Stubborn Remains by Harper Wood

This year at AWP, Third Coast hosted our first Dice & Draft Bookfair Contest. Contestants rolled four dice, randomizing the genre, setting, character(s), and an item that should appear in their poem or story. Submissions were judged not only on the quality of each piece, but on how creatively authors used the prompt they rolled on the dice. Editors selected two winners, one poem and one flash prose piece. Congratulations to Harper Wood for their flash piece, “Stubborn Remains,” which was written in response to the following prompt:

Horror (Genre), House (Setting), Animal (Character), Photograph (Item)

There is a fox in the henhouse, and it keeps killing our chickens. The collie was supposed to keep the chickens safe, but three weeks ago the gate was left open. We hung posters and handed out photographs to other dog walkers. At my teenage son’s insistence, I posted the photo to Facebook, but deleted the post five days later when I got tired of the crying face emoji every time I opened my phone. My son knocked on doors until a stranger living at the end of the cul-de-sac told him with no hesitation that one morning while sipping his morning coffee he saw that very dog get hit by a black truck. Said that the dog got up and ran into the woods surrounding the neighborhood, leaving only a smear of viscera on the pavement. I nearly hit him for his apathy, but I try not to be a hypocrite where my kid can see it. Weeks later, the pavement still bleeds crimson after a storm, a dark pool in the pothole where clear rainwater should reflect the sky.

In autumn, something kills the fox. Leaves it at the back door for my son to find when he goes out to collect eggs at dawn, red fur pale in comparison to the dark blood stubbornly coagulating on the stone patio. I insist on burying it right at the edge of our backyard where the woods begin. My family still can’t decide if the dog is dead or not. Sometimes they speak like the dog is still around in the woods or as an angel. Either way they both agree he’s doing a terrible job guarding the coop. They’re right, but neither of them are insomniacs as I am, so I’ll never confirm it. On those nights I wake with a pit in my stomach and fingernails bitten raw to the point of bleeding; on those nights I crumple toilet paper in my fist to staunch the blood as I watch four-legged shadows slip into the henhouse. Whatever waits in there must be gone by dawn, because when my son returns he only mentions which of the hens is missing.

The dog returns in springtime, bounding out of the woods where he has been all along. Clean teeth, bright eyes, we take him to the vet and my wife is overjoyed to receive a clean bill of health; our jobs won’t cover vet insurance. While my son cuddles the collie on the couch, my sister parks her black Ford in my driveway and meets me at the fence gate. We do not speak, we only make a circle around the yard with the pretense of checking on the chickens—making note of the upturned dirt only we knew to look for—before entering the house. The dog leaps from the couch, stretching its front paws up toward my shoulders, grins at me with all his teeth. So close, I spot the soft and fluttering feather between his canines.

Harper Wood is a Michigander by birth, though they currently live in Massachusetts as an MFA candidate at Emerson College and the Publisher at Redivider. In their limited free time, they can be found making cocktails for their friends, working through their shelves of unread books, or playing fetch with their cat. Otherwise, find them on Bluesky @hnwood.bsky.