No Noise is as Heart-Wrenching as the Noise of a Wolf Howling by Jennifer Todhunter

Our friends owned a cabin five hours from the closest gas station, seven hours if the forest service road was closed, and there was a group of us who’d drive up every year after the kids got out of school, skipping the Last Day Parade since kindergarten in the hopes of beating traffic out of town, and we’d stop at the gas station to top up on fuel and for corn nuts and slurpees and everyone would pee one last time because nobody wanted to bare ass it off the side of a deserted cliff even if they spent most of their days mooning their brother or sister or sometimes their dog, and these dogs, one in each car except the car with two, all of them panting and licking, tongues lolling out the windows the closer we got to the lake, all of us anticipating the good times: barefoot wolf howling, daybreak raft floating, and in the birdsong above the alpine we’d go exploring on rusted out ATVs some guy named Reverend Charlie let anyone borrow if they knew where to find them and how to start them, and he wasn’t really a Reverend and none of us were really religious except Johnny that one time he almost went over the edge of the waterfall and grabbed onto Jesus so hard we thought he was going to strangle him, and it was Johnny who arrived at the cabin first this time with his wife and his two girls, both pigtailed and dressed up in their last day fancy dresses because he delighted in the degradation cabin life had on everyone’s appearance, his chocolate lab, Hank, riding shotgun while his family sat leg to lap in the backseat like lattice work on the top of an apple pie, and we all brought our dogs because we loved them but also because there were bears in the area, grizzly bears, a mum and her cubs for sure we were told and who knew what else once you got onto the trails, that was part of the magic and the mystique and the cause for a lot of anxiety for those of us who were more city than country, and there was a divide in that, the fancy bikinis and motor boat husbands, the cabin owners and the invitees, but we all watched out for bears and let out a collective sigh when we gathered at the end of a day for some supper, as we unknowingly took turns counting the kid’s and dog’s heads, as we knew we would only truly relax when they were all inside and sleeping, and it was Johnny who went out back for a piss, his ass the first bare ass we’d seen all weekend, who stumbled four beers and a fireball shot or two deep into the house with Hank in his arms, all of us jumping up to see which child it was, all of us frozen except for Johnny’s youngest girl, her pigtails askew, her skirt bedazzled with burrs and moss hitchhikers, her arms not quite able to wrap around Hank’s stiff body, all of us recoiling in relief at the sight of a dog instead of a child, all of us mesmerized by the tears streaming down Johnny’s face, and it was the first time we heard anything howl other than a wolf that weekend.

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JENNIFER TODHUNTER — Jennifer’s stories have appeared in The Forge, Monkeybicycle, River Teeth and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and Wigleaf´s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. 

Art by KIMMY LARSON — Kimmy is an autistic writer and artist living near Antwerp, Belgium with her husband and their bunnies. She also volunteers as a wild animal rehabilitator, providing care for everything from hedgehogs to owls. Baby doves are her favorite. See more artwork, or say hi @kimmy.creatures on Instagram.