The Wishing Garden by Christy Yorke

shoot and never kill—only make extremely mad.
    On an afternoon in early May, when the air swept in from the desert pre-warmed and gritty, Jake drove back from Flagstaff, occasionally glancing at the man sleeping soundly beside him. Doug Dawson had a fewtufts of hair left and bruises all down his arms. Jake turned onto Sage Street, where a thousand newly hatched gnats floated in the steam rising up from the asphalt. He pulled up in Doug Dawson’s driveway and cut the engine. Doug woke up immediately, and turned around to look at the logs in the back.
    “My wife doesn’t know it yet,” Doug said sleepily, “but she’s going to love this bench. After I’m gone …” When Jake said nothing, Doug merely touched the bandage he still wore on his forehead, though the incision had been made months ago.
    Jake got out of the truck and Sasha, his husky, came bolting for him. She reared up on her hind legs to kiss him.
    “Down, girl.” He scratched the belt-strap scars behind her ears until the dog no one would come within three feet of nearly purred.
    He let Rufus and Gabe, his chocolate Lab and golden retriever, out of the truck bed and glanced at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in it, and that put him on edge. He liked a little cloud cover. All the thunderstorms in the area started on Kemper Mountain, where he’d built his cabin. Legend said that was where Lalani, the thunder god, lived; drunk talk said Jake spiked the sky with his own electric spite. Actually, it was the thermals along the summit, combined with the moisture that rose off the alpine lakes, that brought rain nearly every summer afternoon. Down here on the valley floor, it was dry as sand, and already Jake’s lips had split in the corners.
    Sasha sniffed the sawdust and chain-saw oil on his fingers and growled. Jake never took the husky woodcutting. The first time Sasha had heard the chain saw, she’d jumped through the sliding glass door of his cabin and run for miles, bloody and razor-sharp with glass. She’d mowed down everything in her path—full-grown elderberry shrubs, stunned white rabbits and, finally, Lowell Dresher, a two-hundred pound logger and Jake’s nearest neighbor three miles down the road.
    By the time Jake got to her, Sasha had clamped her mouth around Lowell’s neck. She could have broken the man in two at any time. As Jake approached, she growled from deep in her throat, from a place Jake hadn’t even known about. Lowell was not making a sound, but Jake could see the whites of his eyes. He flapped his huge, helpless hands on the ground.
    Jake had laid his hand on the back of Sasha’s neck. For a moment, she’d clamped down harder, then suddenly she let go. She was shaking so badly, her legs went out. She lay on her belly and pressed her nose against Jake’s leg, and Jake could actually hear her losing her will to him. It was like the cracking of a twig, a snap, and then she was his, she was going to do whatever he said. She would love him whether he deserved it or not.
    He drove Lowell to town, while the man’s teeth chattered loud enough to be heard over the engine of the Ford. “You’ve got to put her down,” he managed to get out.
    “I’ll keep her away from you. You have my word.”
    “I’m telling you, she’s wild.”
    “That’s exactly why I’m keeping her,” he said. “What else is going to make me feel human?”
    Now, he started unloading the lodgepole out of the pickup. The woods around Prescott were filled with ponderosas, but for Doug’s bench, he had decided to use the straight grain of lodgepole, which grew in thick stands up around Flagstaff. Jake had let Doug come along wood-cutting, though he preferred to go alone. He had also agreed to craft the bench at Doug’s house, so the man could watch over the progress. Jake had agreed to a lot more than he usuallydid, and he was regretting it more each minute. How could he deny a dying man anything? He had made beds for spoiled movie stars and never once