[Trigger Warnings: >!Implied Domestic Violence, Animal Death!< ]
It’s Saturday morning. I’m not allowed in the bedroom, but I can see Mama and Wayne are still in bed. I can’t leave until I tell them where I’m going. Instead of being able to go outside and see what’s on the agenda for the day, I catch a blast of cold, wet air and golden sunlight when I open the door onto the back porch to let out Lucy and the cats. Boo and Biscuits go stalk off into the big open field next to the houses, and Lucy goes to sniff the tire on the neighbors truck.
I catch the door so it doesn’t slam, close it quietly, and go pour myself a bowl of cereal.
About an hour and a half later I’m walking uphill on the road towards Clyde’s house with April and Lily, but that’s not where we’re going. April talks over the drone of the cicadas, saying she found something in the woods up at the top of the hill. The warm gravel crunches under my bare feet and I’m careful to step around the spiny chestnuts that have fallen from the tree in someone else’s yard.
It only takes a minute to get to Clyde’s, and I turn back to look at Grandfather Mountain and the trailers down the hill before we disappear into the silent tree line.
The rotting leaves and pine needles on the ground are chilly- nothing is warm in the woods. The sun can’t get through the dense canopy of green here. Lily is telling April that they can’t say anything to their mom- the grownups don’t like it when we go out here. I feel the sweat start to bead up on my forehead and I hold my arms, rubbing them to try and make the goosebumps go away.
The woodland romp is taking the breath out of my lungs. I think about turning and going back because I’m tired, but April is the oldest and she’s the only one who knows the way to get home.
“Besides,” she says, “we’re almost there.”
The silence felt like it stretched on for an eternity to a twelve-year-old, but it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes when we got there. I wasn’t sure what ‘there’ even was, and I almost walked into it except that April grabbed me by the shirt.
It was a carcass. A young doe crawling with maggots and half reclaimed by the earth. One glassy eye stared straight up into the treetops as if she was praying to something older than the mountains. I’m half sunk into the damp, mulchy earth and when I feel the maggot wiggling on the top of my foot I can only think:
‘I wish I had put on shoes.’
The warmth of the afternoon sun feels unbearable when the three of us emerge from the trees. I’m drenched in sweat, shivering and burning up all at once. None of us speak as we walk down past Clyde’s and towards April and Lily’s home, but something catches my eye. Dark red splatter flecked with pink, and then a soft orange that almost blends into the tan gravel of Preston’s empty driveway.
I meekly step up to the invisible line where the road ends and the driveway starts. I don’t want to get close -it’s Preston’s house, you know, nobody wants their kids to go near it- but I can see from where I am. It’s Biscuits, laying not even two feet from the underpinning of the dirty old trailer, with part of his skull caved in. The blood and brains are already half dried up, and I watch a horsefly dance in and out of his empty eye socket.
April and Lily are already gone. I only notice when I hear their screen door slap closed against its frame.
I smile while the grief and vomit catches in my throat.
By the time I walk the fifty or so yards back to my house, it’s somehow already getting dark, and my head feels full to bursting. Mama says I look sick, and doesn’t take long to touch my forehead and tell me that I’m burning up. She bundles me up on the couch and lets me watch cartoons in the living room while she opens a can of soup.
There’s nothing I can say as she interrogates me on where I’ve been, what happened, why I don’t have shoes on. How am I supposed to tell her?
I stare at the purple and red half moon under her eye, but I can only see that deer staring up to God, begging for something I could never comprehend. I think of Biscuits, his empty eye socket with a horsefly darting around it, and know that Wayne will never come back.
I was right.