by Sabrina Canepa
At first, I thought the smell could’ve been the week-old microwave dinner, something with corn and peas and brined liquid, stewing in the garbage.
I thought it could’ve been the garbage in general, sitting next to the side gate, as it had for over a week. The city changed the garbage pick-up day a couple months before the smell, and wheeling the cans to the curb every Monday night instead of Tuesday slipped my mind more often than not. The thought of used tissues, slime coated bean cans, and unrecyclable coffee lids stewing together for eleven days was enough to keep me away from the side yard.
Days passed and the smell thickened, poisoning the pores of every surface. I waded through the syrupy texture of it, my uninvited houseguest.
The day the garbage cans were set to go out the phone rang at five in the morning. The kind of ringing and ringing that bled into dreams and in-between consciousness.
Something is outside your window, said the neighbor when I answered the phone, It’s eating.
I’d rather not explain the carcass. I’d rather not describe the thousands of maggots formed into a blur of movement and death. I’d like to forget the blackness of the remaining organs littered across the front step. But that didn’t stop me from staring. From taking it all in.
The carcass, the source of the smell, had been a deer. Rotten and gutted in the side yard, the prey of a suburban mountain lion, the deer’s only real predator aside from car bumpers.
House cats present their kills as gifts to humans. Some part of me, the part that bathed in the smell—used it as a perfume—thought it was like a fang-delivered present from the wild that still existed in my wooded neighborhood. Like the mountain lion recognized some sort of refusal to domesticate in me too.
When they were alive, my grandparents were members of this club. And by that, I mean my grandpa hung out with other old men while my grandma attended charity events. There was this one event I attended every year. I attended many events every year, but this one was different.
It was called the Deer Feed.
It was exactly what you’re thinking.
A person from this club hunted deer, and then we all sat at linen-lined tables and ate the same deer.
I sat, every year, legs swinging from the too-tall chair, white ceramic plate empty. People with microphones always took a moment to thank the hunter, the provider of the meal.
One year, a frail lady stood at everyone’s applause.
I said, This is sick, this whole thing is so sick.
My mom said, Be quiet.
Instead I focused on this lady, this hunter. She killed all those deer. Bucks, the man with the microphone had said. I thought of how big those deer must’ve been to feed all the people, how close she must’ve stood to get a kill shot. How many bullets it took to take down animals so big. How they transported the carcasses. I felt sick with curiosity.
I thought she must’ve needed help.
I thought she still did it.
I thought I’d like to be some sort of hunter.
I thought I’d like to be calculated, to take something down.
I’d like to feed something too.
For a few weeks my mom hated the neighbor’s son. Hate is a strong word, she once told me. She told me to use it sparingly.
But listen, I was only nine years old and everything felt so simple.
I thought hate was my mom’s anger every morning when she looked out the front door to see her rose bushes bare.
A rose bush without the flowers is just thorns, she said, and that’s not a welcoming sight.
She thought the neighbor’s son was cutting all her roses.
Out of spite, out of boredom.
Like how I stole rocks from our other neighbors’ driveway or brought bowls of
worm and insect-filled dirt into the house.
But this is about the roses. This isn’t about the neighbor’s son.
Because one morning my mom woke up earlier than usual. She looked out her window to scan the street, her morning routine.
She saw a family of deer, heads pushed through the gaps in our picket fence, eating the buds off her perfect row of rose bushes.
She wanted to uproot them all, try something different.
Feed the deer, I said, they must be hungry to walk this far.
It became a neighborhood joke in a way, these thorny bushes in our front yard a welcoming sight for deer and nobody else. And, secretly, me.
Because they were proof that a family of floral intestined deer were out there, living with a singular desire to survive. And in that pursuit, they destroyed the roses in my front yard, the most pruned and cared-for wild things.
When I learned how to drive, my instructor was always a little angry.
He called me a distracted driver, unobservant.
Single-minded to the point of putting other people and yourself in danger, he said.
If I wanted to change the radio station, all my attention was on the dials. If I was looking for a specific turn, I didn’t see people or cars or trees. Only street signs. I still think about him sometimes, years later as I breathe and drive and prove him right.
Like when I drive down this one winding road in this one secluded town. The first time I drove on this road it was dark and I was a little lost and the car I drove wasn’t mine.
The town wasn’t mine either, no matter how hard I tried.
I didn’t know the people or potholes or the closest gas station.
You know, things about places that make them yours.
I was driving on this street and turning so many turns without streetlamps until suddenly I was stopped.
The first sound I remember from that night was accompanied by a jolt: my borrowed car tires were unsure of the road, the back of my skull snapped into the headrest. I only saw the dark of night in the headlights, cars behind me slowly piling up as I opened my door and left it hanging on its hinge, swaying slowly back and forth as I walked to the front bumper.
The deer’s body didn’t look right. His hind legs dragged on the ground, his front legs tried to lift the rest of his weight, his head thrashed around as if loosened with the blow.
I heard another car door open and shut; a man from two cars back got out and approached the thrashing deer and me. He placed a hand on my shoulder and said, cover your ears, stand back.
Then a metal click.
I covered my eyes before the first shot rang out. I looked when I thought it was over. The deer stared straight at me. The first shot hadn’t killed him.
But the second or third did.
I didn’t hear either. I didn’t hear the song from my borrowed car’s radio that played against the echo of the three bullets. Or the sound of car horns from behind me. I could only hear the drag of the deer’s antlers against the concrete as the man pulled his body from the road, back behind the line of trees where we both belonged.
I was jogging through a park when I could no longer deny the urge. I watched squirrels forage and weeds grow across the cemented path. I slid off my shoes without untying them. Then I stepped off the concrete.
My bare feet sunk into the damp soil, cushioned by the scrape of twigs and squish of recently fallen leaves. The sounds of the birds and the smells of the pine sank into my pores.
The only deer here is desire.
I ran into the woods until I no longer heard the shrieks of children or motors of cars. I ran until dirt crusted my feet and calloused my toes. Until my nose turned cold, moist.
Until fur sprouted from my arms and legs and my senses sharpened.
And the forest greeted me kindly.
Sabrina Canepa is a graduate of CU Boulder’s MFA program. She has work published in Necessary Fiction, The Emerson Review, and elsewhere.