*excerpt from the print edition of NER 46.3-4

The sounds slip through my window as I am falling asleep. High whines, low calls, no note held for long. Every time I think I have a grip on the pattern, it changes. 

I live on a suburban street, paved but too small for streetlights. My home is an in-law’s apartment, perched above the garage of someone else’s empty vacation home. Because it’s on Cape Cod, this narrow arm of land thrusting into the ocean, the stars aren’t bad, but my immediate surroundings are not wild. Signs line the roads warning that the area is “thickly settled,” and the houses sit right up against one another. Unowned green spaces are few: cemeteries whose plots have been full for years, small “natural areas” too swampy to profitably develop, and glassy, black kettle ponds ringed in scrubby wreaths of green. 

The jerky noise seeps through tiny cracks in my home and rubs strangely against the ways I am used to thinking of this place. During the day, I teach high school English. Tomorrow my sophomore class is going to crack open The Tragedie of Macbeth; Shakespeare will be the final unit of my first year of teaching. As I teeter on the edge of sleep, boundaries between fact and fiction blur. Caterwauling witches rove suburbia and the sea wind whistles on Scottish heaths. Then the screeching song moves out of range, and my brain, which had been trying to cling to logic, loosens its grip. 

—

Long after that first nighttime encounter, I will learn that my sleepy conflations nearly hit the mark. Real bodies make those eerie sounds, though those bodies range across boundaries and occupy in-between zones. These hybrid animals belong to a blurry category of creatures that modern science has had trouble pinning down with a name. Technically a genetic cross between coyotes, wolves, and dogs, they’re sometimes called coywolves. Claiming as their home territories suburban streets and swamps, nocturnal golf courses and urban cemeteries, the creatures easily overlap with human habitats—yet most people who share space with them never suspect their presence.

—

I won’t learn the name coywolf for a long time. Any conscious memory of the strange sound has melted by morning. I drink my coffee, review my lesson plans, bike through the early morning mist to school. During first period, we start in on Macbeth. The play begins with thunder and lightning. I project an image of desolate Scottish Highlands on the overhead, turn off the lights, and ask the students to drumroll on their desks to mimic the shudder of a storm.

The three witches claim the stage in the first scene of the play. As a teacher, I need to work to get the kids to see them as scary. Popular culture has defanged modern witches—all Harry Potter as Jesus parable and Sabrina the Teenage Witch remakes on Netflix. Some people in Shakespeare’s era believed that witches directly served the devil. Think of the scariest horror movie you’ve ever seen. How it started to creep into your real life, to make you afraid of silence or showers. This, I thump my copy of the play, is like that.

My scare tactics flop. Our remove in time and space gives us all—and especially high schoolers, many still vulnerable to believing that the world is supposed to make sense—a feeling that we modern humans know reality too intimately to be intimidated by the supernatural. Witches seem silly.

We quickly make our way through the play’s set-up, and soon things start to get serious. Macbeth and Banquo, fresh from slaughtering a rebel force, stumble across the witchy trio on their way home. Banquo, in a knee-jerk reaction, tries to pinpoint what the heck he is seeing. “What are these,” he asks, “so withered, and so wild in their attire, / that look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth / and yet are on ‘t?” Earthy or supernatural? he’s wondering. Female or male? Macbeth commands, “Speak, if you can. What are you?”

The witches refuse to answer. Instead, they deliver their prophecies—Macbeth becoming King, Banquo fathering kings, et cetera, et cetera—and then vanish, leaving in their wake a final confusion. “Were such things here,” Banquo asks aloud, “as we do speak about?”

I pose Banquo’s question to the class. Ghosts, one girl guesses.

No, real witches, a boy disagrees.

They could have been a drug dream, another student points out, going for a laugh, but also making a fair point. Banquo wonders the same thing: “Have we eaten on the insane root,” he asks Macbeth, “that takes the reason prisoner?”

I wonder aloud if it is useful to categorize the witch characters at all. Did Shakespeare intend for them to resist classification? The collective mood becomes more solemn in response, the students unsure. They find it harder to dismiss the fear of something they can’t explain, something inexpressible in familiar language. In high school, teens traditionally sort one another into labels, and some of the students in the room have experienced the confusing pain and joy of finding themselves stuck between approved categories. Queer students, bilingual students, students of mixed race in this very white school, children of divorced parents, even just kids encountering newly strange, pubescent bodies—for a moment, for a few of them, the text becomes a mirror. They catch a glimpse of themselves.

One earnest, brave student connects what we are talking about to the lawn signs everyone has seen proclaiming support or professing opposition to Question 3, a referendum on discrimination against transgender people in the state. This subject raises hackles on all sides. Parents of students in this class would put up “for” and “against” voting signs with equal conviction. I am a young teacher and feel caught in between my beliefs and my implicit job description—to stay apolitical, to help every student learn how to interrogate their own assumptions. I let the students talk. Everything hangs unsettled when the bell rings.

—

I look up the lyrics to a song I like because it mentions the Cape. A few words in one verse are indistinct. The ______ ______ of Cape Cod? Google comes to the rescue: “Coywolves” fills the blank. I click on a video of coywolves on a nocturnal cam and hear them singing. My mystery sound! One question begets another. I find myself echoing Banquo in my head, What are these . . . ? . . .

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