The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories by Ethan Rutherford

he’d used)—had been out and told her it was a lost cause. Joan refused to believe him at first—the guy’d barely left his truck before he was back in it, talking about all the other animals who required his attention that day—but soon after his visit Zachary had stopped eating, and when he moved, if he moved at all, it was with clear and unhappy effort. The herd, no fools, had begun to shun him, and at night his pathetic bleating entered her dreams. She’d wake, thinking she’d missed something important, had left someone stranded, or had otherwise failed in some meaningful way. Two evenings ago, unable to sleep, she’d left the house to sing, softly, to him; but then she’d seen Sarah peeking through her window and had become self-conscious. This was the animal kingdom, she reminded herself. Silly to see metaphor where there was none.
    She heard Thomas coming downstairs and turned from the window to greet him. “That was John,” he said when he came into the kitchen.
    “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she said.
    “Cell phone.”
    “Oh,” she said. Thomas walked halfway across the kitchen before remembering something upstairs. “Goddamn it, I’m unraveling,” he said.
    “You’re just tired,” she said. “I didn’t sleep much either.”
    Thomas looked at her. His eyes were bagged. His beard, which she still wasn’t used to, was neatly trimmed. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “It’s his birthday on Thursday. I’d forgotten.”
    “I know his birthday,” she said.
    He would be thirty. For the last year he’d been calling in the middle of the night, waking them, sometimes with nothing to say, sometimes angry, sometimes crying. It happened once a month. Maybe more. It was impossible to say what he wanted, needed, from them. Thomas would take the phone across the hall, and talk to him until he calmed down. John never wanted to speak to her, not recently at least, and when she asked Thomas what they talked about he gave her an abbreviated, bare-bones account. The rest, he said, was nonsense, that John had just wanted someone’s ear until he was tired enough to fall asleep. They’d been married for thirty-four years; she knew he was protecting her. She didn’t like being shut out, it drove the two of them away from each other and into themselves; but after John’s last visit, which had been frightening, and had shaken her, she was, at least partially, grateful for it. She was also grateful for Jocey, John’s girlfriend. Since they’d been dating, the calls had become less frequent; where they’d failed to find a way to help him, it appeared she succeeded.
    Thomas walked back into the kitchen, holding his hat. The scar on his forehead, just below his hairline, was healing well. The accident had happened two weeks ago, when Joan was running errands: Thomas, chopping wood, had yanked their axe out of the stump too quickly and brought the blunt end to his head, opening a deep cut. He’d knocked on Sarah’s door, and she’d taken him inside and stitched him up. Joan had wanted to go to the hospital when she returned—when she saw his stitched forehead, his bloody bunched-up shirt on the floor—but Thomas insisted Sarah had closed it perfectly, and the hospital was unnecessary.
    “So he’s on his way?” Joan asked. “He knows about the storm?”
    “Already on the road,” Thomas said. “He does.”
    “Do you think they’ll make it tonight?”
    “I do.”
    “Good,” Joan said. She wasn’t sure if she meant it. “Do they have an emergency bag? Just in case?”
    “He said they’ve got jackets, and jackets, and jackets. He wants to go skiing while they’re here. I said that was fine.” Thomas picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter, inspected it, put it back down.
    “Well, they’ve got a cell phone, at least.”
    “Yes. At least they’ve got that phone, thank God.”
    “You don’t have to make fun of me,” she said, and turned toward the window. The snow