The first time they have sex in the dead uncle’s house, Moira hears someone outside the window. 

She doesn’t do anything at first. Tonight, the sex is decent (47% probability) and vanilla (84% probability). They are christening this new house of theirs, this house that was once his uncle’s. She’s not in the mood, but there’s poetry in bringing life to the death house. She’s chosen to ignore the little rod burrowed in the fibers of her arm, spitting out etonogestrel, making her womb a death house itself, an impossible place for christenings and embryos (99.9% probability).

The noise comes again. 

“Shit,” Moira says. 

“Yeah, baby, you like that?”

“No, shit! Get off!” When she shoves him away, his penis pops out of her, full-mast and slick. While Miguel stares at her, pretending he’s not offended, Moira scrambles out of the bed and crouches beside the dead uncle’s window. 

She’s unfamiliar with the yard, with California, so everything is suspect. The crinkly grass. The too tall sequoia tree. The half-glass of wine on the picnic table, not left by them but by an intruder enjoying their sloppy sex noises. 

Of course, the noise is gone now.

She hears Miguel slide out of bed and come to stand behind her. He’s still breathing heavily, which doesn’t seem very fair. “I don’t see anything.”

“Can you go check?”

“There’s nothing dangerous out here. Coyotes, at worst.”

“Can you please please please go check?”

He doesn’t want to. She can tell by how long it takes him to untape boxes, unfurl bubble wrap, root through the incidentals of their life for something he can use as a weapon. She doesn’t care. She keeps her eyes in the backyard. The half-glass of wine stays half-full, or half-empty. Half-there.

She hears him move through and out of the house. A noise like the noise comes again, but different. It’s Miguel now. He holds a small wooden paddleboard at the ready, some component to a beach game he swore they’d play all the time, now that they were only ten minutes from the ocean. He is still naked and erect.

She wonders just what about all this is so arousing. The cool night air which, being Californian, isn’t cool at all? Or is it that he’s protecting his crouching girlfriend, her only armor a K-mart bra missing two metal hooks? Maybe it’s just that she’s so good at sex, his penis is upset to be bereft of her, still pulsing like a homing beacon, seeking her out. Part of her is charmed, feels again those old stirrings of fresh love. Mostly, though, she’s a little grossed out.

Dutiful, he takes his time searching the yard and finds no intruder to spank with his paddleboard. When he comes back inside, they laugh it off as first-day-in-the-dead-uncle’s-house jitters. They do not have sex again.

*

Meeting Miguel had been a statistical improbability. Moira had been an Actuary Science major; he’d gotten a Master’s in Poetry. But after her parent’s funeral, she’d needed comfort. The only thing that’d come to mind was a mug of hot chocolate, cloying and sweet. Leaving the funeral home, she’d gone to the first coffee shop she could find. Miguel, working, had been the only one inside.

“Coming from a funeral?” he’d asked in a glib kind of way.

“Yes,” she’d said, in a coming-from-a-funeral kind of way. Her black dress was two sizes too big. Just a hand-me-down from her mother. 

Miguel had blinked owlishly. “Oh. Whose?”

“My parents.”

“Well. Coffee’s on me, I guess.”

Miguel was the first person to not apologize or offer condolences. He was rude, actually, but the rudeness had sent a delightful little trill up Moira’s spine. It was probably why she drank the hot chocolate there, standing next to the counter. Miguel mostly ignored the few other customers as they spoke. He talked about his poetry workshops, about triptychs and ghazals, about the inherent narcissism in getting an advanced writing degree. Moira talked about actuary science, about gambling on a tragedy, making money for insurance companies by calculating the odds for the worst possible scenario. About how, wasn’t it funny, her sophomore project had been calculating the probability of an accidental fire caused by the Plug It and Forget It! Electric Blanket ™, the very same one her parents let burn their house down. Wasn’t that funny? 

It took them two months to kiss, mostly because that was not something Moira thought about. Kissing. Sex. The works. One night, while he cooked beef bourguignon and she thought about the probability of choking on cow cheek, he’d smacked his lips onto hers, wet and slimy. She could taste the red wine in the sauce, not yet cooked down.

“What’d you do that for?” she’d asked, mildly offended. 

He’d looked at her screwy. “I’m seducing you, Moira. Have been for a few months now.”

“Oh.” She supposed that it wasn’t so bad being seduced. 

There was no real discussion after that. He felt free to touch her, and she felt free to move her things into his apartment. They took pictures together at their respective graduation ceremonies. When the dead uncle died childless and the house became Miguel’s, she bought a pair of tickets, seats D14 and D15, smack in the middle of the plane. Though the statistical likelihood of a crash was absurdly low (.00000008% probability), she imagined it. The swooping feeling in her stomach as they nose-dived, Miguel’s girlish screams, the sensation of crashing over Colorado or Utah or Nevada. Iowa would have been her favorite state to die—her body flattened into the dirt, pulverized, her blood and bones feeding the corn that fed America.

Miguel sleeps through the entire flight, a Rumi collection open on his chest.

*

Moira hears the noise every time they have sex.

It is probably not a masked rapist outside their window. It is probably not her childhood nightmare man come to life. It is probably not a feral mountain drunk on Miguel’s scent, prowling down the California coast, hoping to lick his skull clean.

When Miguel finishes, he kisses her over and over on the cheeks. “I love you, I love you, I love you. You were so good tonight.”

“It’s probably just the house.”

He pulls back. “Huh?”

She rolls them over until they are nose-to-nose. She must go a little cross-eyed to see him straight. “The noise. I bet it’s something the house does at night. Creaking. Heating. Something.”

“I didn’t hear it.” He bumps their noses together. It’s cute, maybe. “If that’s what you think, I’m sure you’re right.”

It is hot, almost ninety degrees, and the night doesn’t cool. Miguel, Californian to the bone, falls asleep quickly, but this is Moira’s first time in a heat like this. Sleep avoids her. She struggles with the covers for hours before finally kicking them to the ground like something disobedient.

*

The plan is to job search. Miguel had been lucky in finding a position so quickly, teaching Dickinson and Byron to sleepy undergraduates at nine in the morning. He loads his days and makes just over $20,000 a year. Moira’s degree has more use to the economy, a higher earning potential. She needs a job if they’re going to stay in California.

Miguel drinks his coffee and ties his tie. It is miserably hot, and they’ve found room in their budget for a cheap, plastic fan. It clicks back and forth in the corner of the kitchen, whirring itself to death in a futile attempt to cool them down. Moira opens her laptop and, when Miguel is no longer behind her, goes through the local news. There are no stalking cases in their neighborhood. The last break-in had been three years ago, the last murder twenty. The only thing of note is the dead cats, dozens of them in the last year. Something has been eating them. Coyotes, Miguel would say, but she’s not so sure. When he cartwheels off to talk about death disguised as birds and birds disguised as hope, she snaps the laptop shut.

She goes top to bottom. Not a crevice of the house escapes her searching fingers. The crawl space attic tucked above the ceiling, maintained by a family of spiders that have constructed vaulting halls of spider web, beetles caught like ornaments in the webbing; the guest bedrooms, twins down to a wine stain on the paisley rugs, as though after a spill in one room, someone had carefully dripped cabernet in the same spot; the living room, the only unfurnished area of the house, filled instead with Moira and Miguel’s unopened cardboard boxes; the pastel shells lacquered on pink bathroom walls; the bright kitchen and its fat fridge; the dead uncle’s bedroom.

Nothing. She returns to the kitchen. The screen door has a tear in it, so small she’d only discovered it during her search. She fiddles with it as she looks out into the backyard. Nothing. No busted HVAC, no wonky air purifier, no lurking electric blankets. Nothing in the house that could make the noise, she’s sure of it. And though memory is a poor record keeper, she lets herself consider the possibility that the noise maybe, possibly, sounded like footsteps.

Carefully, she opens the kitchen door and peers into the backyard. It isn’t much to look at. When Miguel had told her about his home state, he had described opal waters and spiraling plant life. An orgiastic explosion of reds and greens and yellows. Reality has been disappointing—to Moira’s eye, everything is brown and grey, husked by the endless Californian drought. The dead grass crunches when she steps out onto it.

It doesn’t take long to find the footprint. It’s faint, an etching of an etching settled in the dusty garden bed underneath the bathroom window. A victory—she’d been more afraid of being wrong than being right. She levels up her hand beside it. A monstrous foot, really, nearly three times the size. Her feet certainly aren’t that big, or Miguel’s. She’s not sure any human’s foot could be that large, actually.

It takes time, but she sifts through the dead uncle’s belongings and unearths a single steel-toed boot. Size thirteen. Large, but not so large. When she sets it beside the footprint, the boot doesn’t even reach the toes.

She can’t decide whether to show the footprint to Miguel, but the decision is made for her. He comes home late, laden with Thai food and her favorite beer. By then, the Santa Ana winds have blown the footprint away.

*

Moira had always had a nervous disposition—if she’d lived fifty years earlier, her parents might have driven an icepick through her prefrontal lobe. Lucky enough to be born late for the lobotomy, Moira was instead shipped to a series of counselors. Some made her draw pictures, some spoke through felt puppets, some sat with her in silence on bean bag chairs. None answered the questions her behaviors posed.

It was the separation anxiety that had worried her parents the most. Moira was almost eleven when it began. Whenever her parents left her alone, even if it was to go to school, she would cry and cry and cry, convinced that she would never see them again. A car crash or an aneurism or a gobbling sinkhole opening in the ground. It went on for a year, uncured by hypnotherapy or drugs. Time alone gave her the tools to pack the fear away, hide it until it was a tiny creature in her chest, easy enough to ignore.

It wasn’t until her parents died that she understood. At their funeral, she had stood over the closed caskets and felt nothing. Nothing new, at least, because it had been there all long. Grief, delivered to her door too early. Somehow, at ten years old, she’d known what was coming, just as she now knew how likely it was for bacteria to creep through produce, for a frayed wire to spark. Probability was just prophecy. She’d seen her parent’s death in the decimals and done nothing to stop it. They would have died anyway, she knows—but still.

*

Sex just doesn’t work in California. It is always too hot or too sticky or too bright. The noise comes again and again. She ignores Miguel’s thrusting to stare out the window, but whatever makes the noise—whatever made the footprint—hides from her sight. He doesn’t say it, because he loves her, but Moira knows Miguel thinks she’s making the noise up. He thinks their relationship is failing. She doesn’t think so—at least, it’s not failing anymore out here than it would anywhere else. Her mind is just on more important matters.

Too big for a human, the footprint must have been made by Something Else, something she has no name for. She abandons any pretense of a job search, spending her mornings and afternoons reading about creatures that probably aren’t real, with scales and feathers and claws. There are hundreds of unverified sightings, reported on obscure, sensational web pages. When Miguel pants over her, sweat curdling on his back, she imagines what might be watching them—the sasquatch or the chuchunya, the wendigo or the chupacabra. She wants to reach out the window as Miguel quakes inside her. She wants to wrap her hands around crisp emerald feathers or crusted, swampy scales. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know. Anything could be making the noise. She begins to leave the screen door unlocked, an invitation no one answers.

*

Their last night in Illinois, Miguel and Moira had gone to a poetry reading. By then, there had been nothing left in the house. Their lives were packed away in moving boxes, and there were no more chairs to sit on, no televisions to watch. She had wanted to roam her childhood haunts one last time, but Miguel had sworn that the poet visiting was amazing, one of the best.

They hadn’t stayed long. The poet had said the title—i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense—and the fatal postman came again, dropping so much grief into her lap she couldn’t hold it in her arms. It spilled out of her. She began to cry so loud she couldn’t hear anything but the first two words. o California—

She hadn’t known why she was crying—not yet—but she’d known something terrible was waiting for her when she realized. Miguel had rubbed circles into her back and whispered assurances in her ear, moved that she could be so moved. It was the first time she’d cried in front of him. They’d left shortly after, the poem’s words following her out of the library and into the car and all the way to the west coast—o California, o California, o California.

*

She slides down onto Miguel, so full she feels nauseous. She feels small. She’s always felt that way, maybe. The decision drops into her, effortless, and she tells him immediately: “This is the last time I’m ever having sex.”

His skin is flushed in the moonlight. She acknowledges, clinically, that he’s beautiful. Pleasant bones, dark curls. He puts a hand up to her cheek and rubs it affectionately. “Is this like a roleplay thing?”

She shakes her head and refuses to elaborate. This is the final effort. Eventually, Miguel takes over, flipping her onto her back and fucking her slowly. He is saying sweet things in her ear—how much he loves her, mostly. She ignores him, waiting for the noise. Waiting. Waiting.

It doesn’t come. No footsteps, no gentle turn of heel to arch to toe on brittle grass.

The noise has abandoned her. It is just her and Miguel, stuck in the dead uncle’s house. For the second time in their relationship, Moira begins to cry.

“Oh shit. Shit, shit.” He pulls out of her, cradles her chin in his hands. “What’d I do? I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” she blubbers. He kisses her, smearing his lips over her forehead and nose. She loves him, she does, but it makes her want to peel her skin off. She shoves him away from her and he stills on the opposite side of the bed. Her tears taper off quickly, the emotion receding back to dark waters inside her. She doesn’t know what she’s doing wrong. She never has. When she opens her eyes, Miguel is staring at her warily. Like strangers, they watch each other from opposite sides of the bed.

Miguel is the one who breaks the silence. “Do you hear that?”

The world goes quiet. Miguel rolls out of the bed and creeps towards the window. She sees a hundred possibilities—an arrow through the throat, a gnarled hand ripping his torso, ribs clattering uselessly to the ground like wooden children’s toys. Miguel turns to her and smiles. “It’s raining.”

She can hear it now, the soft patter of the rain. She hasn’t heard it since Illinois. She can’t bear to see it. She squeezes her eyes shut and turns away. “Come back to bed?”

He does. He wraps himself close to her in a way he must think is comforting. She does love him. She does she does she does. She listens to the patter of the rain until he falls asleep, then unstitches herself from his side. Still naked, she wanders through the dead uncle’s house, running her fingers over unpacked boxes. Useless things they’ve dragged all the way out here, only to leave them trapped in cardboard.

The noise. Louder, now, than ever before. It’s not rain outside the kitchen screen. She turns on her heel to look.

Whatever stands in the dead uncle’s yard is tall and walks on two legs, but it’s not a man. It’s wet and large and looks nothing like the pencil drawings or blurry photographs she’s scoured through online. It stands twenty feet from the dead uncle’s house and watches her with blank slate eyes.

She walks up to the screen door, right until her nose touches the mesh, her breath fanning out into the summer heat. She holds her hand up to the tear in the screen, showing the white of her palm. “You’ve come to take me back, haven’t you?”

The thing steps into the ring of the patio light. Teeth, clean and long, glisten outside of its lips. It inhales deeply, smelling the air. Smelling her.

She doesn’t know what’s going to happen now. She knows how likely it is for the stove to burn the house down, for a mass shooter to raze the neighborhood, for the oceans to rise and drown them all. She knows what will happen if she stays here. Though she has no siblings, no nieces or nephews, if she stays in this house any longer she will become a dead uncle too.

The thing blinks at her, impatient for whatever is coming next. She digs her fingers into the ripped screen and pulls. The door tears open like a mouth and swallows her whole.