Cascadia

7. Vanished

After the initial shock wore off – and there were no tears left to shed – Keana made her way downstairs. The spacious living area was still littered with sleeping bags and blow-up mattresses. She found incense still burning in their holders, filling the room with a heavy scent of Nag Champa and sandalwood. The kitchen was a disaster, however. Dirty pots and pans were left out, spread across all available counterspace. She prepared herself a plate of cold vegetables and quinoa and moved to the dinner table, still cluttered with plates of half-eaten food and untouched glasses of water and red wine. It looked almost as if everyone had simply gotten up and walked out in the middle of their meal.

She ate alone at the head of table, each bite accompanied by a single thought: What happened to everyone? She could have easily driven herself mad attempting to answer that question, so she decided to focus her attention on other matters instead.

The afternoon was spent cleaning the main floor. She cleared the table, stored the leftovers in Tupperware containers, dumped the scraps into the compost bin, washed the dishes, and wiped down the counters. She then moved to the living room where she dusted, vacuumed, and arranged the items on the sole coffee table in an aesthetically pleasing way. It was barely noon by the time she ran out of stuff to clean, leaving her alone with her thoughts once again. If she thought too much about the missing residents, the panic would set in. Must keep busy. Must keep busy.

She filled two buckets with recycled dish water and carried them down to the community garden and dumped the contents into the soil. A noticeable number of weeds seemed to be cropping up, so went about pulling every single one of them up with her bare hands. As she knelt to pull the last tansy up by the root, she heard a soft rustling behind her.

The black dog had returned, lying complacently in an overgrowth of witchgrass. He held his head high, keeping one paw crossed protectively over a mangled object. It took a few moments before Keana realized she was looking at the severed head of Gabby's pet goose. The dog's eyes beamed as it looked back at her with great pride, seemingly expectant of a reward or some praise for a job well done.

Despite her best efforts, the memory of the old woman came rushing back. She felt her spine tighten at the very sight of the canine. It wasn't real, she told herself. None of this is real. Without thinking, she grabbed a palm-sized stone from the ground and clutched it tightly in her hand, cocking her arm way back for a high-velocity throw. Of course, she wasn't going to hit the dog. She just wanted to drive it away. Everything that had happened – everything bad – had only happened after she encountered the dog.

"Go away!" she yelled. "If you go away, things will be normal again."

The dog perked its ears up, locking eyes with Keana. She froze, her arm extended back and her hand loosely gripping the stone. The dog had saved her, hadn't he? Saved her from the goose. Saved her from Gabby. Finally, she allowed the rock to fall from her hands, unable to follow through on her threat.

"Alright," she conceded as her arm fell back down to her side. "Let's go see if we can find you something tastier to eat than that. I'm sure you must be hungry."

She started back toward the house. The dog secured the goose skull in its mouth and scrambled after her, making their way up the hill.

Back in the kitchen, she tore through the refrigerator in search of any scraps the thought the poor dog might enjoy. There was little offering in the way of meat – and what meat there was had been frozen and would take hours to thaw to the point of being usable – so she heated up a small batch of brown rice and carrots and dumped it into a small ceramic bowl. A second bowl was filled with fresh water, and both were carried out to the porch where the dog had been lounging in the sun, still breaking off tiny shards of bone from the goose skull. When he caught the scent of fresh food, his tail wagged excitedly, hardly waiting for the bowl to touch the ground before digging in. Once the food had been consumed, he ran up to Keana and licked her face. Laughing, Keana tried to push him away, but he kept coming after her with his enormous wet tongue.