There sure are a lot of them, she thought in some surprise, as another landed on her knee. Attracted by my sweat, I guess.

That settled it. She would gather up the cans and go back to Lowfield, back to her cool quiet house.

Catherine rose and walked toward the dilapidated porch briskly, slapping at her arms as she went.

The flies were whirring in and out of the open doorway, creating a drone in the stillness. The boarded-up windows of the house and the overhanging roof of its porch combined to make a dark cave of the interior. The sun penetrated only a foot into the entrance, so the darkness seemed impenetrable by contrast.

She stooped to pick up the first can she had hit, which was lodged under the lopsided steps. The stoop leveled her with the raised floor of the house, built high to avoid flooding in the heavy Delta rains. As she reached for the punctured can, something caught at the corner of her eye, an image so odd that she froze, doubled over, her hand extended for the can.

There was something in that little pool of light penetrating the empty doorway.

It was a hand.

She tried to identify it as something else, anything else.

It remained a hand. The palm was turned up, and the fingers stretched toward Catherine appealingly. Catherine’s eyes flicked down to her own extended fingers, then back. She straightened very slowly.

When she inhaled, she realized she had been holding her breath against the smell. It was a whiff of the same odor she had caught as her car passed the dead dog.

With no thought at all, she grasped one of the supports that held up the roof over the porch. Moving quietly and carefully, she pulled herself up on the loose rotting planks and took a little step forward.

A fly buzzed past her face.

The blinding contrast of sun and gloom lessened as she crept closer. When she reached the doorway she could see what lay inside the shack.

The hand was still attached to a wrist, the wrist to an arm…