The Doe by Brenda Taulbee
“peeling back the thick slab of skin and fat to reveal the red of her”
Fiction by Brenda Taulbee
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The sun sits like a fat tick gorging itself on horizon, and the rounded tops of those too-close mountains and we are up too early, carving our slow progress up the gully of the back ten. Breath caught and suspended, the variable weight of air as it leaves lungs. Ours and the horses’, with their crystal-beaded noses and lashes. Everything quiet like the second before a car crash. Snow empty and then littered with clues from our passing.
We come upon her limbs first.
A splay of pronged toe curved into delicate tendon. A tangle of entrail, then the belly, split sternum to groin like some slapdash grin. The doe has not been dead long. The blood is still tacky where the careless bullet took her low in the neck. An accident, we’re sure. It is not unusual for off-season hunters to fire into a herd. The gut-pile still steams. The heart and liver are missing, trophies plundered, the meat left to freeze before scavengers can pick her clean. Up close, the doe’s eyes, brown and empty. The parasites crawling through the fur of her split white belly don’t know they will die too. Soon.
Last winter my sister found our pet rabbits huddled together, frozen solid in their outdoor hutch. The chicken wire cage insufficient to protect them from the wind. My stepfather joked they’ be good eating, said he’d teach us to skin them. We could keep their feet for luck.
Standing over the dead deer, the horses fill their noses with death and stomp impatience while my stepfather pulls his knife from his belt loop. Shakes his head. What a waste, what a fucking waste. He is thinking, good eating. He is peeling back the thick slab of skin and fat to reveal the red of her. My hunger growls with guilt. I wonder if her nose is soft, if it is velvet like rabbits’ feet. If it could somehow be a little more lucky.
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Header image courtesy of Kelcey Morette. To view more of her work, go here.
Brenda Taulbee writes to understand all of the messy, intricate ways we human. Her poetry collection, The Art of Waking Up (GobQ/Reprobate Books) was released in 2014 and her work has appeared in various print and online publications, including The Inflectionist Review and the forthcoming Unchaste anthology. August 2016 She'll pack up her cat Murphy's Law and begin her MFA journey at San Diego State University.