Nocturnal Emissions by Jeffrey Thomas Page A

you belatedly. How typical, you and your mother are bound to think. In all the fervor, I forgot until too late that today was your birthday. I truly, truly wish I had been with you. I wish I weren’t so horribly, cripplingly sad.
    I should be elated, Maria. This latest find is beyond imagining, beyond comprehending. Beyond my mock profession. It is like seeing the face of God.
    I feel vindicated for believing in the unbelievable.
    But if only the animal were not dead. It is like looking down at the corpse of a beautiful child.
    You might have seen it on the news. Maybe you even saw them interviewing your stammering, unhelpful father…his expertise sought after at last, and yet proving so inadequate, just as they always suspected.
    It was some tourists hiking in the park who stumbled upon the body, lying in some ferns by the side of a little trail you and I might have walked ourselves numerous times.
    At first it was thought to be a bobcat. Before I actually saw it, I myself thought it might be like the phantom panther I investigated in Minnesota . It would be strange enough, tabloid material in itself, if this were only about an unusual striped cat as large as a medium-sized dog. But that grin fixed on its dead face, a shockingly human-like grin, curving from ear to ear. As if to mock me. As if inviting my recognition.
    I don’t want to see the dissection…assuming the cat doesn’t vanish before they dissect it. Beginning with the tail, and ending with a disembodied grin.
    I don’t want to see what they find in the park next. A Mock Turtle floating dead in Jordan Pond. A March Hare rotting in the sun atop Cadillac Mountain .
    If these creatures must go extinct—against my instincts as a hunter of the mysterious—I hope to never bear witness to it again. It is like finding your old storybooks torn and scattered along a beloved wooded trail. It is like, forgive my morbidity, finding you lying there. Dead too soon, you precious little child. You woman I wish I knew.
    Until I can acclimate to this. Until the Earth rights itself again on its axis…I must put down my pen. And my glass…
    Forever yours. Forever and ever, as the storybooks say.
    Good night, sweetheart.
    – Dad.
     

 
    Channel 4:
     
    the night
    swimmers
     
    -ONE-
     
    To reach the spot in Eastborough Swamp where he and his brother had used to go target shooting, Jeremy Spence had to cut through the back end of Pine Grove Cemetery .
    The rear border of the town’s largest graveyard had been pushed further back than when Jeremy and Allen had used to tramp into the swamp’s wooded depths, but then again, if the town itself kept increasing its population, so should its cemeteries make more room for future inhabitants. Sometimes Jeremy lamented how over-development was stripping Eastborough , Massachusetts of its farms, its woods and fields, its rural character…but this was the first time he’d considered that even the graveyards were becoming over-developed. Maybe when space grew too scarce they could bury the dead in multi-leveled condo mausoleums.
    At the periphery of forest, the brothers had often found old wreathes and withered flower arrangements heaped by the groundskeepers, occasionally old slate gravestones that had been broken by vandals or snow plows. Once, they had even found a dead cat with its belly burst and full of boiling maggots as if it had given birth to those restless, mindless swarms.
    Today, however, Jeremy merely crossed a bare dirt lot, plowed level, until he came to a wall of old, lichen-stained trees. There was no gradual build up of vegetation anymore. It was a sharp division of two worlds, like the edge of an ocean where it meets the shore. A bit warily, Jeremy crossed that boundary line. Almost always, he and Allen had come in autumn, when the vegetation was less lush, and when there was less likelihood of ticks and spiders and other sinister, unseen creatures lying in wait. The blue hovering smoke of their guns gave the