Blast | April 23, 2026

Justin Taroli‘s piece, “Coyote Map,” follows a photographer who strangely encounters coyotes throughout the city of Albuquerque, after returning once their grandmother passes away. As the mysterious sightings progress, they discover something about their grandmother that may align perfectly with the curious coyote circumstances in the city. This piece intertwines themes involving grief and spirituality as the reader explores the world through the eyes of the narrator, who embarks on an investigative whim led by their grandmother’s remnants.

TMR’s online-only prose anthology, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

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Coyote Map

The first one I see is crossing the gas station parking lot at sunrise. I’ve got coffee in one hand, a bag of ice melting against my hip, and I almost drop both when it stops mid-step and looks at me. The sky is pale gold, same as its fur, so it’s like the coyote is made of light. Behind it, the street is empty—no cars, no early walkers, just the humming of the fluorescent pumps. 

I’ve been back in Albuquerque two weeks. The house still smells like my grandmother’s soap. I sleep in her bed, listen to the trains at night, think about how her voice always seemed older than her face. I came back to clean the place, maybe sell it, but I keep finding reasons to stay. 

The coyote blinks at me. Its ears twitch toward some invisible sound. Then it moves on, passing between the gas station and the boarded-up pawn shop, stepping over weeds with the same precision my grandmother used for embroidery. I don’t take a picture, not that first time. 

The camera comes later, when I see the second one. I’m driving down Central and it’s there on the median, bold as anything, standing between a Walgreens and a strip-mall Mexican buffet. I pull over and snap it through the car window. It doesn’t run. Its mouth is open, tongue out, like it’s laughing at me. 

At night, I scroll through the photo, zoom in until the fur turns into pixels, then zoom out again. The streetlight makes its eyes burn white. The next day, I bring the camera with me everywhere. 

I start looking in places I once avoided—behind the train depot, at the edges of vacant lots, under the freeway overpasses where you can smell burnt sage from the encampments. I walk the same stretches of road over and over. When I find one, I slow down, wait, click. 

The photos are just for me at first. Then I post one to socials. It gets a few likes from high school friends who still live in town, and a few from strangers who’ve probably never been here. I post another, and another. Within a week, people are tagging me in their own coyote sightings. 

One night, I dream of my grandmother’s voice. She’s telling me a story I barely remember—something about animals that guide you home if you’ve lost your way. I can’t see her face in the dream, only the movement of her hands. She’s tracing something in the air, a shape I almost recognize. 

The next morning, I find her sewing kit on the top shelf of the closet. Inside, under the tangled thread and rusted scissors, is a folded piece of paper. It’s a map, hand-drawn in blue ink, the kind with creases worn soft by years of opening and refolding. The streets aren’t labeled, but I know the landmarks—the old mission church, the arroyo by the railyards, the cottonwoods out by the river. When I overlay it in my mind with the routes I’ve been walking, it matches exactly. 

* * * 

I trace the map again before bed. I’m not sure what I’m looking for—maybe a missing street, a hidden landmark—but there’s nothing extra. Just the familiar sprawl of the city, drawn the way she must have remembered it, the way it was before the Walgreens and the Mexican buffet, before the pawn shops turned into churches and back again. 

A week later, I’m at the edge of the railyards, waiting. The sun is dropping behind the warehouses. A train passes, slow and loud, pulling a string of graffiti-scrawled cars toward the horizon. And then I see it—another coyote, smaller than the others, with a torn ear. It’s watching me from the opposite side of the fence. I step toward it. It steps back. 

There’s a gap in the fence where the chain link is curled like paper. I push through, the metal snagging my jacket. The coyote doesn’t run. It turns and walks, head low, glancing back every few steps to be sure I’m following. 

We leave the tracks behind. The ground turns to packed sand and brittle weeds. I pass a burned-out car frame, a mattress half-buried in dirt. The coyote slips through a line of tamarisks, and then we’re in the arroyo. It’s wide and dry, walls the color of rust. I smell something faint and sharp—maybe the last trace of a fire put out days ago. 

The city feels far away here, like it’s been folded up and tucked inside a drawer. The only sound is the wind moving sand in soft scrapes. The coyote stops in the middle of the stream and stares at me. Through the lens, I see the outlines of more shapes. At first, I think they’re shadows, tricks of the light—but no, they’re other coyotes, emerging from the shade. One, then three, then seven. Their paws make no sound. I take the shot. The shutter clicks, and in that moment, every head turns toward me at once. 

The smallest one—the one I followed—steps closer. It blinks slow, almost human. I can see the torn edge of its ear, the dust clinging to its fur. For a second, I think it’s going to brush past me, keep walking. Instead, it sits, tail curled over its feet, waiting. 

The sun is nearly gone. The light in the arroyo shifts from gold to the color of bruised fruit. I lower the camera. My hands smell like metal. When I look up again, they’re gone. 

* * * 

A week later, one of the photos ends up on a wildlife blog. Someone emails me to ask if I’ll give an interview. They want to know if I’m “documenting an urban reclamation phenomenon.” I tell them I’m just taking pictures. Another email asks if I’ll sell prints. I ignore it. 

My follower count climbs. People tag me in grainy night-vision shots from their doorbell cameras, coyotes caught mid-stride across suburban lawns. Others send me blurry frames from dashcams—tails disappearing between rows of parked cars, eyes flaring white in headlights. 

It’s late September now, the light thinning earlier each day. My grandmother’s map stays on the kitchen table. I mark in red pen the dates and locations of each sighting. Over time, the lines between sightings connect into a shape I almost recognize—curves and points like a constellation, something my grandmother might have drawn in the air while telling her stories. The pattern seems to be closing in, pulling tighter toward the center of the map. There’s one place it hasn’t touched yet: an empty square near the river where the street names fade into dirt roads. I circle it. 

The day I go, the air smells of rain though the sky is clear. I walk through neighborhoods where the chain-link fences sag under the weight of windblown trash. The ground dips toward the river, and the houses thin out until there’s just a single trailer with a blue tarp roof, its windows papered over from the inside. Beyond it is an overgrown path. The earth is soft, damp in places, lined with cottonwoods that tremble without wind. Somewhere nearby, water moves—a slow, steady trickle. 

I see the first coyote at the bend in the path. Then another, half-hidden in the brush. They’re watching me, silent, holding their place until I pass. 

The path opens into a clearing. It’s smaller than I imagined, just a shallow basin ringed by sage. In the center, a pool of water no bigger than a bathtub, perfectly still. My reflection wavers, then sharpens. Behind me, in the water’s surface, are the coyotes—dozens of them—standing at the edge of the clearing. In the reflection, they are nearer than they are in the air around me. I turn, but the space behind me is empty. 

I back away, careful not to disturb the dirt, and retrace the path to the trailer with the blue tarp roof. By the time I reach the main road, it’s dark. The streetlights hum, throwing rings of weak light over the cracked asphalt. I cut through a neighborhood I don’t know well, passing yards with abandoned swing sets, cars on blocks. At one corner, three kids are sitting on the curb, tossing gravel into the gutter. They stop and watch me as I pass. I wonder if they’ve seen the coyotes too. 

Back at the house, I spread my grandmother’s map on the kitchen table and draw a small circle where the pool should be. I don’t remember her ever telling me about it, but the way the lines on her map seem to radiate toward that spot makes me think she knew. Maybe she’d been there herself, a long time ago, before the fences and the trash heaps and the boarded-up pawn shops. 

I start leaving the house earlier each morning. I want to see the city in the hours before anyone else is awake, before the light flattens everything. At the railyards, I watch pigeons scatter from the rafters. In the industrial zone, I pass a man in a grease-stained shirt wheeling a bicycle with no chain. Sometimes I catch sight of a coyote at the far end of a street, trotting between shadows, gone before I can raise the camera. Other times they appear so close that I can hear the soft clack of their claws on pavement. 

The more I walk, the less the city feels like streets and buildings, more like layers of something older—canals buried under dirt, trading routes erased by freeways. My grandmother’s voice comes back in fragments: her warning to avoid certain areas after dark, her habit of touching the doorframe twice before leaving the house. I’d thought those things were superstition, or just habit.  

One afternoon, scrolling through the photos on my phone, I notice something I can’t explain. In three separate shots, taken in different parts of the city, the same coyote appears—a female with a jagged scar running down her muzzle. In one photo, she’s by the riverbank, in another, she’s trotting through the empty lot behind the Walgreens, and in the last, she’s standing on the roof of an abandoned laundromat. I took all three shots within the same hour.  

I go back to the laundromat the next day. The roof is empty. The front door hangs open, and the inside smells of mold and mouse droppings. I climb the back stairs to the roof. From up here, I can see the city unfolding in all directions: the brown river ribboned with cottonwoods, the grids of houses, the sharp blue line of the mountains in the distance. There’s movement in the alley below. A coyote slips between two buildings without looking up. 

That night, I print out all my photos and spread them across the living-room floor. The scarred female shows up more than I thought—always at the edge of the frame, never the focus, as if she’s been watching me watch them. 

I start looking for her. Days pass without a sighting. Then, one morning before dawn, I see her at the far end of the street, standing under a flickering streetlamp. When I take a step toward her, she turns and walks away, steady, as if keeping time. I follow. 

We pass through the empty parking lot of a shuttered grocery store, through a gap in a cinderblock wall, across a stretch of dirt scattered with beer bottles and sun-bleached shoes. The air smells like damp earth though it hasn’t rained. 

She leads me toward the river again, but from a different angle this time. The path winds between stands of mesquite, the ground softening underfoot. I can hear the slow movement of water somewhere ahead. The sky is lightening, streaked with pink and orange. 

We reach the arroyo. The scarred coyote steps down into it without pause, her body moving through the shadow like a brushstroke. I follow, camera in hand. This gully is narrower than the last, its walls closer, the air cooler. My footsteps sound loud in the stillness. The coyote glances back once, then keeps walking until we emerge into a place I don’t recognize—a shallow hollow lined with smooth stones. 

The hollow opens onto the same pool I saw before. The water is just as still, the surface holding the sky like a sheet of glass. The scarred coyote stops at the edge. She steps forward, dips her muzzle to the water, and drinks. I lift the camera, but I can’t make myself press the shutter. 

The scarred coyote lifts her head from the pool. Water clings to the fur along her jaw, catching the early light. She looks at me, still and waiting, as if there’s something I’m meant to do. 

I step to the edge. The reflection shows the sky behind me, streaked with pale gold, and the ring of coyotes that I can’t see in the air around me. Their ears are pricked, their bodies motionless, as though they’re holding a breath we all share. My grandmother’s map flashes in my mind—every path, every mark, leading here. I think about how she used to pause in the middle of her stories, leaving a gap I was meant to fill. Maybe this is one of those gaps. 

I take a step forward. The water is colder than I expect. My breath catches, but I keep moving until both feet are submerged. The pool can’t be more than a few feet across, yet as I step forward, the bottom drops away. The reflection ripples and breaks. The sky disappears. 

There’s a sound like wind through cottonwood leaves, only faster, sharper. I can’t tell if it’s above me or inside my head. When I look down, I see the coyotes moving, sliding across the surface like shadows. They circle tighter, their bodies forming the same shape I traced on the map, the shape my grandmother drew in the air. 

The cold climbs my legs, my ribs, my throat. I expect to feel the panic of drowning, but instead there’s a stillness, a weightless suspension, as though the water is holding me in place. The coyotes’ eyes are brighter now, reflecting something I can’t see. For a moment, I think I hear her, my grandmother, calling my name. A steady voice in the distance, as if she’s been waiting for me to catch up. I turn toward the sound. The pool widens. The edges of the creek fade. The city is gone. 

In its place: open ground stretching in every direction, dotted with shrubbery, the air carrying the smell of dust before rain. Coyotes move through the grass, silent and sure-footed. The scarred one stands nearest to me, her gaze level, unblinking. The ground feels firm beneath my feet, though I don’t remember leaving the water. The light shifts, and for an instant I see both landscapes at once—the gully with its rust-colored walls and this open plain, layered over each other like two photographs held up to the sun. Then the arroyo is gone. 

The scarred coyote turns and walks. I follow, the rhythm of her steps steady, familiar. Somewhere ahead, the horizon shimmers, and I think I can see the outline of the mountains, blue against the pale sky. I don’t look back. 

***

Justin Taroli is a writer based in New York. He is the author of two books, one novel and one short–story collection. His work has appeared in publications including fugue, Philadelphia Stories, and Door is a Jar. He is currently seeking representation. You can find him at a movie theater or bookstore in NYC.