Perfect Morning
The back door sticks on humid mornings. He puts his shoulder into it, the familiar give, and the dogs push past him before it’s fully open.
They always go first.
The air hits him, rain-washed, iron-green, the smell of wet soil and something vegetable underneath. The yard is saturated, every surface beaded. His boots find the flagstone path and the stone is slick under the tread. He watches where he puts his feet.
The chickens are already working the run. Three of them, then four, moving in that purposeful, tilted way: heads forward, weight shifting, absolute commitment to the next six inches of ground. The ladies. He opens the coop latch, cold metal, a little grit from the rain, and checks the boxes. Four eggs. He cups them, one then two then three then four, warm against his palm, and carries them inside, the dogs circling his heels.
He sets them in the bowl on the counter. Goes back out.
The garden runs along the south fence, beds mounded, the soil dark from overnight. He moves down the row, his hand trailing the wire support, the tomato cages he bent himself three summers back, one still slightly crooked. The tomatoes are smaller this year. He turns one in his fingers, checks the skin. Fine. Still fine. The cucumbers are further along. He finds one fat and firm, the skin faintly rough under his thumb, and pulls it free with a twist. Tucks it under his arm.
He straightens and looks south, past the fence line, down through the tree break.
The mist off the Shubenacadie is burning off in long horizontal sheets, the valley floor going pale gold where the light catches it. The river is a suggestion below the mist. The sky above the far ridge is clear, deep, the blue of a Nova Scotia morning that has decided to be generous. It looks like a scorcher.
It won’t be. It never is. The temperature here holds inside a range so consistent it stopped registering. He breathes it in anyway, the cool of it, the exact weight of it in his lungs.
The dogs are done. He calls them in.
Inside, the kettle. He measures the instant coffee into the mug, two heaped spoons, the jar almost empty, and pours. The smell rises, close but not quite right. He wraps both hands around the mug and stands at the window.
The yard. The hens. The mist going thin at the treeline. The crooked tomato cage.
He misses real coffee. Close enough.
“You’re late.” Rhonda, from the hall. Her voice dry, not worried.
“I know.” He doesn’t move from the window.
He finishes the coffee at his own pace. Sets the mug in the sink, runs the tap over it. Dries his hands on the towel hung from the oven door, the one with the small burn at the corner, been there two years.
She’s in the kitchen doorway when he turns. He doesn’t know when she moved. He crosses the room and she tilts her chin up and he kisses her the way he always kisses her at this point in the morning, deep, both hands, like there is no particular hurry and also like there is. Her fingers close around his wrist. Stay there a moment after.
He picks up his bag.
The driveway gravel is dark and compact from the rain, quieter under his boots than dry. He walks the length of it, thirty metres, give or take, past the place where the lilac overhangs the fence, to the road.
At the light post he stops. Standard post, standard fixture, the paint a little chalked at the base. He presses the button on the underside of the mount.
A door opens in the air at the road’s edge.
He steps through.
The antechamber is small, white, and bright: no shadows, no source. He moves through the dressing with the speed of repetition. Kevlar, working up from the waist: panels seated and pressed, seams checked by hand at hip, chest, each shoulder. The collar piece last, the chin guard clicked into place. He rolls his neck. Nothing exposed.
The helmet comes down. The HUD wakes: charge indicators, compass, threat overlay in pale green, a dozen small confirmations that all read nominal. The world through the visor is the same world with a grid over it.
He takes his rifle off the rack. His, specifically, the grip worn in at the web of his thumb, the sling swivel re-drilled two centimetres back where it balances better. He racks the charge check. Full.
He crosses to the outer door. Presses the button. Breathes out.
The seal opens.
The sound comes first.
Not silence. The opposite. A dense, layered noise: clicks and wet rhythms and something low that isn’t quite sound, that he registers in his back teeth more than his ears. The air is wrong: rot and the taste of a filling in a dying tooth, but cold, nothing alive underneath it.
He steps out.
The ground shifts. Not unstable. Alive, the soil itself fibrous and responsive, the surface threaded through with something that pulses in slow intervals. The trees at the road’s edge still stand but their bark has split and what’s underneath is pale and glistening, and the branches move without wind in long slow arcs. Something the size of a cat but with too many joints runs the length of the fence line and disappears into a crack in the earth that wasn’t there yesterday or didn’t matter yesterday.
The sky is the wrong colour of light, not dark, not overcast, just wrong, a frequency off, the shadows falling at angles that don’t match the source. Everything casts two. The mist off the valley is still there, but it moves against the gradient, uphill, slow and purposeful.
The post on this side is the same post. Same height, same fixture. The button housing has grown over. Not rust. Something fibrous and slow, the same colour as the soil. He could still press it. Probably.
The shapes in the middle distance don’t stop moving. None of them. The whole visible landscape shifts and breathes and repositions. Things that might be animals if you didn’t look past the outline. Things that are definitely not.
He looks back.
The dome is smaller on the outside than it was on the inside.
He turns forward. Raises the rifle. The HUD locks onto something in the middle distance, green bracket, pulsing, nominal, and his exhale is slow and even.
He fires.
I miss you.
