COYOTE NIGHTS
by Rosalee Mayeux
Winner - 2002 Columbine Award for Best Short Story
“... I was insane with worry that year, starved for information about my boy whom I felt I knew so well. But he had been trained by every bad B movie, every corny TV show on the planet, not to be a snitch, not to tell his mother most certainly. He said his “friend” would get in trouble with “bad” people, mom, really bad people and it wasn’t safe to tell. He said he could get hurt. Or maybe they’d even come here and hurt us. He wasn’t telling and that was that I could lock him up and throw away the key he wasn’t telling. He said if he told I’d do something, he knows it, I’d do something crazy or stupid like call the cops and then who knows what would happen to him and his friends.
I stared at him as he slept for weeks maybe even a month, late at night. Thinking, thinking, trying to figure it out, where could twelve and thirteen year old kids even get dope? One day he’d say the mall, one day he’d say it was down at the local school yard. And then on one more exhausting, sleepless night, I watched as his room filled with beautiful moonlight dancing in from the window and playing across his sleeping sweaty little face. And I suddenly got it. I looked out the window into the bright-as-day moonlit night. I looked at him. I looked out the window. And there, right across the street, was a light on. At two AM. And I saw the black car. And its shiny paint. And the moonlight shining on my son and I knew. It was coming from across the fucking street ...”