At the house where he first spotted the two small dogs, the young coyote found a dead raccoon, still fresh, steaming. Front paws pinning the animal, he shredded the meat from its skeleton. With every mouthful he shook his head, darted his eyes this way and that, and rotated his ears. No perceptible threat present, he satisfied his hunger without interruption, ripped the raccoon’s skull from its spine, and set it like a trophy under the pines that had become a familiar haunt to him. There he left it for the worms beneath the snow.
***
One allegation, then another, arose a few months after Alice and Mitch were married. It was just after she’d adopted Chase and Hunter, a bonded pair of senior Yorkies she’d picked up at the shelter, right around the time Ghost made a bloody mess of the snow near the privacy pines in their yard. When Alice let out the dogs, they went berserk, sticking their noses right into it, digging, barking, yipping as if they themselves had made the kill. Chase, the smaller one, danced on her hind legs, while Hunter kept his nose down until he pulled up a wad of sticky, bloodied fur he’d torn off the animal’s skull. Alice scooped up the terriers and led them to a clean spot to do their business. Hunter still had the fur in his mouth when she put them in the tub to scrub the blood.
Mitch followed Alice’s orders and brought two towels into the bathroom. He grabbed the bloody wad from Hunter and threw it in the trash. Alice asked, “What do you think that was?”
Almost like a proud father, Mitch answered, “It seems like Ghost might have had himself a meal.”
Alice and Mitch had named the young coyote Ghost after he appeared and disappeared early one evening. They were grilling steaks. As the meat sizzled on the flame, the coyote snuck up to the pines, pushed his snout under the lowest needles, and vanished. He visited several times after that, always at dusk, always evaporating right after they’d catch a glimpse of him, as if he were announcing himself as a specter. Now the cold gave Alice something else to worry about. The two complaints — and now Ghost — out there, haunting her.
***
The night they met, Mitch’s shoulder bumped Alice’s head during the part of “You Make Me Wanna Shout” when everyone gets low and sings, “A little bit softer now.” On the way up, as they worked to a scream — “A little bit louder now” — Mitch apologized and asked Alice if she needed ice. She laughed and followed the man she would later describe as “a wild, handsome nerd” to the bar. They married six months to the day after that faculty social — the Zoology Chair, Mitch’s best man; the Provost, Alice’s matron of honor. When the provost offered her toast “to marriage in your sixties,” Alice and Mitch gazed at each other, each unaware of what had caught the other’s eye in that exact moment. For Mitch, it was the way a chunk of Alice’s hair had wrestled itself out of her updo, the way it begged to be fixed. Taunted him, really, almost like a piece of food dangling in front of a hungry animal. And for Alice, what caught her attention was the way Mitch looked at her. Was that puzzlement? Hunger? She settled on reverence. After all, he was the one who’d pushed to get married, who’d said that she settled him, that he needed to be settled.
With bourbon on his breath, Mitch’s best man said it would be a relief to see Mitch tied down. He even used the word “restrained.” Innocently, Alice joked about shopping for a whip. “If I’m to be a tamer, I need the proper equipment. Don’t I?”
***
The invitation howl of a female beckoned Ghost away from his territory into an icy field he didn’t know. Her lure was persistent, giving him confidence and direction, and he postured and stood bold when other males challenged his presence. He learned quickly how to peer into their eyes, how to project his strength, how to back them away without physical altercation.
By scent, Ghost found the female alone, hidden between mounds of wind-blown snow. They sized each other, sniffed their parts, rubbed shoulder to shoulder. If anyone had been there to see it, they might have noted that their bond was instant.
***
When Alice wrote her letter stating her intent to retire, Mitch stood over her ready to pop a cork. He was sweet that way — always up for celebration. She was drawn to his playfulness, and in this moment, when she was ready to claim her own freedom, he was cheering her on. He reminded her of what a success she’d been, how much the English department would miss her, how her reviews, conducted by an independent agency the university hired, were exceptional. How her students raved about her flexibility, her compassion, her insights. How relaxed she made them feel — about being in her class, about the material. While she’d miss the affirmation, for sure, Alice had begun to ask herself dreamy questions like “What about Majorca?” and “Is the beauty of Santorini as breathtaking as they say?” Though Mitch wanted to keep teaching, he urged her on. “Yes! Plan your trip! Mediterranean, here she comes!” he said. Later, Alice would wonder about Mitch’s enthusiasm for her traveling solo; however, imagining the beaches of Majorca and the cliffs of Santorini felt freeing, and her retirement letter had spilled out of her without effort. When her computer read Sent!, Mitch popped the Prosecco, handed her a glass, and left her alone to dream.
***
The day before Ghost bloodied up Alice and Mitch’s yard, Chase gnawed the heels on Alice’s new pumps, and Hunter tore apart the diaper he needed to keep from leaking pee. In spite of the challenges, Alice was taken by the dogs’ exuberance, their affection, their tenacity. Their terrier instincts fascinated her. They hunted flies and mangled mice, then warmed her lap each night.
Annoyed, Alice allowed her mind five minutes to tinker with the gossip. She’d overheard one of the secretaries in Mitch’s department whispering to another, “It’s about academic integrity. General integrity, if you ask me.” If there was anything to the allegations, she wasn’t sure. How well did she know him, really?
At the dinner table, Alice and Mitch sank their knives into meatloaf and shoveled mashed potatoes onto their forks. Mitch asked Alice if there was anything she wanted to discuss. She studied his face but stopped herself short of asking him anything that might disrupt the quiet. Mitch’s expression was flat under the light fixture’s shadows. She wondered if she would ever know.
Using some news he’d just read, Mitch steered the conversation. He told her that some researchers had made an important discovery with chimpanzees. Apparently, they had observed one chimp putting an insect on another’s wound as a form of medicine. “It shows empathy, Alice. Animal behaviorists are very excited. Empathy among animals. Imagine that.” Mitch’s quivering chin revealed his disdain for his own words. Alice noticed it and doubted that Mitch cared at all about empathy.
Alice scooped up the dogs, said she was tired, and left Mitch to do the dishes. The next morning, the pines were still and there was blood in the snow.
***
In Ghost’s first winter with his mate, a young male appeared in their territory. Hunched, neck stretched low, the young male approached Ghost’s mate as Ghost watched from a short distance. Someone might have said that Ghost looked amused for a few seconds, as if dismissing the threat the young male presented. Go ahead and try, he might have said. When the young male got a hair too close, Ghost pounced and pulled away, a tuft of fur in his cheek, his upper lip positioned in an elongated snarl. The young coyote took off, kicking melting snow and mud into the air. Ghost lay down where his mate stood, her eyes soft against the sun.
***
On their fourth date, Mitch took Alice to a taxidermy shop beyond the county line. He knew the owner who sometimes loaned him animals for Mitch’s smaller classes. Alice stood in the middle of the shop, glass-eyed foxes and bobcats peering at her from their wooden stands, while Mitch asked her to pick her favorite. So taken by the passion in his words — “See where this one’s eyes are set? Perfect for hunting!” — she never settled on one.
Alice’s skin tingled when Mitch guided her hand over the feathers of an owl, its head turned toward something only the owl could see. And Mitch’s voice, almost a whisper — when he talked about the owl’s ability to hunt without sound, to swipe its prey and evaporate into the trees — lulled her. She felt the word “evaporate” dangling between them.
Alice remembered one of her students complaining about being ghosted by someone she was in contact with on an app. “It’s like he just evaporated,” the student told her friend. Alice wondered what it would take to behave like that if you weren’t an owl. To vanish into air.
***
Intrigued by Ghost, Alice did some reading. Coyotes do not appear in the Chinese Zodiac; however, some enthusiasts say they have much to teach us. Skeptical at first, Alice discovered that a coyote will eat whatever’s in front of it: a rodent, garbage, a small dog or two if given the chance. She also learned that the coyote is highly adaptable and admired for its ability to assess a situation, to insert itself and to disappear, to make its presence known without getting caught. Alice concluded that an animal might actually be a teacher of sorts, that a person could learn from an animal, even a scavenger, and not be one herself. “Fucking resourceful,” she whispered.
***
Mitch was born in 1960, the Year of the Rat. His parents thought that was hilarious. Right before Mitch’s Bar Mitzvah, their favorite waiter at their go-to Chinese restaurant gave the family a calendar with a list of the past one hundred birth years and their animals. His younger sisters were a tiger and a goat, respectively. Their tormenting made Mitch despise the Chinese Zodiac, Chinese food (except for Butterfly Shrimp — rescued by bacon), and the waiter, who tried to convince Mitch that the rat was a noble animal, symbolizing wealth and vitality. Under his breath, Mitch made the wish to disappear. Then in a shallow voice he whispered “Go to hell” and walked out of the restaurant while his family laughed about his little tantrum.
As an undergrad zoology major, Mitch was given his first rat to train. He had zero experience with animals, but something about the animal kingdom — where behavior could be explained by biology — drew him close. The rat, whom he named Cynthia after his mother, chewed electrical cords, shit in his sneakers, and played dead when it was time to work. He fed her six items from the list titled “Never Feed Your Rat These Foods,” and marveled at how none of them affected her the slightest. When he returned her to the lab supervisor at the end of the semester, the supervisor remarked that Cynthia was gluttonous and lazy, that Mitch had ruined her for other students in the program, that she’d probably have to be euthanized unless he wanted to keep her as a pet. Mitch exited the lab without a word.
***
One evening in early spring, Ghost returned with his mate to Alice and Mitch’s yard. The dusk light was low, Alice’s favorite time to garden. As Alice buried wildflower seeds in the soil around the house, the two coyotes appeared in front of the pines. Ghost bolted as soon as Alice noticed them, but the female lingered and turned toward Alice. Alice felt the coyote assessing her. When Alice stood up and faced her, the coyote took off.
***
In the months before he married Alice, Mitch wrote a series of articles on canine behavior. He explored an age-old topic that pet lovers can’t seem to get enough of: how domesticated dogs exhibit modified forms of behavior found in their wild cousins. He used examples he plucked from three of his students’ papers, altered the language a bit, and wrote up the experiences as personal anecdotes. The articles were picked up by a magazine called The Contemporary Dog, which had its own display in the university library, in the room where therapy dogs visited stressed students during exams. One stressed student, taking a break from her Ethics 101 notes, picked up the magazine, and flipping through, caught a few words that detailed the exact dog behavior she’d seen described in a paper she’d proofread for a guy who lived down the hall from her. When she saw Mitch’s name on the article, she tucked the magazine into her backpack and marched back to her dorm. She had recalled her floor mate calling him “a fucking prick of a professor.”
***
The young man at the shelter told Alice that the Yorkshire Terrier was originally bred for catching rats. This guy was full of information — a real dog geek. He told her Chase and Hunter would be loyal companions to each other and to her until they died. He added, “If you’re lucky, they’ll come back to visit you once they’re gone.” Then he asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
Caught off guard, Alice said she wasn’t sure.
The shelter guy said, “You’ll know once they’re gone. My Sadie, my little Bichon, comes back every Christmas.” When Alice fell silent, he said, “Well, you’ve got time. Just enjoy them.”
That night, Chase bit Mitch. Alice wiped the blood off of Mitch’s chin and said, “She’s just adjusting.”
***
Ghost and his mate marked the pines and left scat along the back line of Alice and Mitch’s property. The scat was large and twisted, and when Mitch and Alice examined it, they saw rodent hair and berries, evidence that the coyotes were eating well. Mitch and Alice noticed that one coyote’s paw print had landed smack in the center of an old footprint of Mitch’s — his boot long and wide. Alice marveled at how the paw print fit so neatly inside the outline, as if it had always been part of the image.
***
Early in his career, during a lecture on animal behavior observed by someone from the tenure committee, Mitch posed this question to his students: “Is a rat truly a predator?”
He went on, “Can an animal who will eat nearly anything, who only really exhibits predatory behavior when nothing else is available” — here he thought of damaged electrical cords — “be considered a predator? Think of masterful cheetahs, of hovering hawks, of stealthy rattlesnakes. Those, my friends, are predators. The rat only hunts mice and frogs when the trash in our dumpsters isn’t on the buffet. Mostly, the rat is a mere scavenger.” Mitch clicked his tongue when he said this. Notice of his approval for tenure came in the mail just a few days later.
***
The fact that the year Alice was born — 1958 — was the Year of the Dog came to her on her first wedding day in 1982 when her sister-in-law, who’d been adopted from China and took pride in the Chinese Zodiac, presented her with a hand-carved dog. Her new husband rolled his eyes, but Alice loved the figure and the engraving: RESOURCEFUL and INDEPENDENT.
Two years later, the night her husband told her that he was leaving, that he needed more adventure, Alice positioned the carved dog on her night stand so that its engraving would be the first words she saw every morning.
***
Once and only once, Ghost — traveling alone — approached the window next to the patio door where the Yorkies often appeared. He could smell the dogs inside, no humans nearby. The coyote paced for a few minutes under the window and pawed at the soil. When he knocked over a watering can, the Yorkies lunged at the window, ran to the door, and jumped higher than they should have been able to, carrying on with a tenacity unmatched in the wild. They were still scratching at the molding long after Ghost had bolted.
***
It was weeks before Mitch rammed his shoulder into Alice’s head at the faculty social when Mitch’s friendship with a female graduate assistant was starting to cause a stir. The graduate assistant stated she was uncomfortable. She decided to stay in her position, but agreed with the suggestion the university’s legal team made and began communicating with Mitch through email only. Mitch didn’t understand how it had gotten to this. There had been that awkward moment in his office, and now there was all this chatter around them. He decided that pursuing someone else, someone who could soften his nerves, maybe even his desires, might be a good idea. Anyway it would take the focus off what his chairman called “a potential scandal.”
One morning before class, he heard a student talking about an elective he was taking to fulfill his literature requirement. “The professor,” he said, “is so smart and so reassuring. She calms my nerves.” When the student said her name out loud, Mitch tore the corner off a paper from his planner and wrote it down so he could look her up, maybe find a way to bump into her. He liked her name and let it sit on his tongue. Alice. “I could use someone like that,” he said to himself. He lingered on the word “use.”
***
At thirteen, Alice experimented with smoking and stealing. Cigarettes from her father’s top drawer. A necklace or a pair of earrings from friends’ houses. She never wore what she lifted. The thrill was in the taking.
She’d whisper her crimes to her mother late at night while her father was at the bar with his buddies. Alice took to studying her mother’s responses. Sitting across from her at the kitchen table, two cups of Oolong tea between them, her mother would smile halfway, take Alice’s hands in hers, and say, “This won’t last. I know you. These aren’t the hands of a thief.”
Alice’s father would sometimes come home in the middle of one of these kitchen table sessions. Her parents were always delighted to see each other. Alice attributed this to her mother, to the stability her mother provided, to her mother’s steadfast belief in the goodness of her husband and her only child.
At sixteen, after one messy accusation from a friend who was missing a bracelet, Alice decided her mother was right; she didn’t have the hands of a thief. Determined to be more like her mother — steady, giving, empathetic, accepting — Alice stopped taking what didn’t belong to her.
***
During denning season, Ghost’s mate dug multiple holes at the back of the property that had become their territory. Multiple dens would allow her to move her pups if she sensed a threat. When it was time for her to nest, she chose the hole where the roots under the pines met an impenetrable rock.
While Ghost was out hunting, she entered the den to prepare for her litter. The gentle motion of a nearby stream and the fitful darting of woodland rodents eased her. A new silence had settled in the area, and she responded to it by allowing herself to sleep, to gather strength for birthing.
***
Alice and Mitch sat across from each other in the kitchen — between them, a stack of ribs, bare after Mitch had devoured the sinewy meat. Mitch complimented Alice’s cooking, burped, and took a call from the department chair. Alice heard him through the door of his study. “I thought you had put that matter to rest. Nothing happened. I’ll tell you again: she felt awkward because she was attracted to me. I thought you said you’d take care of this.” And once more, his insistence — “Nothing happened.”
The night before, as Mitch took off his jacket, a folded piece of paper torn from his planner tumbled to the floor. Mitch left the room and Alice scooped it up. Wanting to make sure there was nothing important on it — a phone number, perhaps — she unfolded it and saw her name scribbled in red ink. On the back of the paper was the date. He’d written her name three weeks before they’d met.
Mitch returned to the table, glanced at Alice, and said, “The dog magazine again. The students want me to make a statement about whose anecdotes they are.” She recognized the look in his eyes — the look of an animal on the hunt, determined to feed himself without getting caught.
***
At first, without her at his side, Ghost paced the line between the den and the stream, wearing a path in the brush. He brought her food — rabbits, frogs, sometimes a small raccoon, sometimes discarded steak, salad, pizza — and woke her by nudging whatever part of her was closest to the den’s entrance. When the pups arrived, he hovered over the den, his legs thick with resolve, his chest swollen with satisfaction. Had someone been there to bear witness, they might have called him a sentinel. No longer vaporous among the pines, Ghost claimed his territory with a haunting, guttural howl.
***
Mitch sat at his computer diving into the research on the chimpanzee who’d used an insect to heal another’s wound. He hated the topic, told his colleagues he had no interest in animals showing empathy. He said, “I’ll take apex predators any day. Orcas, lions, alligators — give me any one of those any time.” Despite his pleading, his colleagues insisted that the chimpanzee study be part of his curriculum, so there he sat suffering, wondering how he’d present such sentimentalized information. Mitch submitted his revised curriculum and walked out back to shake off his frustration. He thought he heard the high-pitched chatter of young pups, and for a second he wondered about Ghost and his mate, where they had settled.
He stretched his arms over his head, an effort to cleanse himself of his compromise. “Empathy,” he said out loud. “For fuck’s sake.”
A clean white object in the grass caught his eye. The skull of an animal. He picked it up to study it, to take it inside to show Alice, but when Mitch stepped into the door frame, the silence of the house met him cold.
–
Born and raised in New York, Karen Zlotnick lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and their Newfoundland dog. Some of her work has been featured in Pithead Chapel, Typishly, jmww, Stonecoast Review, and Moon City Review. In addition, one of her stories was nominated for Best Small Fictions.
© 2026, Karen Zlotnick
Halfway Down the Stairs 