This coyote had human shaped teeth.
They'd only been at the new job a couple of months: process technician at a dairy plant in northeast Ohio, a 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift and a 35-mile drive each way. About twenty miles into the trip home, the road runs through a long wooded stretch. Fog sits on it most nights, so they drive it on high alert for deer and raccoons, podcast on, brights on, watching the shoulders for eyeshine.
On July 4th, 2020, about ten minutes after leaving work, eyes lit up at the side of the road and a coyote trotted out of the trees. That was a surprise in itself. They'd seen coyotes back home, near their old high school, but never out here. They slowed down as it crossed. Then, halfway over, it turned toward the car and sat down in the road, about ten feet from the bumper.
There wasn't another car in sight. They could have just gone around it, but it was too strange to drive away from, and they figured it would get up and wander off any second. It didn't. So they honked.
Two or three seconds later, the coyote smiled at them. With the brights on and the animal that close, there was no mistaking what they saw: its teeth were human-shaped. Every hair on their body stood up. The smile lasted about a second. Then it got up and ran into the woods.
They sat there frozen for about five seconds, then floored it. The plan had been to grab a sausage McMuffin on the way home. That plan was gone; they'd lost their appetite completely, and they still hadn't gotten it back when they wrote about it a few hours later. The rest of the drive was spent second-guessing it, and every time, they came back to the same thing: high beams, ten feet away, clear as day.
They've been into the paranormal and cryptids for years, and they mentioned they're Native American, in case that matters. The first word that came to mind was skinwalker. Maybe it was that, maybe some kind of mutated coyote. Either way, they were sure of one thing. They were finding a new way home from work.