Gretel
For the love. For the love of all that’s holy, just pretend it’s foggy Ireland, Gretel told herself, but no, it was ashy Colorado, and the valley was socked in with wildfire smoke and the sky was orange-gray, brown-gray, Grey Poupon-gray, and it was disgusting and no use pretending otherwise. It was disgusting and it was not Ireland. Even her imagination had limits.
Burned pine needles—still in the shape of pine needles—were currently littering her new deck just outside the bedroom’s sliding glass doors. She watched from bed and said pretty damn grim aloud to the afternoon sun, an orb of red so shrouded by the plume that staring didn’t hurt her eyes at all.
Her plan had been to spend the day tacking chicken wire underneath the new deck, perhaps with the neighbor kid, Alexis. The point was to prevent future catastrophes, such as skunks moving in, but what was the point of that? So she stayed in bed and when she awoke next it was still shitty, except the sun was lower, closer to the mountains. The bright blue birdbath was filled with black water and the sunflowers blooming next to it—volunteers from the birdfeeder—stood in defiance to the ash. So did the finch, clinging to the sunflower upside-down, though the dead one below clarified that defiance had its limits. There were some bright red poppies too, the only flowers to bloom after she’d cast a huge number of wildflower seeds, the others chomped down by deer.
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She fell asleep again and woke again. Ever since she’d had COVID, she slept like this, in fragments. She saw now that a deer was in the poppies. The doe wasn’t eating them, poppies being toxic to deer, or so she’d heard, but standing in them and eating the lilacs. This was the same deer that she’d tried to chase out of her yard all summer—this doe was young and small, not the mother of the twins, and the only one likely to jump the fence despite Gretel having put up a higher wire. Since the fire, she’d taken to plinking the deer on the butt with the BB gun, which she figured felt like a small finger-flick, given that the distance was so great. Her brothers had shot her with BB guns at a much closer range, after all, and it was never catastrophic, so she supposed she shouldn’t feel guilty. Although she did, of course. It was maybe a horrible thing? Still, it was an experiment of sorts, to see if the deer would exhibit some behavioral plasticity and associate her yard with unpleasant mild pains on the ass—just like humans might change their ways after the pain-in-the-ass of wildfires? Like she might become a more energetic person?
She wanted to go back to sleep but her nose started bleeding and she was forced up to get a wad of toilet paper, and while she was up, and after she peed, she picked up the BB gun resting against the wall in the corner, opened the glass door, and said, Scram, lady. All I want are my shitfuck lilacs and plinked the deer.
The deer flicked her ears and turned around to look at her but did not move. The doe had plenty of other land to munch on, after all—the house was surrounded by an enormous expanse of pastureland and foothills—sure, not lilacs, but still. So she plinked again but missed; the deer didn’t move but the lilac branch above it did. She supposed she wanted the deer to feel shitty, because she felt shitty, and because she wanted just one thing to remain safe and alive. So she stepped outside the door to yell louder, and at the sight of her, the deer jumped and bounded over the fence and onto the county road.
Then she heard the screech and thud. Her first thought was: Are you serious?
Her second thought: Actually, I knew that might happen.
“Playing with (Wild)fire”
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She walked outside and turned the corner of the house to see an old rust-red truck, the same color as her pajamas. She thought for a moment about the happenstance of that, too. An older and smaller and no doubt wiser woman, someone who wouldn’t have plinked or yelled at a deer, was swinging herself out of the truck and moving toward the prone deer. She approached the woman and said, “You okay? Want me to call the sheriff?” but the woman shook her head, no, and Gretel understood that the woman was likely one of the workers from the dairy, over-worked and under-paid and definitely wanting to stay off the radar of the sheriff.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Gretel said, and indeed it felt like a river rock was stuck in her throat. Now she felt worse. She was a disgusting human being, as disgusting as the sky, and she had just made this woman’s day disgusting. And the deer—how much more disgusting could it get? Than unnecessary death? They stood side-by-side and stared at the deer, which looked fine but was clearly dented on the inside, and then at the truck, which was visibly dented but drivable.
“Do you want to call an insurance company? The sheriff?” she said again.
“No,” the woman said. “No. He’s not…”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
They sighed and stood in silence.
“I’ll give you money to fix it.”
“Okay,” the woman said. “But it wasn’t your fault.”
“It was.”
The woman quirked an eyebrow at her, but she didn’t explain, and so they both took a step toward the deer, who now had blood streaming out of her nose. Gretel picked up a warm hind leg and the woman picked up the other and together with a one, two, three, they lurched the deer forward. The deer was warm and heavy, but it wasn’t far, and the other woman was very strong; otherwise, it simply wouldn’t have been possible. It very nearly wasn’t. Gretel was huffing from the effort, and from the ash, and she was surprised for a moment that she wasn’t shy about the pajamas, stained from period blood on the butt—while her sleep was now fragmented, her blood flow was nearly constant since COVID. She felt a glimmer of curiosity about her brain being in such a fog. She also felt something akin to stunned awe: she had wondered if this would happen, and then it did. Simple as that. Perhaps humans predicted possibilities all the time and yet did not change their behavior, and that seemed odd.
By the time she’d jogged inside to rifle through her drawers for some cash and come back out, the red truck was gone in the twilight. She climbed back into bed. She stared at the red poppies and the yellow sunflowers and the blue birdbath filled with black water and the white ash falling like snowflakes. Pretend it’s Christmas Eve and it’s snowing, she told herself, but no, imagination had its limits. She shouldn’t have scared the deer. She should be more grateful for this community and take better care of its inhabitants. Also, she probably had until tomorrow to pack her go-bag for potential mandatory evacuations, and for the deer to start smelling, which meant she had until then to get it together.
Lou
The sky was getting crazier by the minute. Lou figured it was probably the most wondrous sky he’d ever seen, in fact, so changeable in hue, just like the stock trailers going up the canyon were all sorts of colors, all sorts of models and makes and years, all sorts of levels of dented, and between the vehicles and the sky, he felt like a circus was going on in his eyes. It made him woozy.
The evacuation center for large animals was at the elementary school parking lot and the call had been put out on the radio and social media: anyone with trailers was supposed to help out. It struck him as strange, how despite the enormous technology and too-big government, it still came down to a semi-disorganized mess of regular people guided by a volunteer posse which mainly consisted of his neighbor, Autumn, on her phone at her kitchen table, and whomever she could pester.
He wasn’t able to help with the animals, though, because he didn’t have a stock trailer. Instead, he was driving Autumn’s new Tacoma to hitch up the nice motorboat of a friend of Autumn’s to get it off the mountain, the friend being busy evacuating other items. The fire had been going for weeks, maybe a solid month, but it had just flared up in the heat and wind—had gone from thirty thousand acres to sixty thousand acres yesterday, and from sixty thousand to a hundred thousand today.
At the mouth of the canyon, he braked and glanced right, since this last intersecting county road was dangerous. You couldn’t count on the cross-traffic to heed the stop sign; he’d seen a wreck or two there. And strangely—wasn’t it weird how the world worked like this sometimes?—in the exact moment he glanced, he saw an old pickup collide with a deer.
His foot hit the brake by instinct, and a jolt of oh shit zipped up his spine. But he kept driving. Literally, there was nothing he could do—this was a narrow road with no turnarounds and the red truck was now out of sight because he’d rounded a curve and now would round many more curves before he got to a boat in the mountains. Fuckin-A that was shitty, poor dude and poor deer and I didn’t realize the apocalypse would feel so heavy.
Sherm
The deer was still warm and why not? It looked like a clean snap at the neck. Sherm stood considering it in the tall roadside grass.
Pros: income from bartending at the saloon was gone because of ’Rona, and sure, he’d need more food this winter and the community food cabinet felt embarrassing, plus, he had space in his freezer, and plus, it would be putting the death to use.
Cons: he was in a salty, pissy mood already. And it’s just that he’d never eaten roadkill before, and also, maybe eating roadkill was illegal in Colorado, unlike his home state of Alaska, though in the end, that was a non-issue—who cared about what was legal anymore?
It would be easier to gut her roadside but he just wanted to be away from people, all people, he hated people, and this intersection was dangerous and currently busy (for a county road) because of the fire, so he improvised a ramp out of boards already in the truck bed (he’d intended to take them to the dump, one less flammable pile of junk around, but he’d been too tired). He also had some rope and bungee cords buried on the floorboard and was able to rig up a system and haul her up, bit by bit. Luckily, she wasn’t large, which made a one-man show possible, though it wasn’t easy and had him wheezing. People didn’t really know how hard it is to move a dead deer, or a dead anything, and it occurred to him that was why he was always so tired, COVID-longhauler for sure. He was tired of moving his dead lonely soul and sick body around. He was heavy to himself.
He heaved her body into his truck bed and stood panting, running through the progression of things he’d do next. He was having trouble thinking through things and it helped to tap his head with each agenda item. He’d:
- get her home,
- hoist her by the back legs to the lower rafter of the tree fort left by some long-ago renter,
- skin her, gut her,
- dump all the junk into an old plastic bin,
- then dump all that far from the house so as not to attract that bear,
- butcher her.
He’d need to do it all right away because it was late August and warm. He didn’t have butcher paper—he hadn’t been planning on this—but he’d improvise with something. Or maybe his neighbors, Mariana or Paige, had some, and regardless, he’d share the meat with them (but not the jackass with the white car).
He hurried, though the sheriff was busy with doing real work for a change, and regardless, getting a deer off the road was a help to society. But he felt he had to move fast because he didn’t want to deal with another human, and also, if he didn’t go fast, it wouldn’t get done at all. He glanced to the side as he pulled himself up into the cab and noticed a woman looking out from the chinked log cabin at the corner. She was standing in front of a glass door that opened onto a porch and was mostly secluded by trees and lilacs—he wouldn’t have seen her save for the red pajamas she was wearing and the yellow sunflowers near her door. Color and movement were what caught the eye.
She offered a little wave, and he imagined she meant, thank you, hang in there, I’m sorry we’re all feeling so shitty, and for the first time in so long, he smiled. He had the sudden prediction that he’d be very grateful for the meat this winter, and that each time he ate some, he’d think of a red-pajamaed woman.
Laura Pritchett is the author of seven novels. Known for championing the complex and contemporary West and giving voice to the working class, her books have been recognized with the PEN USA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the High Plains Book Award, several Colorado book awards, and others. She directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and holds a PhD from Purdue University. More at www.laurapritchett.com
