Page 8 of Mazywood

MAZELLE SEARCHES FOR SCOUT IN the thin pines and tall brush of the Gracetown woods. Mosquitoes as thick as fog feast on her skin. She darts through reeds and shadows, panic gnawing on her tummy. Scout can’t be gone. Without Scout, she and her family have nothing!

“Scout!” she screams to the forest and its towering trees blocking the sun. She has never heard such anguish in her own reedy voice.

Somewhere ahead, her sister Doris is screaming in terror.

But Doris and Scout aren’t in sight. Only trees. Trees surround her, an endless ring.

As Mazelle runs deeper into the woods, the swamp grasses and Florida pine needles sag under… snow? Yes, snow! The mosquitoes batting her arms have turned to snow flurries. A layer of twinkling white cloaks the trees around her, until her feet sink into frigid snow as high as her knees. How will she see Scout in this sea of whiteness?

Another scream from darkness. And a deep, terrible bark she almost doesn’t recognize.

“Scout!” she screams out.

Mazelle sees a pink paw print in front of her. And another. A trail of bloody paw prints weaves through the tree trunks.

Somewhere ahead, Scout barks. Is he hurt? And why was Doris screaming? (You know why. Because Scout knows how much Doris hates him.)

“Scout?” she calls. “Where are you?”

Another bark, closer this time. Mazelle tries to see Scout, but snow obscures everything.

A sound like leaves crunching envelops her. She sees Scout running toward her from a break in the tree line ahead, barking merrily. A thump sound makes the ground beneath her quiver each time his paws land as he runs.

Scout’s snout is dripping with blood. With a worried gasp, Mazelle checks him for injuries, but his stubby tail is wagging and his blood-spotted tongue dangles with joy. He barks, licking her face. Streaking her cheek with stickiness. The blood isn’t Scout’s, she realizes.

Whimpering floats from the trees ahead.

“Doris?” Mazelle has warned her sister so many times not to tease and insult Scout.

Doris is wrapped in fog, her figure shadowy and obscured. Or is it Doris at all? This woman doesn’t look like her sister; she’s shorter, with wider hips. The woman plants her hands on those hips with displeasure apparent even in the mist.

“Wish I had my shotgun! But I don’t need no gun to brain you, you filthy stinking dog!”

No, that isn’t Doris’s voice floating from the trees. It sounds like her mother’s godmother, Aunt Ruby, who lives with her family now.

And Scout likes Aunt Ruby even less than he likes Doris.

Scout growls and snaps his teeth as he races on the bloody trail back toward the angry voice, matching Aunt Ruby’s rage with running steps that make the ground tremble.

A thump shook the wall. Mazelle woke up gasping for breath, expecting to see snow across her blankets. Or blood.

Instead, her four-poster bed with a lace canopy appeared like a vision from a storybook, helping her shake off the nightmare that didn’t feel like it was only a dream. She wasn’t in the woods, but the thumping had sounded real, ringing in her walls. In her bones.

Mazelle ran to the front door just outside of her room to peek out at Scout on the sunporch, and he was sitting in front of the door like usual. If he’d been ramming himself against the door—an alarming image in her head—he had stopped now. Luckily, the rest of the house was silent, and Aunt Ruby wasn’t racing from the kitchen to shake a rolled-up newspaper at Scout, yelling at him to be quiet. Aunt Ruby only pretended to swat at Scout with the newspaper to try to make him flinch—but Scout never showed fear. Mazelle hated to watch Aunt Ruby threatening Scout that way. She had a feeling that Aunt Ruby better not do that again, not if she knew what was good for her.

Scout’s tail swished against the porch’s wood slats as he grinned at Mazelle, his pink tongue spilling free. Mazelle was relieved that he had no coating of blood on his tongue. (She remembered that from her dream even if she couldn’t remember the rest.) Mazelle was nearly as surprised to see Scout each day as she had been the first morning after she brought him home. His existence felt improbable and delicate, a mirage she could blink away.

In the two years since Scout appeared, it felt silly to imagine that she’d conjured him from the Wishing Pool; instead, she decided she’d just been lucky to find such a talented stray. But she couldn’t deny that he wasn’t an ordinary dog. At nine, she was no longer a little kid who accepted the world’s cracks without questions.

No matter how early or late, Mazelle had never seen Scout curled up asleep. He was always awake before her, just like today. She also had noticed that Scout ate his dog food with duty rather than the joy of other dogs; instead, Scout liked to hunt. He chased squirrels in their backyard, and the few times she’d seen him catch one, it wasn’t a pretty sight, his gory meal staining their backyard grass. Mazelle was careful to clean up any blood on Scout’s mouth or snout before her family saw how much he could seem more like a wolf than a dog.

But so what if Scout liked to hunt? Wish or no wish, Scout had come from the wild.

The last thing—the part she could not reason away—was the unnatural way Scout knew her thoughts, their invisible tether. The very trait that had bought her this beautiful bed, this home, might be the most troubling question of all: How? That question was a dark velvet curtain concealing Mazelle’s unease, and she was afraid to peek behind it too closely because examining it in the light might ruin everything. If she truly understood, it would scare her.

And Mazelle didn’t want to be afraid of Scout. She couldn’t afford to be.

So, as always, Mazelle smiled widely when she saw her dog waiting for her. Her family kept the porch door locked at night, but the screen was flimsy if someone was determined to get in and steal her dog. Her everything. She could never take Scout for granted.