Dagger was starting to slip between the cracks. Like Jarrod before, who started tearing his eyes out last spring. His mind got so wide he became sluggish and dangerous like a papa bear in spring. Someone you had to watch out of the corner of your eye while they chopped vegetables.
“Hey, Bertha. Did you know moose come down into town sometimes?” asks Dagger. She’s reading from a guidebook about Northern Idaho she stole from the Boise public library. We wasted an entire afternoon at the bus station there, being whipped by the wind and sidelong glances as Dagger tried selling it to people arriving from out of state.
“What’s this town called?” she says.
“Don’t ask stupid questions.”
She keeps getting bogged down between things. Asking avoidable questions. Focusing on escapable facts. Last night she asked me where I came from.
The snow is halfway up our boots. Dagger keeps blowing on her hands and turning the waxy pages of the book with her yellow fingernails.
“We’re not gonna be able to get shit for that if you scuff it up.”
She turns a page with a farmer’s table manners. “The Nez Pierce tribe had these lands stolen from them in the Treaty of 1863. They call it the Thief Treaty.”
I ignore her, but she continues to assault reality. Bringing in permanence.
“There’s a Redwood tree in the arboretum on campus.”
“Come on.” I start walking, stubbornly not looking back to see if she’s following. I don’t plan where I’m going, trusting something will happen. Shop windows are framed with twinkling lights, reminding me of time. Three men in orange vests hang garland from the streetlights. One dangles from the electric lift while the others yell conflicting instructions from the ground. I want somewhere to rest. Away from all the cliches this small town is turning into.
Muffled footfalls pound up behind me. “Maybe we should check out this lake north of here. National Geographic called it the most beautiful lake in North America.”
“That book’s 30 years old. I’m sure they’ve found a better one.”
An old man gets out of his truck and glares at me. He’s missing an arm and fumbles with the trunk’s latch. Then he has both arms but is missing a leg. It’s shadowy. Possibly wooden. Maybe steel. Good quality. Then an ear disappears as the leg reappears. I start checking my appendages, anything that seems detachable. Something seems missing, stuck in a different dimension, so I recount. Each time I get a different number.
“There’s a mountain outside town which is an enjoyable daytrip for hikers of all fitness levels.”
I stomp to a stop and Dagger runs into my back.
“You don’t have a fitness level.”
“I got away from that Doberman pretty well last week.”
“That was last summer. We were in the desert.”
“That’s impossible. I slept in a cornfield that night.”
Dagger scoops up a handful of snow and eats it like cotton candy. This is an act of defiance. A rebellion against our reality. It’s something we don’t do, meaning she is sending new, unchecked ripples out into existence. She wears a huge smile, really enjoying it. We stare deep into each other’s faces. Neither flinch. The air cracks between us. She keeps chewing like a cow grinding its cud.
“Stop loving this.”
She giggles like a kid who just stole your bike. I get scared. We’re nowhere. Between drinks and bodies and highs and highways and fucks and towns and mountains and loves. You don’t need anything when you are nowhere. Dagger seems to have forgotten this.
“If we stay here long enough, we’ll have a seaside view when the west coast falls into the ocean.”
I want to rub her smile in a pile of dog shit. Even unreasonable futures are upsetting.
“Remember that bar in Florida where you could feed the gators?” I ask.
Her smile flattens slightly before reforming, revealing a charred castle of teeth. “No.”
“We fed them marshmallows. You said you could have done it forever. Never seen you happier.”
“You’re a liar.”
These details upset her. A past beyond memory. Where all her desires were already satiated. She searches her book for facts, solid immovable pillars to strap herself against. I don’t remember the last time we were this close to being real. Fully manifested in a physical place. Sober to reality. Heavy with all of a place’s violent history and beauty and possibility and disappointment. I might have to kill her.
She sits hard against an alley dumpster which flexes and thunders. Acidic tzatziki from a nearby Greek restaurant dances with diesel fumes in my nostrils. A grease dumpster sparkles sickly. Broken glass glitters around a blue plastic recycling bin. I’m not sure how the small boulder arrives in my hand. It grates against the pads of my fingers like a cat’s tongue. The snow crunches as I tiptoe closer. The rock seems bigger raised above my head. It floats there like an extra moon, trying to drift into our world’s orbit, as if I cast it into the heavens to rearrange all our cosmic meaning.
“What the,....” says Dagger, pointing down the alley.
The rock plummets from the sky, crashing to earth like a meteoroid. It thuds against my foot.
The enormity is unimaginable. It shakes body parts I have no names for.
“It’s a moose,” whispers Dagger.
The word has no meaning, failing completely in the face of so much real. I can’t hold all of it in my head at once. I shake my skull, shuffling and reshuffling the realities I can handle, like they’re channels I can simply change.
“Is this happening?” asks Dagger. She’s shaking. The moose faces us with its fully unfurled self. It looks gargantuan. Bigger than life. And pissed.
I step forward.
“No,” whispers Dagger. She wants to run. Escape this reality for another. Go backwards. But it’s too late. “I love you.” The words are too soft. The wind catches them and throws them back down her throat.
I extend my hand, pace steadily toward the beast. Its nostrils flare warningly, pluming out a fog of hot life. Its corn stalk legs extend impossibly from the snow. Its brown fur glows against the white backdrop.
A moment passes when everything could happen. The world turns and looks down on us. We become the center of everything, refocusing gravity, sucking all matter to our meeting point. A black hole forms in the moment between human and moose. For an instant, arm extended, reaching into nothing, I disappear. Is this love?
Suddenly, the fur tickles the tips of my fingers. Its coarse and matted into hard whirlpooling knots of earthy grim. The moose exhales in a low moan and bows its head. Dagger tries to move but can’t. Her ass frozen solid to the asphalt.
I spring onto the moose’s waiting back. It raises itself to its full height and suddenly I can see. From this height I see the whole town. Whole state. Whole country. Take it all in, in one big gulp. See the pieces fitting together. Realize none of it matters.
I bury my face deep into the moose’s neck. Nuzzling deep into the acrid scent. Smelling the clean nothingness of melting snow, mixing with the heavy layer of musky animal, creating something unnamable. Beyond language. Outside the commerce of scents. A smell without a leaden past. Something completely alive. Existing only in this place. In this moment.
The moose rears back, not abruptly but as if hovering. Its full length stretches toward the clouds. Dagger runs, testing her fitness. Flinging herself out onto Main St and scattering herself across the gutter. Ready to commit her new set of facts to memory and sell her book for a dry hole.
The moose returns to earth gracefully and then turns north. I cling gently to it as we pad softly out of town and into a new spring.
Michael Harper is a MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. Previously he taught kindergarten in Vienna. His most recent work has appeared in The Manzano Mountain Review, Litro Magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, and Decomp Journal.
