Free The Wilds by Julia Elliott Page A

don’t know. In my brain, my spine. The nervous system, I guess. I don’t know if I really smell anything at this point.”
    “Very interesting,” he said, rising from his desk. “I have an appointment, but I’d like to talk more about this . . . phenomenon. We could . . . I don’t know.”
    “Meet somewhere?”
    “Yes, we could do that.”
    Dr. Vilkas walked to the media cart and closed his laptop.
    “Like for coffee, maybe,” I rasped.
    “Or maybe we could conduct some tests, scientific experiments with the dogs.”
    Dr. Vilkas dropped one of his cables and picked it up, put it down on the media cart, shook my hand with his hot hand, tucked his laptop under his army jacket, and walked out into the rain.

    “Late again,” said my husband, who held a baggie of fetid meat in his hand, bait for the new leghold traps he’d positioned in shallow trenches around our yard. We were standing behind the garage, beside our new aluminum garbage cans, a hot spot for canine activity.
    “The dogs,” I said.
    “Did they come to school today?” he asked.
    “No. But we had another meeting. Working out the kinks of certain safety procedures.”
    “What kinds of safety procedures?”
    “Rabies prevention.”
    “Which involves?”
    “You know, detection. Symptoms. Vaccination. Rabies is a virus.”
    “Duh.”
    “And we’ve got something this Saturday, something on crowd control.”
    “I thought you were going to help me install the electric fence.”
    “An electric fence won’t keep them out.”
    “How do you know? Intuition?”
    “No. Actually, a dog expert who spoke at school said so.”
    Suddenly I felt very alert. Wind blustered through the trees, shaking drops from leaves. Something zinged up my spine. I thought I smelled Fritos.
    “I know you think I’m crazy, but I feel like they’re coming,” I said. “I really do.”
    “It’s too early. They always come at dusk.”
    “At school they usually come in the afternoon. I’m going inside.”
    “Plus, they’ve never come when it’s this wet out,” my husband called after me.
    I was jogging toward our house. The mist felt good on my skin. I thought I heard my husband laughing at me, or maybe I heard a braying dog. By the time I reached the back porch, they were already streaming into our yard. My husband yelled, ran around the side of the garage, scrambled into the closet where he kept hispower tools, and shut the door. He was safe, so I could laugh triumphantly on our back steps, one foot from the door but still outside in the electromagnetic air, my head thrown back, my neck muscles rippling, a long liquid howl shooting out of my throat.
    The dogs didn’t plunder or linger, but tumbled right through, a stinking river of fur and clamor that flowed around our side yard, dipped down into the gulch that had just been cleared for a vinyl-sided mini-McMansion, and disappeared. I couldn’t tell whether they’d gone west or east, and with my heart still thudding, I ran inside to e-mail Dr. Vilkas.

    “A fluid progression?” said Dr. Vilkas.
    “Yes, beginning at the crown, dropping to the top of my nape, moving down my spine, and then, well, from the coccyx to the pubic bone, an, um, quivering in between.”
    “In between?”
    Dr. Vilkas was smirking. I’m not sure if he believed me, and perhaps I did exaggerate, but he was also tipsy, slurping exotic liquid from something called a Scorpion Bowl—gin, rum, vodka, grenadine, orange and pineapple juice—a drink that’d arrived with a flaming croutonafloat in the middle of it, making him giggle and rub his palms together. There was a straw for each of us, and I’d taken more than a few nervous sips. We sat alone, deep in the interior of the Imperial Dragon, a strip-mall restaurant with several windowless rooms, the inner room a jungle of plastic vines with two golden bulldogs cavorting by a miniature waterfall. We dined in a gilded gazebo. Pentatonic lute tunes flowed from speakers. The