Ray Kowalski was fifty-eight years old and his knee hurt. Not all the time — that would have been simpler. It hurt when it rained, which was often enough in eastern Ohio, and it hurt when he stood too long, which he did every morning because he had nothing better to do with his mornings, and it hurt in the mornings when he first got out of bed, which was the worst because that was the moment when he had to decide whether to get up or stay in bed and the decision was always the same: get up.



The house was a rental. One bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen that smelled like the person who had cooked in it before Ray last, and a porch that was more crack than wood. He paid three hundred dollars a month for it, which was more than he could afford on his disability pension, but the woman who owned it — Mrs. Kowalski, no relation, just the same last name because Ohio is full of Kowalskis the way New York is full of Kohns and LA is full of Garcias — said she would work with him because she liked the look of a man who sat on his porch every morning and did not complain.



Ray complained. Internally. That was his thing. Internally complaining. He did not complain to other people. He was not that kind of complainer. The kind that complains to other people is the kind that wants something. The kind that complains internally is the kind that has given up on getting anything and is just making noise in his own head to pass the time.



The little bastards lived under his porch. He did not know this for a while. He knew there was a hollow space under the porch — you could see it if you lay on your back and looked — and he knew that something lived down there because he heard them at night: scratching, moving, the occasional sound of something small and hard hitting the underside of the floorboards. He did not think much about it. Mice live under houses. Rats live under houses. Whatever lives under Ray's porch was probably just doing what whatever lives under houses does: living.



He noticed them properly on a Tuesday in July. He was sitting on the porch with a beer — Pabst Blue Ribbon, because that is what you drink when you do not care about the taste and you care only about the cold — and he looked down and saw three of them sitting in the shade under the porch, looking up at him.



They were yellow. That was the first thing he noticed. Not the yellow of a banana or a school bus or a warning sign. The yellow of something that had been in the dirt and come out yellow. A dirty yellow. A sickly yellow. A yellow that said: this is what you look like when you live under a porch.



"Alright," Ray said. "What are you?"



They looked up at him. Three pairs of yellow eyes, flat and unblinking and absolutely uninterested in his opinion of them. Ray took a sip of his beer and looked at them for a minute. Then he went inside and got a piece of bread from the kitchen, broke it into three pieces, and dropped it through the gap under the porch.



They ate it.



That was it. That was the whole interaction. He gave them bread. They ate it. He went back to his beer. They went back to whatever they were doing under the porch.



The next morning, there were five of them. Then seven. Then, by the end of the week, enough that Ray started thinking of them as a colony, which is to say he started thinking about them the way he thought about everything: as a problem to be managed rather than solved.



He called them the little bastards. Not because they were bastards — he was not a cruel man, not about animals, at least — but because they were persistent. They were under the porch every morning, every evening, sometimes during the day if he was sitting on the porch long enough to see them. They were always there. They were always yellow. They were always looking up at him with the same flat, unblinking attention.



He started leaving them bread. Not every day — some days he forgot, and some days he was out of bread, and some days he simply did not want to get up from his chair and go to the kitchen and break a piece of whatever was in the bag. But often enough that they learned to expect it. They would appear on the edge of the porch, sitting very still, watching him drink his coffee, waiting.



Sometimes he wondered what they were. Weasels, probably. Or skunks. Or something in between. He was not an animal man. He had worked in a steel mill for thirty years. The only animals he knew were the ones he saw on the side of the road sometimes, dead, and he preferred not to think about those.



But the little bastards were different. They were not dead. They were alive. They were alive under his porch and they were alive on the porch and they were alive looking up at him with their flat yellow eyes and there was something about that — about being looked at by something so small and so yellow and so utterly indifferent to his existence — that made him feel, for reasons he could not name, like he was the one who was being studied.



His grandson came in August. The boy was eight, named Tommy after Ray's brother, who was dead, and Ray liked him because he was quiet and observant and did not ask too many questions. Tommy's mother — Ray's ex-daughter-in-law, which is to say the woman he had been married to for sixteen years and was no longer married to — said she needed a break and could Tommy stay for a week? Ray said yes. That was his way. Yes. Always yes.



Tommy spent the first day exploring the property. The house was small, so the property was all he had to explore: the porch, the yard (which was mostly dirt and weeds), the small grove of trees behind the house, and the bank of the creek that ran at the bottom of the hill. He went everywhere and came back everywhere with the same quiet satisfaction of a boy who has found a new world and is cataloguing it.



On the second day, he was in the old barn — which was less a barn and more a collection of walls that used to hold things together — and a piece of rusted nail fell out of the wall and hit him in the stomach. Not deep. But deep enough. Blood ran down his shirt. Tommy did not cry. He stood there, looking at the blood, and then he looked at Ray, who was sitting on the porch drinking coffee.



Ray came running. He picked Tommy up and carried him to the house and cleaned the wound and put a bandage on it and called the doctor, who said it was infected but not badly, and prescribed something, and said to keep it clean.



That night, Tommy ran a fever.



Ray sat by the boy's bed in the single bedroom, watching him breathe through the mouth because his nose was stuffed and his body was burning, and he felt something he had not felt since Maria was alive and Tommy's father was sick and Ray had sat by his son's bed and done exactly what he was doing now: watching, waiting, hoping that the medicine would work and the fever would break and the boy would wake up hungry and asking for breakfast in the morning.



The little bastards were there. He did not see them at first. He was too focused on Tommy. But when he looked up from the bed, he saw them: three of them, sitting in the corner of the room, on the floor, looking up at him with the same flat yellow eyes they always looked up at him with.



He did not say anything. He simply looked at them. They simply looked back. After a moment, they turned and disappeared through a gap in the wall that Ray had not known existed.



In the morning, the fever had broken.



Tommy woke up hungry. Ray made him eggs and toast and coffee (no coffee for an eight-year-old, he corrected himself, and made him orange juice instead) and watched him eat with the kind of focused attention that men who have spent their lives doing hard physical labour bring to things that matter.



After Tommy ate, Ray went outside and sat on the porch. The little bastards were there. More than before. Maybe ten, maybe twelve, sitting in the yard and on the porch and on the fence posts, all of them looking up at him.



He poured a cup of coffee, sat down, and drank it. They watched him. He watched them. The sun was coming up over the hill, and the hill was green and brown and alive, and the creek was running below it, and the little bastards were sitting in the grass and the porch and the fence posts, and the world was, for one perfect and ordinary morning, exactly what it was.



Ray did not think about it much. He thought about the wound, which was healing. He thought about the grandson, who was eating eggs. He thought about the knee, which still hurt. He thought about the price of beer. He thought about the things he would think about, in the order that things get thought about when you are a fifty-eight-year-old man sitting on a porch in eastern Ohio on a morning in August.



The rain started two weeks later. It rained for three days. Not hard rain — steady rain, the kind that gets into everything and stays there. The creek rose. The bank behind the house started leaking. Ray noticed it on the second day but did not think much of it. Banks leak. That is what banks do when it rains.



On the third day, the little bastards came running out from under the porch. All of them. Ten, twelve, fifteen — pouring out from the gap under the floorboards like water from a broken pipe, running across the yard, up the hill, through the trees, everywhere. They were not hiding. They were leaving.



Ray watched them for a long time. Then he went inside and woke Tommy.



"Get your shoes on," he said.



"What?"



"Get your shoes on. We're going for a walk."



They walked to the high ground — the small hill behind the house, where the trees were thick and the ground was solid. Ray stood at the top of the hill and looked down at the house and the creek and the bank.



The bank was moving.



Slowly at first — just a trickle of dirt and small stones running down the slope, like the earth was sweating. Then faster. A slide. A real slide. Dirt and stones and trees and everything that had been holding the bank together for fifty years sliding down the slope in a way that was, Ray thought, not unlike a person falling from a great height.



The house saved itself by maybe ten feet. The back half of it — the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom where Tommy had slept — all gone. Buried under a landslide that the rain had made and the bank had decided to make.



Ray stood on the hill and watched it happen. He did not say anything. He simply stood, with Tommy beside him, and watched the earth move and the house disappear and the little bastards run and run and run until there was nowhere left to run.



The next spring, Ray went back to the house. The rain was over. The sky was blue. The creek was low. The hill was a scar — brown and bare and wrong, like a wound that had closed but left a mark.



He walked around what was left of the house. The front room was still standing. The porch was mostly intact, though the underside was exposed, and he could see the gap where the little bastards had lived. He looked in. Empty.



He walked the yard. The fence was gone. The grove of trees was partially destroyed — half of it gone, half of it leaning at an angle that suggested it would not last another winter. The creek was lower than it had been before the slide, which meant the bank had given up enough earth to lower the water level. The world had rearranged itself around the slide, as it always does.



Ray sat on what was left of the porch. He took out a cigarette and lit it and watched the valley. The cigarette smoke mixed with the valley fog, which was the colour of the sky and just as temporary. He took a drag. He looked at the scar on the hill. He looked at the empty gap under the porch where the little bastards had lived.



"Well," he said.



That was it. That was the last thing he said that day. He sat on the porch for a long time, smoking cigarettes and watching the fog and thinking about nothing in particular, which is the best kind of thinking there is.



He never saw the little bastards again. Could be they moved. Could be they did not. Ray did not spend much time thinking about it. He had a knee that hurt, a pension that did not go far, and a porch that needed repair. There were things to do.



Sometimes, on certain mornings, when the sun is right and the fog is thick and the creek is running low, Ray sits on the porch and looks at the empty gap under the floor and thinks about three yellow eyes looking up at a man with a beer and a piece of bread and deciding, for reasons they will never explain, that he was worth feeding.



He does not say anything. He simply sits. He simply watches.



And that is enough.

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