Natalie was not sure she had heard anything at all. All around her were clouds of pink and she thought of the exposed insulation in her parents’ attic, soft and dangerous. 

“Oh. Oh my god.”

“Shush it,” said Daniel. “It’s just a deer. You’re okay.”

Daniel patted down his airbag and unbuckled his seatbelt, then reached over and released her belt with a push of his thumb. She heard his door open and then a rush of swearing from outside the car. 

She closed her eyes. She opened them. She twisted her body out of the car, which now rested diagonally across the black road. She stepped out onto spongy leaves.

“Christ.”

The spotlight shine of the headlights illuminated her husband, his hands hanging limply at his side, his shoulders slumped forward. Behind him the road receded into darkness. The doe was spread over the hood, mostly intact but also leaking into the grill and under the front right tire. A pietà, she thought. Her car cradling it like the arms of the virgin Mary.

Daniel was already pulling out his phone. Asking for a tow truck, yes to this bumfuck road, yes right now, please. She watched as he hung up and walked around to her side of the car, giving the carcass a wide berth and shuddering.

“It’ll be at least an hour. They’re sending a guy out but they’ve got to get him up first.”

“Up? He’s asleep?”

“I think up from town. Not up from bed.”

“Oh. What are we supposed to do for an hour?”

He pulled out his phone again. Natalie crossed her arms tight across her chest. The night was thick and warm, the humidity catching in her throat. Behind her loomed a dense wall of trees, and for a moment she stared into it, past the thin reedy branches pushing up by the road and into the teeming dark. She lowered herself slowly to a crouch.

“I think it’s still breathing,” she whispered.

“It’s not.” 

“I think it is. I see it moving.”

“Okay. Well, I hope it’s not.” He didn’t look up. “That would suck.” 

She heard the animal let out a soft grunt, like the last of the air leaving its beaten body. She realized her face was wet with tears.

“I was driving the speed limit.” He was looking down at her, face lit from beneath by his phone screen, his eyes dark. 

“Yeah, Daniel,” she sighed. “Like you always do.”

“I’ve never had this happen. And I grew up in New Jersey. The deer were like squirrels in my neighborhood.”

She folded herself into her knees. Daniel’s sneakers sloshed through the leafy undergrowth and then went quiet as he reached the asphalt. She heard the car door unlatch again. For a moment the slice of ground in her vision went black, then blinked golden yellow. The hazards were on, the high beams snuffed.

“It’s too dark,” she said, her voice muffled in her arms.

“Do you want to run out the battery?”

“Aren’t we getting towed anyway?” He didn’t respond. “It’s creepy out here. Too quiet.”

“You wanted to come out here. A break from the city, I can’t write in this apartment anymore.” 

“Okay. Okay, I get it.” The pale undersides of the trees pulsed with her hazard lights, and with every beat of darkness the woods grew deeper. She had a horrible queasy feeling sneaking up through her torso and into her throat. She suddenly missed their little one-bedroom facing the brick wall of another apartment complex full of people living their own lives, and getting woken up twice a week by the piercing call of the garbage truck reversing into their alley.

But the quiet was broken by the noise of a gas engine growling from behind them, followed by thin rods of light cresting the hill. Natalie saw the asphalt shimmer as a big SUV pulled up. Slicked over with blood, she imagined. 

It slowed down, navigating gently around the rear of their car, and stopped next to them, in the left lane. A big guy leaned his whole body over the passenger seat to shout out the window if they needed help with that. Daniel said they did. 

“Dan,” she whispered, as the car pulled forward to park neatly in the right-hand lane. “Dan, we’re fine.” 

“Do you want to wait an hour?”

The man let out a long, low whistle as he walked through the grass shoulder. He bent at the waist and peered intently at the mess. He was not old, maybe thirty, like them. His grey cotton t-shirt was sucked into his chest with sweat. 

“Windshield’s together, that’s not so bad. Are you two all good?” He looked up, his eyes shining as they flicked back and forth between the couple.

“Yeah, sure, we made out okay.”

“I’m guessing you called for a tow already.”

“It’ll be an hour or two.”

“That sounds about right.” 

He straightened up at the waist, pulled at his t-shirt a bit to unstick it. “Look, they’ll do the tow, but they’ll want you to remove it first.” He gestured at the carcass draped on their hood.

Daniel nodded. “Yeah, sure. That makes sense.” 

“I can’t tow you, I don’t have a hitch. But I can help you do that.” He spoke slowly, and she knew he could see right through to their suburban upbringings, their adult lives nurtured by the city. Natalie thought of the dead rat she once found in her shower. The maintenance man for their building came up and swept the body into a dustpan, which he tipped into a plastic grocery bag. Then she had him bleach the tub. 

“That’d be great, man. I’ll be honest, we don’t really know what to do with it. I’ve never, you know…” Daniel trailed off, shrugged. 

“Hunted?” The man grinned as he looked right at Daniel. The only gun Natalie had ever seen was the handgun nestled inside a narrow safe in her father-in-law’s closet. 

The man walked toward the doe’s head, close enough now to lean in and kiss her if he wanted to. He paced around her body. “Yeah, she’s okay. You’ll have some cleaning to do, but the body’s fine, should be a cinch.” He stopped in front of Daniel and Natalie, huddled at the edge of the woods. 

“Now, did you call 911?”

Daniel looked over at Natalie.

“You should do that now, for insurance purposes. They’ll want to send an officer.”

“Nat, can you call?” She nodded. “It’s her car,” he said. 

Natalie flinched as the man’s hand shot up, palm forward. “But, if you don’t mind,” he said, chin tucked into his barrel chest, “I’d like to claim salvage.” She stared at him, gripping her phone, and he stared straight back. “I’d guess you two don’t want it?”

“Want it?” Daniel asked. Natalie looked up at her husband, shrunk closer to him. 

“Well, I can tell the officer that I want to claim it. And then I can take it back with me, off your hands.”  His eyes, curtained by blond lashes, were wide and unblinking as he explained. Natalie suppressed a shiver.

“Oh. Oh, well, sure. Of course.” Daniel tried an easy smile. “Natalie, you can tell them, right?”

“Ma’am, it’s alright, I can call.” The man walked up onto the asphalt and spoke with the dispatcher. Natalie turned to her husband and gave him a wide-eyed stare. A what-the-fuck stare.

“Look, do you want it to go to waste? And he’ll clear it off for us. So.” She looked over at the doe, her back crooked but her wiry brown fur smooth and her eyes still glossy. 

“He can get his own,” she hissed. 

“You want him to kill another?” The man came back off the road.

“I’m clear to take her,” he announced.

“Great!” said Daniel. He was still doing that smile that stretched his lips too thin. 

The man gave a firm nod and ducked back into his car, reemerging in a ratty over-shirt. He approached the animal and slid his thick forearms underneath her body. He didn’t lift her, but let her slide off slowly onto the ground, limp and pliant. Her body was straightened out again. Pieces of her fur lay glued to the car’s hood. 

He grabbed her back feet and pulled her closer to his own car and deeper into the woods. He flipped her so her white belly lay wide open. Natalie watched, entranced, as he shrugged his over-shirt off again and tied it tight around his torso. The man went back to his SUV, brought out a black plastic case. He set it gently on the ground next to the doe, then stood back up.

“What is that?” Daniel asked. He was really curious, Natalie realized. Daniel was watching the man as closely as she had been, but leaning forward on one knee, prepared to jump in if asked, like a student in the operating theater. 

“I can’t put her in my car like this.” The man knelt down at the doe’s side and unclasped his black case. Inside were tools Natalie did not want to know about. Things to hack, to saw through flesh. Daniel looked back at her as she wiped a drip of sweat off her brow, feeling her forehead slick and cool.

“Oh, Nat, c’mon.” He rested his hand on her upper arm, gentle, reassuring, and in the same moment she saw his eyes flick up and back. “It’s already dead.” 

“Yes. Dan. I know it’s dead.”

“She doesn’t eat meat, you know,” Daniel explained to the man. “Usually.”  For Daniel’s thirtieth, he brought Natalie and two of his law school friends to an Omakase restaurant. The server placed before them a floral ceramic plate on which lay tender slices of wagyu beef nigiri, shiny and pink as a lung. Daniel told her she needed to try it, this delicacy, her gift to him. 

The man didn’t say anything but kept his eyes focused on the animal. He took a knife and nudged it carefully into the doe’s abdomen. Natalie turned away. The tree next to her had thick, glossy leaves, narrow with jagged edges. She thought about what species it might be while her husband kept talking. 

“We were supposed to be up at this Airbnb tonight. You know it? Pleasant Hill.” 

“Nope, haven’t heard of it.” 

“It’s way back in the woods. Next to a creek, I think.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just one week, for some quiet time. Natalie here, she’s writing her dissertation.”

Natalie turned her head back toward the deer again, her hand raised as a shield by her temple. The doe’s stomach was splayed open now, a gaping red hole that the man was reaching into with his knife and his bare hands, slicing through meat and tendon and muscle to loosen her organs and pull them away. Natalie looked at his face, now aglow with the hazard lights, then dark again. He was focused, quick, surgical. She felt a warmth for him bead up from deep in her chest even as her stomach turned at the violence of it all. 

“She couldn’t write at home. Too much city noise.” 

“Oh my god,” she breathed.

“She always wanted a rural life, right, Nat? Guess this was a quick introduction.” She gave a nervous laugh, mindful of the man below with his knife and his meaty arms, and his aptitude in gutting an animal. 

“Just wanted to get away,” she mumbled.

The man didn’t look up. “It’s beautiful around here. In the daylight.”

“Yes, I’ve heard,” Natalie said. He was separating the doe’s legs, cutting through her pelvis now. His forehead shimmered with a film of humidity. 

“So, what, you eat it?” Daniel asked.

“We’ll send her to the processor. Freeze some.” 

“Well, we’d take a cut.” Natalie squeezed her nails into Daniel’s upper arm. The man cut loose what seemed to be the deer’s lower intestines, a ribbon of purple. Then he put down his knife, rolled her over. A pile of dark innards lay to the man’s side, indistinct against the mottled earth. He put his hands on his thighs. 

“A finder’s fee. You can ship it.” Daniel smiled again. She could’ve slapped him. The man’s laugh felt forced.

“Does your wife want that?” 

“No,” she said, at the same time that Daniel started to say, “She’ll love it, a bit of local culture. For when we’re back in our cramped apartment.” He said that part looking right at her. “I’ll give you our address. Just a cut, not much.”

Daniel pulled a piece of paper from the car as the man hoisted the deer, two legs in each hand, and laid her gently into the back of his SUV. 

“Thanks, by the way. At least we don’t have to look at it while we wait.”

“Sure. Hope it’s not much longer for the tow. Or the officer.” The man wiped clean with his over-shirt, then raised one hand in goodbye.

Daniel slipped back into the driver’s seat and pulled the car straight and out of the road. Natalie climbed in, ducking the airbags. Her damp legs stuck like tack against the leather seat.

“Fuck you.”

“You don’t have to eat it.” 

Natalie slid her ring up and down her finger. Felt its cool metal slither against her skin as she twisted it left, right. She was clear and awake now.

“It’s embarrassing.”

“Well, it’s gone now—what else could you want?” Daniel pressed the ignition. “We’ll tell the tow guy to take us to the cabin. Then we can call your dad to take us home.” They let the cool air wash away the sticky night as they waited.

She closed her eyes and sat straight and still. She imagined a cardboard box, soaked through and dripping as it sat in the lobby, waiting for her. She would have to walk it down the hallway, up the elevator to the eleventh floor, and into their unit, where it would leave a little pool of water on the countertop. She thought the package within would be tenderly wrapped in parchment paper by that man’s precise hands, nestled between egg carton insulation and half a dozen slippery ice packs. The carefully harvested remains from what was once the carcass slung over her hood. 

Maybe she would eat it. Alone, before Daniel knew it had arrived at all, and she would think of the thin grey sleeves of that man’s t-shirt hugging his shoulders while he sawed away at his salvage. Now just a pink cut of venison.