The porch boards creak when Bob shifts his weight. He's been sitting here for twenty-three minutes, counting the seconds between each wave of fog that rolls up from the orchard. His guitar is in his lap, but he hasn't played a note. The strings are loose. The tuning pegs are cold against his fingers. Petunia's head is warm on his knee. She hasn't moved either. Not a whimper. Not a tail thump. Just the slow rhythm of her breathing, regular as a heartbeat, steady as the fog that keeps coming. The woods are quiet tonight. Too quiet. No owls. No coyotes. Even the wind seems to have stopped at the edge of the property, holding its breath. Bob's mind circles back to the clearing. The hum. The way the air tasted like metal. The way Petunia's growl had started low in her chest and built into something he'd never heard from her before. Not fear. Warning. He tried to tell himself it was nothing. A generator. A weird echo. But his hands won't stop shaking—not from cold. From the image stuck behind his eyes: something in the brush, watching, and then gone when he blinked. The fog swallows the fence line now. Bob watches it creep toward the porch steps, one slow arm at a time. He doesn't look down. But he says it anyway, voice barely above a whisper: "You saw it too, didn't you?" Petunia's ear flicks. She presses her nose against his knee. That's all the answer he needs. The fog reaches the bottom step. Bob's fingers find his guitar strings again, but he doesn't tune them. He just holds them, feeling the vibration of nothing, waiting for the woods to tell him what comes next. Somewhere in the distance, a low hum starts. So faint it might be imagination. Petunia's head lifts. The porch light flickers once. Bob stops breathing.