, rooms that feel haunted even in daylight.
When the doctors recommended he be checked into a facility, I already knew there was no other choice.
When they said he needed supervision, separation, evaluation, I nodded because I had already reckoned with that truth alone as I sat after the eruption, wondering how close we might have come to losing more than only one child.
He didn't like the decision—it felt like jail. And I think he knew his new path didn't return to us.
When we left, he had tears in his eyes. The restraints kept him from even offering a goodbye hug. His breath was shaky, his eyes wet and wide, looking for an answer I couldn't give. For a moment he felt like the boy who once howled at the ridge, waiting for the wild to call him back.
Then we walked away, and that was the last time he lived under this roof.
The coyotes pause again, their silence sudden and complete. It's a silence you feel in your soul, a silence that waits, that asks something of you. Ginger, at my feet, stiffens, then settles again once she realizes nothing is coming up the hill.
My phone buzzes—not a message from him, just a weather alert. For a second the old reflex rises anyway, that sharp mix of hope and dread. I want to hear from him, but I never want what his messages carry. Sometimes no news feels like mercy. Still, I check my phone in the middle of the night. I still imagine him calling. I still feel around for the shape of him in the dark. I started walking the perimeter of the property at dusk. I told myself it helped me relax. Really, I was waiting for my body to unclench, waiting for reassurance that the house was safe again.
The night has its own grammar, its own rules. You move through it carefully, aware that anything alive in the dark carries both hunger and fear. I learned that from him.
Six months passed before I slept a full night without jolting awake to each sound. Even now occasionally, years later, when something falls in the other room—a book slipping off a table, a picture frame leaning forward—I feel my heart kick once, hard. The body remembers before the mind decides what to do with it.
Some nights it feels like I'm listening through time: part of me in the present, part of me still in that hallway, trying to understand what had taken my son from himself.
I imagine him sometimes walking along the boardwalk at night, the ocean breathing in and out beside him like something patient. Maybe he sits underneath a bridge, tracing the movement of headlights through the slats. Maybe he lies on warm concrete behind a restaurant, the smell of frying oil drifting over him. Maybe he talks to the waves the way he once talked to the wind.
I wonder what he listens for now.
I wonder whether the voices he hears feel like warnings or invitations.
I wonder if he still thinks he might be an angel, chosen by some force that refuses to identify itself.
And I wonder if he ever stops to look at the sky—if he sees the same moon, hanging like a dull coin over the city haze, and pauses the way he used to pause in the backyard, listening for something far away.
There's a place in him I can't reach, a place that split open that night and never closed. I don't say that with despair. I say it the way someone says a landscape is vast. Just fact. Just geography.
Some parents lose their children through distance, others through decisions, illness, accidents, silence. I lost mine to an invisible fracture in the mind, a breaking I couldn't see until it swallowed him.
And yet he's still alive.
Still somewhere in that restless city.
Still texting occasionally, like a single howl slipping through static.
I walk back to the deck and stand where he once stood, small and sure of himself, howling toward the ridge with a grin so bright it outshone the stars. I can almost feel the echo of his younger body leaning against mine, the trust in that simple gesture. How did we get from there to here? How does a child who believed the world answered him become a young man lost inside a mind that keeps remaking itself into threats?
The coyotes rise again.
This time the call is long and ragged, a kind of yearning sewn into sound.
I close my eyes.
The night wraps around me like a heavy blanket.
Somewhere far away—maybe two miles, maybe twenty—one voice breaks from the rest, lifting upward in a thin, raw cry.
It's a lonely sound.
A sound that knows itself.
A sound that doesn't wait for understanding.
The air cools, brushing the back of my neck.
The wind shifts the branches.
Ginger settles at my feet.
I check my phone one last time. No messages. The screen glows briefly, a pale square in the dark, then goes black.
The silence that follows is strange—not empty, not frightening, but wide. Wide enough to hold everything I know and everything I fail to understand. Wide enough for the distance between a father and a son who once stood shoulder to shoulder on this deck, calling into the night, waiting for the wild to answer.
A moment passes.
Another.
Then, from somewhere beyond the curve of the hill, a single coyote answers—ragged, insistent, alive.
And for reasons I can't fully explain, I try to answer back.
