Roof Coyote

I was watching a trailer for a movie on the web, but it was a movie about me. I remembered it happening, but it seemed unreal. Everything was very muddled.

There was a house, and it was in the woods and cut off from everything. There was electricity but it wasn't reliable. It was snowing gently, and there were already a couple of feet of snow on the ground.

A woman who was me was staying in the house. There were noises and shrieks and howling, then there were some horrible thuds on the roof.

The woman didn't want to check to see what had made the noises. It was almost certainly something bad, something that she couldn't do anything about but that would disturb her nonetheless.

But she had to look, because you just can't ignore something hitting your roof like a bag of wet meat.

There was a sort of hatch in the ceiling in a hallway that opened right onto the roof. The roof was almost completely flat, with just enough slope so it didn't collect water and cave in.

She opened the hatch and stuck her head out. Right next to the hatch, as close as it could be without keeping it from opening, was a big coyote.

It was alive, breathing raggedly and twitching, but it was either skinless or had been turned inside out. Its legs weren't arranged right, either; it was like someone had melted it.

It smelled like a fresh burn, and its breath was hot and reeked of stale blood.

While she looked at it, another one fell a few feet away from it.

She shut the hatch and didn't go to sleep that night.

Some of the coyotes were dead when they fell, but some were still alive. Some lived for hours, whining a little, scraping their raw flesh on the shingles as they twitched. Some even had the strength to howl, a heart-rending howl of pain. She saw some normal coyotes come out of the woods, looking for the source of the pain. They sniffed the dead and dying, lying in red pits their body heat carved in the snow, and ran off as fast as they could.