The Taking

fragrance, it was not unpleasant, either, and was as rich with subtleties as the air in a spice market.
        She had never before experienced such a scent. Yet within the intricate matrix of this unique smell, she detected a tantalizingly familiar substance, simple in its nature. The more determinedly she strove to identify this core odor, the more its slippery name eluded her.
        Although it smelled like a complex mélange of essences and exotic oils, the rain had the character and consistency of ordinary water. She rubbed it between thumb and fingertips, feeling nothing unusual.
        Gradually Molly realized that she was lingering on the porch in the hope that the coyotes would return. Standing among them, like a lamb among lions, trembling on the brink of some revelation, had been such an awesome experience that she longed to repeat it.
        When the coyotes did not reappear, an ineffable sense of loss overcame her. With it arose anew the feeling of being watched that earlier had stirred the fine hairs on the back of her neck.
        Sometimes the forest appeared to her as a green cathedral. The massive pine trunks were columns in a vast nave, and the spreading boughs formed groin vaults and fan vaults high overhead.
        Now, with the reverential hush of the woods replaced by the din of the downpour, the gloom coiling among the trees seemed to be of a different character from that on any previous night. The god of this cathedral was the lord of darkness.
        Disquieted again, Molly backed across the porch, retreating from the steps. She did not for one moment look away from the encircling forest, half convinced that something would fly at her from out of the pines, something that would be all teeth and temper.
        Inside, she closed the door. Engaged the deadbolt. Stood there for a moment, trembling.
        She continued to be surprised and disturbed by her emotionalism. Driven by a kind of instinct, less of the mind than of the heart, she felt reduced from womanhood to the overwrought reactions of a girl-and she didn't like it.
        Eager to wash her hands, she hurried to the kitchen.
        Approaching the open door, she saw that the light above the cooktop was still on, as she had left it when she'd heated the mug of milk.
        At the threshold, she hesitated, suddenly expecting someone to be in the kitchen. Someone who had come in the back door while she had been distracted by the coyotes.
        More emotionalism. Foolish. No intruder waited for her.
        She crossed the kitchen directly to the back door, and tried it. Bolted. Secure. No one could have gotten in that way.
        Coruscating curtains of radiant rain silvered the night. A thousand eyes might have watched from behind that sequined veil.
        She lowered the pleated shade over the window beside the breakfast table. She dropped the shade at the window above the sink, as well.
        After turning on the water and adjusting it to the hottest temperature that she could tolerate, she lathered her hands with liquid soap from the built-in dispenser. The soap smelled like oranges, a gratifyingly clean scent.
        She had not touched any of the coyotes.
        For a moment she did not understand why she was scrubbing her hands so determinedly. Then she realized that she was washing away the rain.
        The curiously aromatic rain had left her feeling… unclean.
        She rinsed her hands until they were red, half-scalded. Then she pumped more soap and lathered up a second time.
        Within that mélange of subtle but exotic scents had been a vaguely familiar odor, smoky and ammoniac, that Molly had not quite been able to identify. Although she had flushed the smell from her hands, it now returned to her in memory, and this time she was able to name it: semen.
        Under that spice-market variety of exotic aromas, the rain had exuded the fecund scent of semen.
        This seemed so unlikely, so absurdly Freudian, that she wondered if she might be asleep. Or sliding into a neuropsychotic episode.
        The inexplicable luminescence, the seminal rain, the cowering coyotes: From bed to foaming faucet, every step and moment of the experience had a hallucinatory quality.
        She turned off the faucet, half expecting silence when the water stopped gushing. But the tremendous roar of the unseasonable rain was there, all right-either real or the soundtrack of a singularly