a dead deer

A dead deer was found in front of the door of some people who lived above us. It had been dragged from the driveway and there were smears of its blood near the wood fence and through the night an open wound let drip its insides in a pool leaking slowing down the stone of the staircase. The fur had gathered around our welcome mat and others in the open air hallway of the complex. The jet streams made blinds of the sky, then a pale blue. Even, divided wedges like fruit peeled. The veins of it a mossy webbing. In the new warmth of the day our shoes made no sounds. It felt like, for some reason, for the first time, we had remembered to put our keys and change in separate pockets.

We tried to put it together in the car on the way to church and then later after our night television. We closed our eyes and probably saw much of the same thing. A car, a truck made of soft metal, like notebook paper crushed in a fist, thought better of and smoothed flat again. Four men abroad in the cab, strange braids of orange scanning them like a barcode as they drove beneath the street lamps. Careful around these corners, one said, probably whispered. A collective nod among them. Their bodies jumped with imperfections of the road. They pulled at the ends of their shirts, breathing through their nose. FM, no AM radio. The warmth and softness of the textured sound waning and returning. It was a man speaking sincerely and without words. The radio tower finding the car through low passages and bits of forest, losing them without warning. Moments of fear materialize in the car like a season. Someone coughs. Someone pushes their glasses further up and it passes, this fear, only to return again at distant road sign. One of them plays with the blood on his hands, making his thumb and fingers lobster claws, feeling it adhere and pulling them apart. It is a quiet noise.

The scenery of their psychology we dismiss. There is no who, we decide, because it could to easily be us. We won’t answer the question to what would put us at the Wal-Mart after the bars close, standing in line with a tarpaulin and dark eyes or whatever they had. We don’t like to think how close we are to it. We like to think about what they wore or what was on their breath. Which one was a smoker, his brand of cigarette. We like to think of the basin in the restroom of the diner where they had breakfast. The dim rim of red left from their hands. The soap was an inky and pale pink. Somewhere in their pores there is still a residue, still some kind of lingering foreign blood at the base of the blonde hair in the crease of a wrist. How they watched the dissolving fingerprints smeared on the laminate of the menu. A forkful behind their teeth, the boyish smile they make when concealing renegade happiness. Their jaws working slowly over bacon. A smirk is passed around the booth and left with the change and the balls of paper in a space where the booth’s back meets with the seat.

We know a few things for sure in our head. We just feel for sure there are things we can know. None of them return to houses with a second story. This coming summer they are going to finish one side of the basement. Put some carpet down there. Find a pool table or something like that. One that collects the balls in woven baskets at the pockets, plastic or fake wood. Patch the one part of the roof where rain collects on the pimpled brown shingles. Do it before those shingles in the garage go bad. They must ask themselves do shingles go bad?. They plan to know a guy who would know, who knows those kinds of things. This same guy they plan on knowing probably knows where to find a pool table too. Or a ping pong table. Well, those seem easy enough to make. They find the word tennis has an odor to it. The deliberate brightness of a sweat from boys that don’t understand it yet to prevent. And the dead deer. We had almost forgot about that.