I remember hearing the coyotes howl for days before we thought to look for the deer. 

That’s not exactly true. 

I want to tell you the truth. 

It had started with my mother, she’d held me after I’d woken from the sound of yipping and banshee screams.

Well, really, it started with my brother. I’d had a nightmare that he’d brought the coyotes into our house. They wouldn’t leave and I couldn’t wake up. 

I don’t think that’s quite right. Forgive me. I’m trying to find a beginning.

Let’s start with the bones. That’s easiest. 

The dog had found a scapula while playing fetch. More scraps of deer followed, bits of pelt, small bones–metacarpals, phalanges, splintered ribs–they were slim and dark. I’m reading about deer anatomy right now, trying to remember. It’s not important, but I want you to see them like I did. 

It wasn’t until the dog appeared with a hoof at the door that my father went on the offensive. By then, the deer was open where it lay by the brook. I could see its echoes: here’s where a hoof was planted, here’s where the pack descended, here’s where its innards dragged as it staggered to the water. Hungry snouts and claws had torn the pelt and shoved it aside, maybe while it struggled, hopefully while it was still. 

In the days that followed, flies, foxes, crows, hawks, and possums had begun to arrive. It was unfortunate that the deer had only two eyes to offer. They go quickly with this crowd—-soft and wet and so, so, easy to claw and peck and slurp from their sockets. No matter, though, these guests are talented at unmaking: neatly snapping ligaments and cracking femurs to release the rich marrow. Squirming maggots burrowed into what little flesh remained. The deer would provide a lushness to the forest floor as it leached into the soil. Fresh green growing in its shape.  A whale fall of sorts. 

I looked to my father—stoic, surgeon—where he knelt examining its head. He hoped to sever it and hang it in our home. He’d nail it to a tree first, imagining a series of nor’easters meticulously stripping off the gristle and stubborn flesh. Afterwards, he could display his scavenged trophy without the ugliness of its origin. He wasn’t bothered by the rot, just inconvenienced. 

I was little, about five I think, slotting these observations into a messy little map of the world. I didn’t learn then to be disgusted.

Left to its own devices, the body is remarkably adept at disappearing. Left to others’ devices, its veins are flushed and filled, lips are sewn shut, eyelids are propped.

Funeral homes call it a memory picture. 

See the sleeping face? See the pretty hands? See the sunken eyes? See the bared teeth? The blotchy jaw? The bruised back? The bloat? The rot? Can you smell it? Can you taste it? It’s coating my throat and stomach. I throw it up just to breathe it in. 

I’m sorry. 

Please don’t look away. 

Humor me. Do you know what a ghost building is? Don’t answer, I can’t hear you. Just listen for a moment. It’s an architectural phenomenon. The walls adjacent to a demolished building retain part of its brickwork. Not a memory, exactly, but a place for one. 

What I’m trying to tell you is my father forgot the antlers, hung on the tree outside our home. What I’m trying to tell you is I didn’t. The building remembers the bricks—the deer haunts the nail. The sheets of my childhood bed are different but the frame is the same. 

* * *

There’s a story I can’t tell you yet. I’ll try and tell the next one instead. 

When I was a kid, my brother was charged with bringing me to and from school. I’d acclimated to his driving style in a sink-or-swim way. This time, it’s middle-of-winter dark outside. The night isn’t so much creeping into the car as it is flooding it. His headlights are off. His music is loud. He’s pushing ninety in the wrong lane. He closes his eyes for long stretches of road, face like he’s savoring it. The threat of two tons of steel crumpling and crushing him into bloody filth is better than anything he’s ever snorted. He whoops, ecstatic—manic. 

My brother was always bigger than I could understand. He was a kudzu. Rooting his way into every corner, every godforsaken nook and cranny of our house. I grew up in whatever space he left behind. Or I grew around him. Now I’m tweezing out the splinters. 

That’s why you’re here. I need someone to hold them for me. In your hands they look so mundane, just little bits of wood and stem. It tempts me to dig out the rest. There’s a few stubborn ones in the pad of my thumb. I feel them whenever something brushes against their grain. I could get them out. But if it still hurts after they're gone, then it was me, not the splinters. You see? 

I’m skipping ahead. You’re not here yet. 

Right now I’m in the car. 

I’m in the car with him. 

I’m scared in a distant way. I could beg him, pray to him, scream at him— I can’t get out of the car. It’s like I watch myself on-screen. During the parts I don’t like I can only close my eyes. 

I sit there and hope he’ll die but I sit there and I think he’ll probably live. With his luck, he’ll eject straight out of his seat, land safely on the roadside to watch his own blaze of glory. He doesn’t think about me. There’s a particular sting to being collateral. 

I think perhaps I’ll survive. Dragging myself to the brook— bowels unspooling and catching on the roots and dried leaves. I’ll lie there in the cold dark, fingers clawed into the dirt. After days of howling my father will push my hair to the side to better saw through my neck.