Saul, the weather-worn cattle farmer, chases rustlers into the night, while his dog, Benji, runs ahead barking. He lifts his gun and fires out from the edge of the floodlight, watching the buckshot spark and crackle before dissolving into the ether. He thinks he spots their headlights flash between the tops of the hills, and places a palm around his mouth and hollers, calling them yeller and dirty low-down no-good spic thieves and dares them to come back and face him like men. Then he waits, and when they don’t return fire, when he’s greeted by only an echo and darkness, he turns his back towards the night and makes his way home. He returns to his lonely, peeling farmhouse as the chickens quiet down and Benji takes his spot on the porch, and the rancher drinks and smokes himself to sleep on his old, ripped and stained, three-cushioned couch, half-listening to a radio show about aliens abducting cattle. Only ’llegal ones ’doin’ that ’ere, he drawls, drifting away from consciousness.

Some hour not long after, he is roused by the hostile wailing of his landline pulling at the cords at the back of his eyes. He answers with a dry, strained cough and rubs the soft spot over the missing rib on his side. The voice on the other end is Bernice, years of menthols since he’s last heard her. She tells him, in a depleted sort of way, that she can no longer care for him. Him who Saul never even knew existed.

He drives into the Dust Bowl town as the sky turns a wilting grey, and raps on the remaining bits of aluminum between the rusted-through holes on her screen door. She doesn’t answer, and he enters into a cluttered mess of beer cans, pizza boxes, burger wrappers, chicken bones, flies, beetles and maggots. There he finds him, but not Bernice. An ugly and sickly-looking child. He is pale, small-mouthed and weakly, with those blue veins around his temples joined to large, frightened eyes. Saul thinks there’s a healthy chance this thing staring up at him isn’t even his, but he takes him anyway. They drive back to the farm, and he gives the boy a burger they stopped for on the way. Then he coughs some, rubs his side and takes the bottle back to the couch. He doesn’t know what to do with him, so he does nothing.

It’s not long after that, with a yelp, the rustlers get Benji, not even leaving the dog’s body for Saul to bury proper.

He litters the night with booming flashes of gunpowder as the boy watches, wide-eyed and unblinking. The rancher then takes to his couch and his bottle, and weeps until he’s unconscious. It’s only the night after that he’s pulled from the couch by what he thinks is the sound of his friend crying in the distance, and he runs out with his shotgun, unloading shell after shell, screaming into the void.  He curses the poachers for taking him, calling them wetbacks and spics and filthy goddamn motherfucking cocksucking beaners and demands that they give him back his dog. He bellows and hollers and expectorates, until he coughs and wheezes and gasps for air. Finally, he catches a sliver in his palm and realizes he’s been holding himself up against the railing.

With Benji gone, he begins to lose cattle. Their wailing as the poachers rustle them wrenches Saul from his drink and his couch, and he rushes to the porch with his gun, but never gets there in time. He attempts to care for the boy, who sometimes he sees and sometimes he doesn’t, but never speaks and only observes. He fries eggs and hot dogs and goes into town for pizzas, cereal and instant noodles, but finds them in or beside the garbage or dropped outside the window with only a half-hearted bite or so missing. He shouts at the boy and threatens to strike him and curses him, and coughs harder and harder for longer and longer. One morning he goes to collect eggs and finds the coop empty and curses the poachers for being plain mean bastards on top of criminal ones. He loses more cattle, and his side begins to hurt something awful. At the store, he thinks he hears a noise somewhere between a bark and a yelp and turns half-expecting to see his friend come back to him, but instead finds a teller with a palm held over her mouth, looking in his direction. Staring. At home, in the mirror, he sees he’s lost weight, his cheeks hollowed and his eyes yellow and sunken, and there’s a wet sore on his side that hurts to the touch and sticks with a bite against his shirt. He continues to chase the noise of Benji and his cows, and the couch gets harder and harder to leave.

The cattle all but disappear in number, and Saul begins to stop leaving the three cushions when he hears them. His cough gets worse, his side hurts more and his knees shake when he stands. He asks the boy to bring him his bottle, but never receives the slightest noise in return and he wonders to himself why he can never find the tracks of their tires or the marks of their boots. He dreams of Bernice, of the other men she’s had and the feeling that she chose him because he was a sucker. After a while, he stops leaving the couch altogether and lets the uneaten food pile into the garbage or out the window or onto the floor, and finally lets the boy fend for himself. He shouts out at the rustlers, day and night, whether he hears the calls of his cows, his chickens, his only friend, or not. He can no longer tell when he hears them or imagines them or cares. At some point, he is roused suddenly from his sleep by the voice of Bernice, and desperately searches the room, begging she take the boy, only to find the pale, voiceless child watching him.

One night, Benji barks for the last time, and Saul is pulled off the couch with what seems a sudden and driven purpose. He calls the boy, his voice hollow and depleted, and finds him already at his side, and they step outside and enter his truck together. They drive down the highway, through the darkness, as it begins to rain. Saul doesn’t turn on the headlights, and after a time, they’re pulled over. The officer recognizes the cantankerous old rancher in the dark cabin of the old pickup and greets him with a patient and humored smile. He ignores the foul smell and asks about the boy, and in an empty sort of way, Saul tells him he’s his, and he simply can’t watch ’im anymore. The officer glances at the child looking back at him, and with a sudden sense of wary and aversion, gives Saul the suggestion to drive more carefully and takes his leave.

The headlights of the police car pass through the truck’s cabin as the officer pulls away and disappears into the night, then Saul’s meagre frame collapses into the steering wheel, his eyes and mouth hang open and desiccated, and finally he is dead.

Then with a sudden twitch, he sprouts back up. His jaw drops and his head jerks to face the boy. And with another twitch, his jaw begins to rattle and move free of his lifeless eyes and sallow, wilting skin. And as the undulating bumpy appendage emerging from under the boy’s shirt and entering the wet sore in Saul’s abdomen twitches again, the boy produces a near-perfect imitation of Saul’s voice through his mouth, repeating that they’ll have to find somewhere else for the boy to live, as Saul can’t care for ’im anymore. And back at the farmhouse, the radio plays a show about aliens abducting cattle, a light flashes between the tops of the hills, and lying among the pile of hot dogs, cereals, chicken bones, flies, beetles, maggots, fur, feathers and ear tags, is a dog collar with an inscription that reads: If found, return to Saul.