Him

                Neither one of them knew how to respond. It was too crude a description of life, to describe its ending as something that needed to be fixed.

                “I’ve got a gun in the trunk of my car,” the man said.

             Before the crack of the rifle, and the emptying of light from the eyes, H asked for a moment with the deer. His natural aversion to death was sending off alarm bells in his head but he knelt just the same. The deer reeked of blood and fear, its breath was rapid and shallow. He put his hands on its ribs and said, “Shhh, Shhhhh,” as much for the deer as for himself. The fur was matted and tough, like bristles on a brush.

            He felt himself wanting to withdraw from the moment, but something made him stay. As the two men watched on H said a small prayer for the deer. He asked that the deer be given peace in its final moment, and he felt the deer relaxing with the tone of his voice. He did not remember from his doctrine class if animals went to heaven. He suspected as he was learning in most religious debates, you could find someone who would say that they went to heaven.

           He wasn’t really praying for heaven though. He was praying for peace, a stillness in the soul. His favorite song then started, “As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after thee,” taken from one of the Psalms. He would spend the next few years of his life often leaving these sorts of moments, rife with emotional tension and danger. And yet, that particular day he remained with his hands on the flanks of the deer until the man shot and the body spasmed. When he stood up he was crying. He did not think to compare himself to Christ, but it was a moment of intense and overwhelming pain, waves of sadness about not just the deer but everything in life that falls short of glory. He avoided it as often as possible thereafter.

           The headlights of the car were ribbons strung through the dark. The birds retired for the evening, and he rolled his window down and snuck his arm out of the window, making snake like movements with his arm, enjoying the wind and the cold. In the morning he thought that he’d write her another letter. It was one of those silly and strange things in life, waiting to receive a letter that could possibly be at his house already. Perhaps he should call his mother and ask.