Rough Animals by Rae DelBianco

Author:Rae DelBianco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2018-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

She’d gone back to her own room when he left, but last night she had gotten too cold, and so Lucy ran down the steps with bare feet after sleeping in his bed alone for the first time. But there was still no one there in the kitchen, so she went back upstairs and laid back down in the bed. Still kept her head to that isolated corner of the pillow he didn’t use.

“What are we gonna do, Wyatt?”

And then to fill the silence of the one that was not there beside her she spoke again.

“We can stay like this forever, caint we, Wyatt?”

And she smiled and nuzzled her face further into the pillow, then smudged her lashes into the cotton at the knowledge that behind her in the bed there was no one there.

An hour later she ran down the steps again, taking the pistol from the bedside table, and skipped breakfast because she didn’t want to open the cabinet and remember that there was one less cup now, and she laced on her boots and ran out to the cattle, while behind her upstairs the skins gasped and swallowed the fifth day’s salt.

She stood among the cattle in the field, and there was a sound from within the woods and Wyatt was not there and she leveled the pistol at the aimless green and found that she was only used to firing a shotgun, that when her right hand held the pistol with bent elbow the left arm had extended to carry the weight of a barrel that was not there. The swooping veils of an owl’s wings unfolded into the air above the pasture, the nightbird chasing sunrise too late. She lowered the pistol, sat down in the grass, and stared out at the green like a prayer or in submission. That there was something of defeat in that firing a shotgun was ingrained perfectly in the muscle memory of her arms.

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