ROADKILL
by Ryan Diaz
The car was long gone. Bloody entrails lay strewn across the highway leading to a gurry lump of flesh heaving in a ditch. The doe wasn't more than three years old and would have likely lived a long life if fate and a Ford Bronco hadn't conspired to meet that day on a foggy service road just outside of town.
Sheriff O'Connor tried his best to avoid its eyes. Even with his back turned, he could feel their cool gaze on the nape of his neck, sending a shiver running down his spine. O'Connor wasn't a superstitious man, but the sight of the bloody corpse unnerved him. Of course, it wasn't his first time looking over a dead animal. He killed his fair share of deer over the years and even managed to score a 10-point buck a few seasons back. But then again, hunting was clean and impersonal. One bullet, one kill, swift and sudden and deadly. The ceremony surrounding hunting somehow robbed it of its savagery, and like a good liturgy, it took the hunter out of the world of the senses and into the realm of the noumenal. The hunt gave the kill meaning, a cosmic exchange between hunter and hunted, the cycle of life captured in the crack of the rifle, and the sudden thud as the dear hits the forest floor. Unlike hunting, which leaves a beast its dignity, a hit-and-run is all about violence. Behind the wheel, the beast becomes a roadblock, an inmate object set up between the driver and the destination. Left to die on the road, the deer was denied the dignity of a "good" death, denying the sacred circle that keeps life from spiraling into chaos. What was left was a mangled corpse, its appearance "marred more than any man."
For a brief moment, O'Connor locked eyes with the dying beast. He watched it struggle to breathe, its life leaking out in steady pools of iridescent red. He shuddered as its mangled chest hiccuped and heaved and struggled to breathe. Instinctively he took a deep breath, sighing in relief as his lungs expanded and collapsed, repeating the movements with ease. Pressing his hand against his chest, he felt for his heartbeat, and when he felt the steady thump, he allowed himself to relax. The beast was dying, but he was alive.
O'Connor walked back up the ditch to his squad car. Nothing was left to do, save putting the poor beast out of its misery.
The air was thick with fog, and as O'Connor inched his way toward the squad car, he noticed the road was all but covered in thick gray mist. There was an impossible density to the fog, as if the sky itself decided to fill up the space between his hands and his face. It clung to everything. His hat, his hands, his shirt, and his gun. It was like swimming, and the further he stepped into the fog, the more he felt the weight of the air press in around him. He felt like he was swimming, and some rogue current was hard at work trying to pull him under.
He fumbled with his keys but eventually got the truck to open. He thought about shooting the beast, but that felt impersonal. So O'Connor decided to use his bowie knife. A quick stroke could quickly end it, and the intimacy of the act would assure that the doe didn't die alone.
O'Connor held the knife before pulling the blade from its sheath. He ran his eyes along the length of the metal, eleven inches from hilt to point. The knife had been a gift from his father. The first time he held it in his hands, the knife felt like a sword, but after 40 years of constant use, the blade had lost much of its magic. It was a tool, its worth predicated on its usefulness, its ability to sever ligaments and skin deer hide in quick, neat, downward strokes. He remembered running around the woods with his friends, playing cowboys and Indians, waving around his bowie knife like Daniel Boone. With boyhood came the luxury to dream, to pretend that death, though inevitable, was far off and that life could actually be like the great stories one reads. But O'Connor quickly learned that boyhood was only a stopgap and that death is always closer than one wants to admit.
Drops of dew condensed on the blade and ran down his palm.
The fog was thicker now, like standing in a storm cloud.
O'Connor tried his flashlight, but the viscous mass moving through the trees instantly swallowed the light. The deer was to his right, lying in the ditch that sloped off the shoulder. All he had to do was follow the car and turn before going downhill to wear the doe lay dying. But the fog gave him pause, and so he made his way gingerly forward, using the car as a guide until he found himself in open space.
He heard the crash before he felt it.
His body was weightless, moving through the air as if being pulled along on an invisible string. When he landed, he barely registered the screech of the car as it took off, the roar of its motor drowned out by the sudden onslaught of pain. He tried breathing, but it felt like two hands wrapped around his lungs. Everything hurt. The world was spinning. The cold ground was like the surface of an undiscovered planet, totally alien, course and hard compared to the virtual weightlessness of unencumbered flight. He tried moving, but his body refused. He felt heavy, as if he was sinking further into the earth and all the planet's gravity was leaning against him. He tried to resist, to work against the steady tug pulling him deeper into the ground, but his body refused to listen, and the laws of nature would not be denied.
He was surprised at the sudden lack of pain. He felt pressure and temperature, but the screaming pain of the initial impact was replaced with a sudden wave of extreme cold.
He was dying.
He knew enough about the process to confirm it for himself, and as he lay there, he felt the life leaking out of him, pooling just beneath his chest, leaving his body in thick rivers of deep red.
By the time he woke up, the fog was at its thickest. He was lost in a world of wet, dewy, gray, and with no sun or sky to look to, time was irrelevant. He might have been there minutes or hours. There was no way for him to tell. He was slipping in and out of consciousness. Each time he woke up to the cold caress of earth, he knew it might be his last. He could feel himself slipping. Darkness gathered in the corner of his eyes. He tried to cry out, but his mouth was shut, and then it was dark, and he wondered if he had died.
It was dark. The fog was gone, and the moon shone brightly in the evening sky. He was still alive, but from the chill running down his spine, he knew he didn't have long. He tried one last time to move. With every ounce of strength he had left, he willed his arm to reach out and pull him forward. But no matter how hard he strained, his arm refused to respond. This is the end, he thought. Left alone to die in a ditch like a wounded animal. It was then he thought of the doe and its lifeless black eyes.
O'Connor wasn't scared of death. That's not what was bothering him. What bothered him was sharing the same fate as roadkill, left to rot along the side of the road, becoming fertilizer for the cottonweed that grew along the shoulder. It's not how he imagined he would go, but in some ways, it was also fitting. "All go to the same place, all come from dust, and to dust all return." At least that's what the minister said at his father's funeral, and if his words were anything to believe, then humans and animals shared the same fate, all that talk of souls and salvation hogwash for better men who'd had the decency to die a "proper" death. In the end, we're nothing but skin and bones, food for ravens and crows. In some twisted sense, this brought O'Connor comfort. He would share his fate with the deer and save his nephew the casket cost.
It was the least he could do.
As the night deepened, O'Connor felt himself drifting. The end was near. He opened his eyes one final time to take in the world: the doe, the grass, the moon, the moss, the trees, the scent of wet earth, and the cool caress of the breeze. Savoring his senses one final time, he breathed what would be his last and said goodbye to his final breath.
He was ready.
But before he could close his eyes, he saw a shadow in the moonlight moving toward him. It was impossibly quiet, almost gliding along the ground as if weight was a mere option and gravity a gentle suggestion. Great big, curved antlers framed its head like a crown, and the moon nestled between them like a jewel. It stared down at him as if with pity, and though he knew it went against all reason, O'Connor cried out to the beast for help. He waited. But it said nothing. Why would it? Why would it lower itself to respond to the guttural sounds of the human tongue? O'Connor despaired. Even in death, he would be alone. But then, unexpectedly, it dipped its head as if bowing, and O'Connor knew intuitively that the creature was thanking him. O'Connor bowed his head in response, and as he did, his body felt lighter, and the heavy weight of gravity was gone. This was it. He was passing over. He watched as the buck retreated into the forest, and as he did, his eyes shut for the final time, and when he opened them again, he was following the beast through the forest lighter than he ever had been in life.