by Corey Farrenkopf

Segments of an Interview with Jimmy Lectre on the disappearance of his father, Paul Lectre, last seen December 3rd, 2024, conducted through a GoogleDocs exchange with Unexplained Maine. This conversation has been edited for narrative structure. No facts have been omitted or altered. - J.P. Leonard

• • •

After Mom died, Dad started making plant identification TikToks.

Of course I gave him a follow. It was my idea after all.

He was so depressed. So glum.

Everyone needs an outlet for their grief.

• • •

The first video he posted was of a sassafras tree with its lobed, dinosaur-foot leaves. You always know it’s sassafras by the curved branches, how they bend at odd angles.

“Did you know oil made from sassafras has hallucinogenic properties? It’s banned in the US, though they used to make root beer out of it,” he said into his phone’s crackling mic, bearded cheek almost pressed against the leaves to get both face and tree in the shot. My father wasn’t much of a cameraman. He didn’t take me up on the offer to buy him a tripod or an external mic. If I lived closer, I would have volunteered to help him film, but I was hours away. He just wanted to wander through the forests of Maine, relaying flora facts gathered over a lifetime.

The production values were low, but he got thousands of likes.

He had a sad Santa aspect to his physicality. The beard. The home-knit hats. The rosacea on his cheeks.

I thought the flare of online success was therapeutic. He hadn’t called me crying in weeks, hadn’t sent me collages constructed out of his wedding pictures, hadn’t cryptically mentioned the darkness winking at him from beyond the back porch.

His online presence was going to save him. I was sure of it.

I was.

• • •

Mom and Dad, on the weekends, when they weren’t working at the bank and the upholstery shop respectively, were gentlemen (gentlewoman?) naturalists. Our house was stuffed with nature guides, bookshelves weighed down with paperback bird ID manuals and how-to-forage mushroom compendiums. Our walls were covered in glass displays of butterflies and moths, oil paintings of famous regional rivers, barometers to let them know what the air pressure would be like for their daily hikes (Mom was prone to migraines). They told themselves one day they’d write a book together about all the best hikes in Southern Maine, each entry accompanied by an illustration she’d ink.

But they never got around to it.

She had bone cancer.

Neither Dad nor I were a transplant match.

She went quickly. Much faster than Dad (or I, if I’m being honest) had time to process.

His name’s etched on her gravestone, just missing the years, a flush of roses sandblasted into the stone. (I still refuse to add another date. Nothing is certain yet.)

I never liked seeing the names of the living engraved next to the dead, whether it was my father’s name or someone else’s. Foreshadowing never needs to be so blunt.

• • •

In Dad’s videos, he occasionally mentioned Mom. How this cedar swamp was her favorite hike. How she made surprisingly palatable pine needle tea for breakfast (high in vitamin C!). How she had little names for all the bald eagles roosting within a twenty-five mile radius of their house. For a while, the references were innocuous.

I didn’t think twice about them.

Healthy grieving.

But not all of it was healthy.

“Have you ever seen your wife’s eyes in the eyes of a frog?” he said into the camera one day, lifting a tiny amphibian he’d scooped from a stream to the lens. The comments weren’t kind. There were dozens of mocking amphibian memes posted below: toads in wigs, poison dart frogs in fishnet stockings, suggestively winking tadpoles. His followers knew Mom was dead and didn’t find the toadish analogy in good taste, though my father meant nothing but loving adoration with the comparison (Mom loved frogs). People online aren’t well known for understanding the eccentricities of those deeply submerged in grief.

I don’t think he would have taken that dog-thing home if they’d been kinder.

I don’t think we’d be having this conversation if that was the case.

• • •

Where to start with the dog-thing?

You and I both know those lost puppy/lost kitten/lost cuddly whatever videos go viral in a heartbeat. Yes, many are mash-ups of other videos, stitched together to tell a story that never really happened, that armadillo not the same as this armadillo not the same as the armadillo in the next shot, but that wasn’t the case for my father when he found that nearly hairless creature beneath the branches of a white pine.

He knew about the trend. There’s no way he could have missed it. He spent hours on the site, scrolling and scrolling from one interaction to the next. With the downturn in engagement he’d received after the frog comment, (25K Likes dwindling down to a few hundred) I almost thought he planted that kind-of-puppy/half-dead-wolf out there in the woods.

Now I know that’s not the case.

In the first video, Dad squats down to the creature, outstretched fingers brushing twigs and pine needles from her patchy coat. He flips the camera around as he raises the little creature to his chest, cuddling her into his beard.

“It’s all going to be alright, little fella,” he says as the thing mewls, her mouth opening a little wider than I thought normal, but you never know with those mixed-breeds people abandon in the woods (sometimes they’re actually hyenas). Who knows what one genetic combination does to another. That’s why the slightly longer legs didn’t resonate, why the blue blue childlike eyes were overlooked.

If he was going to see Mom’s eyes in one of his woodland creatures, that should have been the one.

• • •

Mom and Dad used to play this game where they’d sit on the back porch and hoist handfuls of shelled sunflower seeds towards the sky, holding perfectly still. Whenever a bird landed in their palm to peck the seed, that was one point, and if the same bird went from Mom to Dad or vice versa, that was no points. Second or third or fourth contact netted nothing. Only first contact counted.

People say it’s bad to hand-feed birds, but their visitors were mostly chickadees, and their population was stable, so it was fine. That was their logic anyway. I watched my parents play on weekends, keeping track on little yellow legal pads they kept stuck to the fridge. They’d sit for hours, not talking, just enjoying each other’s company, birds passing between fingertips.

Silence when seated next to the living is far different than the silence of standing over someone’s grave. Dad told me he thought about this all the time. He didn’t make videos of this, thank god, but he did take the seed out to her plot in the cemetery. He’d hoist the sunflowers into the air, but the birds didn’t come. He said Mom was keeping them away, trying to get him to understand how things were different now, how they couldn’t be together in the same way. But he didn’t agree, whatever that meant.

“You sure you don’t think it’s a good idea to do an upload?” he asked a few months back, referring to the grave visits.

“Maybe. Maybe not. They reacted pretty terribly to the frog comment. They might find this endearing … or they might be complete jerks about it. Don’t let them sour this memory for you too,” I replied.

He never brought up the game again.

• • •

Dad got good at making the montage videos with the wide-mouthed almost-puppy-thing. He’d film the steak he cooked for the little lady, the way the dog-thing flipped the scraps into the air, swallowing without a single chew. Then they’d be out in the back yard, running around the enclosure he’d built for her, Dad hobbling along on his bad leg, the dog-thing fully sprinting a rutted racetrack into the backyard soil. Then there the dog-thing would be, in the bathtub, her less-patchy hair covered in suds, blue eyes peering terror-wide into the camera. She hated water. She was all gnashing teeth and swiping paws for the first twenty minutes (did you notice the fresh scars on my father’s forearms? The bite marks?), but Dad said she gave off the worst smell whenever he didn’t run the coconut lather through her hair.

“What does she smell like?” I asked.

“Raw meat,” he replied.

• • •

“Any reason you haven’t named her yet?” I asked on one of our morning coffee phone calls.

“Still waiting for the right one to come to me,” he replied. “My fans have been asking the same thing. Got to give them what they want, I guess. The big reveal.”

“Any ideas?”

“I was thinking of Tina. Just haven’t locked in yet.”

It took me a moment to respond. Tina had been my mother’s middle name, or a shortening of it, Christina. Her friends called her that when she was young, before college, before my parents knew each other. From the way he spoke, I didn’t think the similarity resonated with him, so I didn’t say anything. Dad was forgetful. I just wanted him to be happy. For this thing to work out (even if she did give off odd backwoods-wolf-walker vibes).

“Not a bad name. Could be a little more original, maybe something a little less human? Something to do with nature, or mythology, or …”

“Naw, Tina’s a good name. But I got to think on it. I’ll keep you posted,” he cut me off.

I never did hear what he decided to name her.

• • •

After two months, Tina (as I began to think of her, regardless of my father’s indecision) had tripled in size. (He never called her by name, rarely spoke to her if I’m being honest, though they spent so much of their time together.) Her legs were long and deerlike, an aspect of a gazelle coming through every time I saw her run or momentarily hop along bipedally for a jerky treat. Her paws, if you wanted to call them that, almost seemed humanlike, finger/claws opposable. Way more flex than your average beagle. Her body was thin, but well-muscled, her brown coat now long and frequently puffed from the constant bathing. She looked healthy, no longer malnourished. Her head still resembled a dog, but an elongated dog, the snout of a greyhound, but extended, long and thin with her little teeth catching on her lips.

“Are you sure that’s a dog?” became the most common comment on his feed.

“Of course. What else would she be?” my father typed back, as if he’d saved the response to copy and paste endlessly.

No one was able to come up with a convincing alternative.

A French viewer had posted loup-garou below, but I hadn’t bothered to translate it at the time. I should have.

I’m still wondering if my father ever did a Google search.

Probably not. He wasn’t one for questioning the world he perceived to be true.

I still don’t think the French woman was right.

But close?

Maybe close?

Probably close.

• • •

I started to worry when my father brought Tina to visit Mom’s grave. Dad would place his phone against a neighboring tomb, giving the viewer a wide-angle shot of the cemetery’s rolling hills, the lichen-stuck stones, the way the not-dog-thing curled up above Mom’s headstone and fell asleep. Dad would kneel, petting Tina with one hand, arranging cut flowers with the other, careful to balance them on the headstone’s base. Each of these videos he paired with classical dirges, strings and piano keys tugging at the sorrow I knew was still there, only patched over by Tina’s presence.

The videos were long. Seven minutes. Ten minutes. Far longer than any of his viewers should have wanted to watch. But they watched. Hours and hours of the barely changing footage. The clouds rolling overhead. His free hand wandering through the dog-thing’s coat. The occasional bird alighting on the mausoleum in the corner of the shot. Tina’s eyes periodically flitting to the camera, holding your gaze through the screen. (Was that a wink? Many said so in the comments. I didn’t disagree.)

In the final video of this variety, there’s a brief moment at the end where Tina’s eyes flee from the viewer. Her head swivels up and down right next to my father, as if they’re running along the length of a human form, standing unseen at the top of the burial. Dad is slow to notice, still petting, still finagling flowers. But when he does, he lets out a gasp, falling back onto the seat of his pants. He stares up at the unseen, hand stretched out defensively before his face.

There’s a woman’s voice. Or at least it sounds like a woman’s voice. I can’t make out the words. Not exactly. Return? Elapse? Gift? I don’t know. If you squint, it almost looks like Tina’s mouth is moving in time with the utterance. But I know that’s not right. I know it is a trick of perspective. Someone must be off screen. One of those cemetery joggers who adore the peace and quiet. Or maybe a plant? Maybe my father asked a friend to join him to make the faked spooky utterance. (His views had only recovered marginally from the frog incident.) He himself is muttering, Yes, of course, over and over, sprawled on his back, as if this will get the voice to stop and leave him alone. But doesn’t he want the voice to continue? For the views? Isn’t that the point of this whole thing?

Nothing about the video seems right.

Regardless of how you frame it, there’s no reason human speech should come from that dog’s(?) mouth (right?).

• • •

Dad didn’t like our last phone call. I was blunt about my concern. The long, mournful videos. Tina’s presence on Mom’s grave. That woman’s voice. Either he was staging something I didn’t quite like, or we were all experiencing some unhinged mass hallucination, reality eroding with each new upload.

“I ain’t stopping,” he said, over and over with each of my questions. “The people need to see. They need to see what Tina’s becoming. What it all means.”

“And what is she becoming?” I asked.

I thought of those almost apelike paws, the gaping mouth, the freakishly long legs, the thousand attributes that no one in his comments associated with dogs anymore, just the dog-adjacent. I genuinely wanted to know what he thought was going on.

“You wouldn’t understand. Only when people see do they believe.”

“Dad, that’s sounding a little insane. I’ve seen the videos, that’s …”

And that’s where he hung up.

He didn’t return my calls. Sent me straight to voicemail. I thought about driving out there, but eight hours in the car and the onset of night kept me home. I told myself I’d head out when the weekend rolled around. I didn’t have any sick or personal time I could burn. And he’d said cryptic stuff in the past (remember the winking darkness? My frog-eyed mother?). If I drove out every time he said something haunting, I’d never sleep beneath my own roof. I figured everything would play out. His views would keep dropping and he’d come to his senses, trade digital life for the real once more … and then we could bring Tina to the zoo where she belonged.

But we know that’s not what happened.

You wouldn’t be talking to me if it was.

• • •

When Mom was in the hospital, Dad almost fought the doctor or the facilities manager or whomever was in charge of their window policy. If Mom was going to be stuck in bed for however long her last days stretched, she deserved a bird feeder suction-cupped to the glass. The room didn’t have a view of the forest, or the river, or the mountains. Just more buildings. A billboard advertising an innovative vacuum cleaner. A water tower. Birds were the only nature she had left.

After hours of screaming outside her room, the feeder went up. Dad filled it twice a day. The chickadees and sparrows swarmed. An occasional woodpecker visited. Pigeons could never figure out how to perch on the narrow ledge and slip seed free.

Mom and Dad played a modified version of their game over that last week, sitting in silence, counting their birds, no feed in hand, just tallying as a team. I was sure when she lost consciousness, Dad kept counting, kept score. It was what she would have enjoyed, their joy in silence, their shared space, the drifting minutes and hours they had left. One bird. Two birds. Three birds.

I was the one who took down the feeder. Dad couldn’t bring himself to reach out the window and unstick the plastic. I leaned out, six stories up, spilling the remaining sunflower kernels into the parking lot. The pigeons finally had their moment, alighting on the pale seeds as my father sobbed behind me, as the nurse wrote her final report, as they prepared to remove the last traces of my mother from the room.

I kept the bird feeder.

It still hangs on my bedroom window.

I don’t tell my father that every once in a while, I can almost picture Mom’s eyes in the face of a nuthatch, or a bluejay, or a wren. He wasn’t the only one allowed to see Mom in the wild.

• • •

Dad only posted three more videos after our last phone conversation. Two were of the cemetery, again, but they were closeup shots of my mother’s headstone, not the long view of the plot. The arranged flowers had wilted, no longer meticulously replaced on a weekly basis. Dad spoke into the crackling mic, rambling about Tina’s connection with my mother. Then the not-dog-thing jumped, landing with its front paws (hands?) on the grave, standing erect, leaning there, humanlike, feeling the sun’s warmth beat off the stone. She’d opened her mouth, wider and wider, tongue lolling, her throat a deep and endless trench of vibrant pinks and reds. Then there was the woman’s voice, muttering words that were mostly indecipherable, as if the speaker only had the vaguest concept of English, but was determined to try.

Soon? Rebirth? Feast? Forest?

Every possible translation was terrible.

“You hear that, she’s talking to us. She still has something to say,” you can hear Dad speak off camera. “The dead always find ways to come back.”

Tina nods knowingly, mouth closing, lips quirked back in the worst smile you’ve ever seen. The shot cuts out and the likes and comments stream by over a black screen for an additional minute and twenty seconds. There are more question marks than statements. The French woman is there. See, I told you! (Told us what? You can’t claim vagaries as revelations! As warnings!)

Yes, of course I called him after that one. When your father starts thinking the lycanthropic whatever-you-want-to-call-it he rescued from the forest is clairvoyant and speaking to (for?) his dead wife, of course a son needs to reach out. Of course.

And I drove out the next day, as soon as the sun was up.

But like I said, eight hours. Even if I went ninety the whole way, I wouldn’t shave off much time.

The last video was posted while I was on the road.

I didn’t see it before I arrived at his house.

How would it have changed anything?

I ask myself that.

And I really don’t know.

• • •

Everyone’s seen the last video. The long shot of my father walking into the woods, his backpack bulging with survival gear (I assume it’s survival gear), knit hat pulled low over his ears, binoculars dangling from his neck. It’s a well-composed shot. Perfect rule of thirds. The way the trees shiver under the wind. The way the sunrise paints everything a dull amber. The clouds domed like a misty cathedral.

But more than the shot, it’s the voice people tuned in for. The woman, who sounded so familiar to me, though I never wanted to admit it (don’t make me state the claim here, because I won’t say her name in conjunction with that thing).

“And now we return to nature. Together. For what comes next.”

All of the struggle from the earlier attempts at speech are gone. I don’t mistake a single word. The mimicry is exact (mimicry is what I have to call it, because to call it anything else would dissolve the last barrier I have between myself and the void). So few words, but that’s all my father ever really needed. Just a few, then silence. Shared company, shared time, breath synchronized with his partner. That’s what he valued. Togetherness.

And that’s what he seemed to get.

The shot shifts as the holder of the phone goes to stop filming. There is a moment when she fumbles the camera, catching a blur of lupine jaw, fanged mouth opening wide, hungry tongue licking lips, blue blue eyes staring, a long-nailed finger pressing and pressing until the screen goes dark.

We all recognize Tina (everyone says so in the comments, though no one can put a classification to her. Were-beast? Reincarnation? Cryptid? Vessel? If you know, please fill me in. I haven’t found an answer even in the darkest corners of the web.).

We’ve seen her grow over the past months, seen her progress. “The people need to see.” I keep hearing him say, over and over. Because we all saw. We all saw what he skipped off into the woods with, who he skipped off into the woods with. Feast? Gift? Rebirth? I’m sure that’s what she said. It doesn’t need to make sense. You’ve seen the footage. The police have seen the footage. Everyone in America has seen the footage. But no one has seen my father. Not since that final upload. Not since that final blurry shot. I’m only talking to you in hopes someone will read this and know where my father is, or what Tina is, or what happened to … how she … I don’t know.

There are too many questions. Not enough answers.

I wish my father had been better at talking to me.

Some things need to be discussed at length.

Not everything can be settled in silence.

• • •

Since the posting of the original interview, Paul Lectre is still missing. If you have any information on his whereabouts, please call 1-800-556-3290.