Maggie Brunner: It was a late summer night

I am driving, in my hometown of Salt Lake City, up Emigration canyon. It is dry in the valley and the road is lined with tall yellow grass. The blacktop needs to be re-tarred and as I drive, the car hits frequent bumps. My feet are bare- I feel the plasticized lines of the gas pedal beneath my sole. I am wearing a slip dress of a silky polyester fabric in an off white color. I feel frantic, on the edge of a panic attack, like I'm running from or to something. It was this summer that my grandmother died. 

My grandmother, much like her death, was quiet. I often caught her staring at the lines in her hands, like she was tracing some convoluted path up and down the mountains of her knuckles. By this summer her hearing and her Mormonism were shot. I wanted to explain to her, somehow, that I could follow her dreams and become something, that I would leave the church at 18, like she wished to. But when I visited, my mom was always close by, and if she left the room I was bound by the strange notion that the second I started talking my mom would come in and show her disappointment. My grandmother didn't deserve such stressful infighting, so I would instead try to communicate with meaningful eye contact. She would look away. 

I watch the trees flick by out of my side window and turn my head back to the frightening sight of a staring doe. Her mouth is softly opened and I can see my headlights enlarging in her glassy eyes. Her legs are long and athletic, made for long bounds and to camouflage into the tawny fallen pine needles. When I hit her, they splay backwards and bend upwards, so that her back feet face the sky, to gaze at the night stars. 

Two months earlier I went stargazing with a boy, a day after my birthday. He said he wanted to see me to commemorate another year on earth, but he didn't have a present or particularly celebratory plans. We went up Emigration Canyon, past the spot I'm describing now, to a long bend in the road. The stars were beautiful that night, so we opened the sky roof on his 2009 Forester and admired them. I tried to sketch out funny shapes and divine some image from the stars, as he stared irritatingly at my profile.

"You're missing the stars!" 

I said in a joking tone, but hoping he would move nonetheless. 

"You look really sad." 

He replied, shockingly astute and completely non sequitur. 

The car was stuffy and we had taken those disgusting orange

flavored weed gummies and gotten anxious, so I drove us,

admittedly quite high, down the winding roads to his house in the

foothills. 

I feel slightly high, not entirely in control. When I hit the deer, reality sharpens and my car makes an awful noise, like gears grinding or bones crunching. The deer's bones did crunch, and snap, and twist in ways I still think of when I see wasps squelched under boots or sticks crack in  windstorms. I am suddenly aware of the song playing, "Worried Now, Won't Be Worried Long" the field recorded version from Alan Lomax, sung by a Hemphill girl. It is much too slow for the panic I feel and, almost like my dream notices, the radio cuts out and into a frenzied static. I slam the stick into park and throw open my door. The roughness of the ground meets my feet as I rush out of the car and around to the body. She lays still in the road, periodically twitching. 

My best friend had a seizure that summer. We were having a sleepover and talking about movies when suddenly she began to stare blankly behind me and shake. Then she keeled over and began jerking, in unhuman movements, on her linoleum floor. I began to cry and called her dad. I kneeled at her laying body and grabbed it and held it, first to stop that awful movement, then in fear of losing her. Her body radiated warmth and I could smell her Amber perfume and after her twitching quieted I didn't let go. 

I take the deer into my arms and shake her, checking for signs of consciousness. Her heart is pattering, softly, like gentle rain on a window. I am on my knees, my headlights shine painfully behind me and into her face. I move reflexively to shield her from the harsh light. Her eyes are fluttering. I can hear her breaths, strained. My knees suddenly sting and I look down to see glass cutting into my lower legs. Her breathing is slower now and my body is pressed to hers. I hold her with all my tenderness and love, like somehow, she will begin to heal under my warmth. I will it to be so. Her breath starts slowing. Desperately, I shake her, and touch the soft side of her face with my hand. I hold it and look her in the eyes, pleadingly. She looks back sadly, as if to say I'm sorry, and her eyes flutter shut. Every atom of my body resists and my mind shorts. "No!" I have to do something. I push her limp body so that her head is facing the sky and straddle her torso. I start pumping hard and fast and I hear bones crunch. They're supposed to break, right? I cup her chin with my hand and blow into her mouth with mine. It doesn't work so I go deeper, into her mouth, deeper, blowing. Her mouth smells like pine and raw meat. 

It isn't working. Oh god. 

Still sitting on her chest, I move down, so that my hands can touch the fur above her heart and check for some notion of a beat. My fingers thrum and twitch with adrenaline, and I can barely touch her through the trembling. I don't have to touch her to know that checking for a beat is futile, I felt her leaving moments before. But I can't let her die. I can't let her die at my own hands. 

I press my fingertips together, and then into the dewy fur right above her heart. I take a deep breath and then dig, with all of my weight, through her coat and flesh and bone. Her mass slides through my hands like water or some silky fabric. Her chest is a waterfall. Her heart meets me at the bottom. It is solid and covered in a clotted layer of gummy blood. With all of my gentleness I start squeezing it, to the beat of my own heart, which I feel in my head. Softly, quickly, waiting for her heart to respond in a syncopated rhythm. I must not be going fast enough so I speed up, and I pulse harder, harder, harder. 

It doesn't work and my body is racked with sobs and panic and desperation. I slowly lift her heart from her caved chest and press it to mine. I try to communicate how sorry I am, show her how terribly I regret doing this. And like that, I curl up with her heart to my chest, on the black top, still warm from the day's sun, and sob. 

Normally, I would wake up from the nightmare around this point. On the most terrible nights I would pull the doe's heart out of her chest to find it covered in burrowing maggots that squiggled up my arms and into my ears and nostrils. But, on the last night I recall having this dream, it ended differently. After I lay with the deer's heart briefly, I open my trunk to grab a shovel. I pick up the doe with impossible ease and carry her past the road, through a field of tall, scratchy grass. The singing crickets flit back and forth in excitement at the disturbance. The dream dirt, much unlike real Utah dirt, is moist and supple, so that when I dig the tip of my shovel in the earth it slides away with ease. The sweet smell of rain and humus reaches my nose, the moon shines soft rays down on me. I dig until a sizable hole has been formed and I place the herbs I find around on the floor of the grave. Pepperweed, pine, nettle, sumac, fresh and green. As softly as I can muster, I take her carcass into my arms and lower her onto her bed of leaves. 

There was a pile of white roses on top of my grandmother's grave. When it rained their smell wafted up towards us onlooker's noses. I stood underneath a knobbly tree to keep dry. Every minute or so a fat drop of water fell down onto the center of my right shoe. Drip, drip, drip. My mom spoke tearfully. My grandfather blubbered. I turned away from the hubbub and emerged from my dry spot to look at her grave. I kneeled in front of it and felt the wet dirt in hands. 

This is where she will rest, I thought, she will be happy here. 

I take handfuls of dirt from the pile I had dug and throw them on top of her twisted carcass. Delicately, I infuse the soil with my love, I envision it covering her body like a wave of comfort. I take greater scoops with my whole wingspan and the hole begins to fill up. 

Finally, we lower her into the grave and my uncle says a prayer. “Our dear heavenly father,” I stare into the distance at the rows of stone graves. The rain has slowed and I can see our cars in the parking lot, shining like exotic beetles. "We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen." 

Finally, the hole is filled and I lay face down on the dirt and feel. The warm soil, soft inching worms, the smell of verbena light and airy. My heart knows that if I reached out my arm and crawled through the newly placed earth I could find her. And I can feel her calm, she is comfortable, restful, content. I have hurt her and she knows, but she forgives me. 

About the Author:

Maggie Brunner is an undergraduate student at Bennington College studying Creative Writing and Journalism. Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, Brunner spends her free time on the radio, playing soccer, and sewing. She is passionate about visceral fiction, glam-rock, and kind gestures.