He was never going to be a proper writer. He didn’t know
words like portmanteau. He wasn’t particularly interested in naming things
precisely. A desk was a desk, a house a house, a wall a wall. He knew from
classes that the exterior of a scene should reflect the interior of the
characters. And yet, he didn’t put much stock in that. He had a beige couch
because he liked to sit and a black and white checkered blanket because his
mother had bought it for him. His exterior world was not really an accurate
reflection of his interior world, which was almost infinitely more interesting.
The world was full of people and things. He favored the people. Just once
though he’d like to describe a scene in detail, the exact location of a
painting, the stripes on a carpet, an overhead lamp in detail, a few wicker
baskets pushed into a bookcase, the dusty covers of books, the darkened
chandelier overhead, but what a waste.
The car
was a bullet driven through the heart of a very lonely country. There were many
other cars on the road, driven by people that he didn’t know, flashes of
headlights or shades of red and grey. Some days he could not shake the feeling
of disconnection. The sense that all of his feelings and actions were his alone
that he was to carry them out to an island in the sea and organize them like
shells upon the sand, making lists and piles of his favorites as if it
mattered. One’s own life only mattered immensely to them.
They
were driving at a good clip when the deer stepped into the road. It was more
like a fawn, something between a deer and a fawn. Maybe it was a yearling.
Everyone tells you not to swerve when you see an animal in the road, but most
everyone does. Daniel swerved to the left and as best as they could tell they
clipped the deer with the right front fender and sent it spinning back onto the
side of the road where it lay.
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