BY RICHARD HARTSHORN
I am in the woods, and I am wearing the stupidest shoes. I bought them for the job interview – an after-dinner roundtable with four pasty male mannequins, all with wine breath and six-dollar haircuts – even though they could only see my feet during the few seconds I strode from the door to the armless chair at the head of the table. I can feel blisters blooming on my heels. The straps are pushing my toe-bones into themselves. The spikes sink into the mud as I take the first drag of a cigarette I do not intend to finish, and gaze into the deadened eye of the deer.
The deer was too fast for me. I’ve never been able to admit when anything is too anything for me, but I’m over it. There is no open wound, though the dents from where my car smashed her body are pretty obvious on both her body and my car. My left headlight is spiderwebbed and dark. A streamer of duct tape undulates from where it’s still attached to my fractured bumper, the piece it was taped to long gone.
I blow two brumes of smoke from my nose, taking in the silence. No one knows what has happened between us. I watch her middle expand and sharply contract every few seconds, the spaces between breaths growing longer.
Once the deer dies, I stomp the cigarette into the mud with the toe of my shoe.
The following afternoon, while my sister is cutting my hair, I do not mention the crash, that I watched the deer’s pitiful death, or that I looped a bungee cable around her neck, dragged her to the choppy creek at the bottom of the ditch, and let her body go, hoping my Viking burial would allow her whatever peace a deer might find, but my sister, an expert on everything, would accuse me of littering, of murdering and trying to cover it up, would describe how dead bodies bloat and poison the water and how cars are humanity’s worst transgression, so I let her snip two inches of dirty blonde from the curtain behind my shoulders while she tells me about her week.
My sister is an animal rights activist. And I don’t say that like, “She’s one of those people,” but to her, a deer is more than a person. Everything about her fills me with strange guilt. Our dead parents left a void in her, and I’d give up a lot if I thought I could do anything about it.
Plus I hit the deer because I was busy lighting a cigarette, which I suspect the deer knows. Knew.
She asks about my shoes, which I have not removed since yesterday. She can see my reddened skin, my constricted bones, my feet in S-curves beneath the straps. I tell her my new job requires me to master these shoes when I’m not at work, that occupying this new role means creating a new gait. Little gullies of worry collect at the corners of her lips, and it annoys me. We start talking about cooking.
On the elevator to the summit of the highrise, the woman opposite me fidgets in her green dress. She clears her throat when I don’t look directly at her. I fixate on the golden double-doors, twisting rainwater from my own dress, waiting to find out if the rumored fifteen minutes to the top floor has any truth to it, but she’s persistent. I hear her shimmying in discomfort. When I finally turn, I catch her removing her heels and stepping flat-footed onto the wine-colored carpet.
I ask if this is her first day. She says it isn’t. She threads her tiny wrist through the ankle straps of both shoes and lets them dangle while she waits for her floor. I hadn’t noticed when I boarded, but her dress is not made of green fabric. It is made of thousands of reeds, the kind I’ve seen whipping the edges of lakes. Brown cattails jut from the notches of her ferny belt. Light from the domed bulb on the ceiling strobes across her face like sun on water, her skin like a waterfall, perpetually dripping and rushing and surging.
I play it cool. Ask what floor she works on.
She says, “You know that your sister scoops up litter at the mouth of that river. You know that she’ll find the doe, and that you’ll confess, because you can never keep anything from her.”
“She’ll get over it.”
The woman eyes me doubtfully. She folds her hands in front of her, and a dozen lily-pads issue from her underarms, their pink and yellow flowers awash with elevator light. She reminds me of my ex a little.
“The way I see it,” she says, “You have two choices. Continue to the top floor, meet the Chief, squeeze palms, and work until your poor feet crumble to pieces. Or take the elevator back to the lobby, find the doe’s body on the riverbank, and bury her for real. You know which one leads to keeping your sister.”
A small puddle has formed around her on the carpet. The elevator thrums.
I see myself stepping through the gleaming doors at the top floor. The boss of the company takes my hand. “You will call me Chief,” the boss says, and everywhere there’s the whiff of chemical air fresheners and pure saturation. It soaks the carpet, weighs down the leaves of the potted yuccas, melts oil from the paintings. The Chief sees the shift in my face and tells me I’ll get used to the air up here. “It’s like a mountain,” the Chief says. “But the thick air means you’ve made it. Literally everyone can smell the success on you.” I know the word is figuratively.
Next, I see my own execution: a cord looped around my neck, and the spikes of my heels hovering over the river like little broken branches.
When I find the deer’s body, I do not bury her. I separate her limbs and fashion her wet breastbone into a fiddle. I use three strands of my hair for strings, and I couple the instrument with an old bow I crafted last year for a client who never ended up buying.
My sister is on the porch when I get there. Her hair is done up in frayed pigtails. She’s wearing blue rubber gloves and sorting out trash bags the size of my car.
“This is for you,” I say before she even knows I’m here.
“Those are the bones of a deer,” she says, as if I may have come upon the fiddle by accident.
“Yeah. And she died because of me. I want you to have her.”
“You want me to have her, or you want to be the one to give her to me?”
“I want to give her to you.”
I want the rest to come out. I want to say something about our parents, but my throat constricts and my saliva tastes like poison.
She looks down at my shoes.
“Take those off. They’re stupid. Did you get the job?”
I shake my head no. But I’ve been wearing the shoes for a week and I’m afraid removing them will hurt.
I extend my hands, one clutching the bow, the other curled around the white neck of the fiddle. “This is yours, Chief.”
Her expression is impossible to read from here. She drapes a trash bag over the railing of the porch, peels the gloves away, and starts down the steps toward me.
*
Once the deer dies, an owl shouts from the opposite side of the road, and its call shakes through me. I clop back to my car, mash the cigarette against my front tire, and buzz up the road with one headlight.
The following afternoon, my sister, sucking in her stomach to accommodate her wedding dress, washes my hair over a bowl sink. She’s a nature lover, and has forgone her biweekly litter-collecting group to tie the knot with her fiancé after eleven years of will they/won’t they.
“I smashed into a deer last night,” I say. I don’t want to tell her, but the only other topics would be my failed luthier business or the fact that she chose our cousin as Maid of Honor.
Her fingers gently knead the hair hanging behind me. “Your car okay?”
“Missing a headlight,” I say. “Luckily your wedding is during the day.” Her grip tightens as she squeezes the shampoo out. She mutters something. I can’t hear it over the water rushing around the drain.
“What?”
She turns off the faucet and places a white towel behind my head. “Sit up slowly. Lightly pat your head dry. No rubbing the towel all over the place.” She’s still looking at me, but only because there’s nothing else to look at except my shoes, which she hates. I see the deer’s eyes in hers. I’ve killed her friend, and it isn’t the first time. As a girl, angry about something, I launched her favorite stuffed mouse across the tree-line. Mom and Dad never found the mouse, as if the woods had given it life and a rebellious streak. Later, I let every one of her pet salamanders go. Later, her high-school boyfriend, who didn’t feel like sleeping on the couch, forgot whose bedroom was whose, and mistook me for her in the dark. I made him leave. She never said she didn’t blame me. At our parents’ funeral, my half of the eulogy went like this: Mom, Dad, why the fuck would an Icelandic couple give their daughters French names? Why would anyone give their daughters French names? God, high-school sucked. Even the old fogies in the back row could smell my wine-breath. A wave of violence passed over my sister’s face like a windshield wiper.
“You do it,” I tell her. “I don’t want to do it wrong.”
A triangular flap of white cloth rests between my eyes. My sister, in her wedding dress, bends at the waist and peels the towel off my forehead.
“I do,” I say. She doesn’t laugh.
I tell the woman on the elevator I want the top floor. There’s a little symbol like a mountaintop alongside the button she touches. Halfway up, she whimpers and slips off her shoes. They look even more painful than mine. I ask if this is her first day. She says it isn’t.
“I can’t take it anymore,” she says. I want to ask what, but her shoes, which I hadn’t noticed until now are made of glass, burst from heel to toe, shattering into a zillion drops of water, filling the elevator like an aquarium. I hold my breath, admiring the way the ceiling light scatters through the water, illuminating both our skins and lending the woman the fostering eyes of a nymph. Each thread of her green dress becomes snakeroot or night-heron or a length of goat’s beard, and when she lifts one hand to block the blinding light, miles of salt-marsh grass stretch from the nook of her armpit.
She says, “Are you really going to stop building fiddles?” I don’t know how she expects me to answer. “Because once you get upstairs, the Chief is going to suck the hide-glue right out of your blood.”
Sister deer marriage living failing destitute without dependability can make time for hobbies later won’t be a later without something new.
She asks if I left anything unfinished before getting this job.
Fiddle fiddle fiddle fiddle fiddle fiddle fiddle.
The elevator creaks, then stops. The doors open on the fourteenth floor, and a woman in a dark pantsuit walks in. We continue on. The new woman flips through a manila folder as her loose charcoal-colored hair fans out in the water.
My woman looks at me for an answer, and she reminds me of my ex asking me if this is really it. The moving van was in the driveway behind me, a stack of books under my arm, one foot on the stoop. I was wearing uncomfortable shoes then, too.
I try not to think about the six unsold bows still in the back of my car, but in trying not to think about them, I think about them. And she sees them as clearly as if I’d placed them at her feet. And she feels the pain I feel as if we were both holding our breath.
“I’d do one of two things,” she says. “Make a wedding speech, tell her you’re sorry about the deer, you’re sorry about everything. Or just move away. You could get a fresh start, never see faces you don’t want to see, and never have to worry about the fact that you’re afraid to be without pain. You know which one lets you keep your sister.”
Five floors up, the new woman closes the folder and walks out on us.
I see myself taking the job, owning a home that people want to visit for garden parties. My ex shows up, sits on my lawn, crosses her legs, asks why the string quartet under the pavilion sounds so off.
At the wedding dinner, our cousin makes some seriously weepy talk about childhood games I don’t remember, how my sister is an inspiration that I have never seen her be, how she’s worked for things I have never seen her work for, how she bravely recovered from that broken rack of ribs I personally nursed her through.
On the pier, a hundred miles from home, my sister listens to the ocean collide with the shore, spitting out hermit crabs and unfortunate jellyfish and fistfuls of seagrass. Married now, she inches toward the very edge of the pier and slips her toes over the lip.
She asks if I got the job. I say I did. She turns around and tells me she wishes I’d take off those shoes. It’s been two weeks since the interview.
“I went back for that deer,” I say. “I boiled her hide into glue. I hacked her up and bent her bones into a fiddle. That was going to be your wedding gift, but you don’t play, so I have nothing to give you. And I’m not sorry for any of it.”
I realize now, since she’s at the edge of the pier and I’m behind her, that I could push her in. She’d get tangled in her wedding dress, never come up, become a siren that appears only to tourists and newlyweds. I move alongside her, and the spike of one heel makes a little notch in the wood.
“Push me in,” I say. “This is my gift to you, Chief.”
But she tells me she wants the fiddle.
*
Once the deer dies, all I can think about is what my new coworkers will think of my dirt-loaded shoes. I finish sucking down the cigarette, release a pillar of smoke from my nose, and drop the butt beside the deer’s inoperative head. I don’t mean it to be badass or anything. I maybe want my DNA here, in case someone tries to sniff out the killer later – I figure the deer deserves at least a chance at justice.
The following afternoon, when I step out of the shower, my newly married sister is in the kitchen, helping herself to peanut-free trail mix. She tells me hello, and asks if I really showered in these high heels. I wonder what she’s here to accuse me of – making a spectacle with my drunken two-step at the reception, killing the deer, leaving burning litter in the woods – and which she thinks is the most vile transgression.
“It’s just trail mix,” she says. “I’ll buy you more if you want.” I realize my mouth is hanging and my eyebrows are squeezed together. I tell her don’t worry about it, and she asks me about the shoes again.
“They were dirty.”
“And now they’re wet. Your feet are going to look like bald tires.”
I cross in front of her, take a teabag from the cupboard, and drop it in a mug with orange leaves on it. “I killed a deer last night,” I say. “I didn’t mean to, but it was my fault. I wasn’t paying attention.”
Her chewing becomes more emphatic, and she dumps the next handful of mix back into the bag. “That’s you. If you’d just listen to me sometimes – you know?”
I pour the water with my back to her.
“Did you at least pull the body off the road?” I make a second cup in silence, save for the hum of the burner, and place it on the table in front of her. “I’m surprised you even told me.”
She would’ve seen my car in the driveway and asked about the damage anyway. I finally sit at the table in my towel and heels, take a hot swig of tea, and ask why she came over in the first place. She says she needs a fiddle. Not for herself: the co-organizer of her litter-collecting collective is learning to play. And then there’s her spouse, who hoards old instruments and wants a piece of my work. So two fiddles.
“I don’t have time.” I am supposed to be flattered, supposed to throw myself at her feet in blubbering gratitude for valuing my passions, but I think of my sister’s climbing accident, the X-ray of her ribcage with a crack like a perfect ravine down the left ladder, the food recipes I invented to hotwire her morale when she was laid up, how I cut my work hours to heal her, and how right now, just like then, there’s that suffocating feeling that I’m supposed to do something for her.
She asks why not, even though she knows I’ll be accepting a new job today.
I can’t think of another way to tell her no, so I leave the kitchen and dive into a black dress that I’ve ironed three times in the past fifteen hours, hoping she might give up and slip out the front door while I’m gone. But she’s still there when I emerge, screwing her face into a sourpuss every time my heels hammer the linoleum.
I tell her to wash the mug before she leaves.
The woman on the elevator asks me which floor. She’s wearing a tanktop under an open sea-green hoodie, and when she reaches to tap the button with the mountaintop emblem beside it, I can see about a half-inch of tawny armpit hair.
“It takes fifteen minutes to reach the top floor,” she says. “You’d think they’d have a chair in here.”
I almost ask if today is her first day, but I don’t think she works here. So we start talking about chairs, which leads to lounging on the beach, which leads to driving to the beach, which leads to car seats, which leads to the deer, which leads back to chairs. I tell her that the largest ladder-back chair in the world sits in the median at some intersection in Vermont, and barely a half-hour from there, in upstate New York, an Adirondack chair just as big, but not the world’s largest, sits in front of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant across the street from a hardware store.
She makes sure that once I start this job, I know never to mention that I’ve been to small towns in Vermont and upstate New York. And then she says, “Poor doe,” and I realize that this is all I’ve ever wanted anyone to say about it, even though I wasn’t thinking that while I inhaled the cigarette. Poor doe feels like some sort of revelation. Yes, the poor girl was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So was the doe.
This somehow leads to sisters. I tell her what happened this morning, then what happened before this morning, about our dead parents and my eulogy and my wall of unfinished fiddles. She asks, as I knew she would, why I say sister as if my very soul is fueled by her approval. I tell her, like she knows I will, that I have no idea.
“You have to make a choice first,” she tells me. “Get off on your floor, start your new life. Introduce yourself to the Chief, be adored, get promoted, swallow the strongest shots at the holiday party. Or give it all up and follow the road back home. Your sister is still there. You could keep her.”
When we reach the summit, there’s no ding. No one is there to meet us. In the room beyond, diners surround white tables, looking like they’re dressed for weddings and funerals. Dresses are airtight; top buttons are buttoned. The servers mill in and out of the kitchen like a hive mind, the entire scene like a tableau of itself. I swear one of the servers is my ex, but I know it can’t be. At a table near the most distant window, one diner snaps a red king crab leg in two.
My woman nods her ragged shrub of hair towards a vacant table in the corner. In the ceiling, seagrasses scale the walls of a glass aquarium. Jellyfish pop in the blue spaces between.
We immerse ourselves in our Parmesan-loaded salads, scrape butter over garlic bread, catch bruschetta crumbs in warm cloth napkins, and loudly slurp the oysters when they come out. While we wait for dessert, she cranes her milky arms into a stretch, and there’s the armpit hair again. At the table behind her, a woman with a necklace that looks like it’s made of Spanish doubloons checks us out, then goes back to her lobster.
Our waitress slides white plates of wafer, cream, and beet puree onto our table, and my woman asks me what I wanted to tell her as she swipes a dollop of whipped sugar from one of the little puffy hills with her finger.
I tell her that after I left home this morning, I recovered the deer’s body, hewed her to pieces, boiled her hide into glue, and twisted her breastbone into a fiddle. Three strands of my hair became the strings.
She asks what I’m going to do with it.
“I’m keeping the fiddle,” I say. “I cannot think of one thing to apologize for.” But I picture my sister running hot tap over tea-stained mugs, and I think, if I could run, I would run back to her.
My woman’s hair falls over her forehead, and she wipes it away, smearing some cream into a cluster of curly threads. I touch the tips of my fingers to my tongue, then I lean over and unglue the fibers of her hair from themselves. She’s looking at my eyes the entire time.
When the waitress brings the check on a little plastic tray, I can tell by the way my woman rolls her teeth over her lip that she has never planned on paying. Once the entire staff has scuttled off, or are counting tips, or are too focused on balancing great ovoid platters on their palms, and the diners seem married to their filets, she stands and gives me an on your mark look. But there’s the matter of the shoes.
She lowers herself to one knee, tries to puzzle out why I’ve incarcerated myself this way. Then she gently undoes every strap, lifts my feet away from the shoes as though delivering me into the world, which she is, and says, “This is for you, Chief. You’ve probably forgotten what the ground feels like.”
She stands again and puts her hand out for me. I set each foot on the floor. One. Two.
Okay.
Richard Hartshorn lives on the Rensselaer Plateau. He was recipient of the 2011 Richard Bausch Short Story Prize, and his work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Atlas and Alice, The Writing Disorder, and other publications. Richard received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.