Josie Braaten
The stars are sharp in their velvet sky. It’s December. The passenger window has long since frosted silver up to my nose. I want to lower it and let in eye-watering night. I want my lashes to freeze heavy with their own seed pearls. I want to unbuckle and, twisting sideways through the square, stretch until my fingers find the stars’ sparkled edges.
One by one, I want to unscrew them.
I don’t want to ruin what I can’t see through the windshield. Hairline cracks from highway rocks trace imitation comets across the glass. I don’t want to disappear the dippers, Orion, or square-muzzled Sirius. I don’t want to leave the crescent moon alone in its own light, but I need to feel the press of rock light against my palms.
They might burn cold.
You know what the real miracle is?
My dad has one hand on the steering wheel. We’re ninety something miles from home and at least forty from pavement.
What?
That more people didn’t lose it out here.
It was just before sunset that my brother called my dad. His call came by the grace of a single bar on the closest, high-enough ridge. He’d finally shot his shoulder season elk. By the time my dad called me, The Dog and I were all curled up for our afternoon nap.
We could use your help.
He was lying.
I’m a shivering, thin-wristed, provisionally diagnosed epileptic. My diagnosis is two months old. A small carousel of doctors has called it enough. They feel encouraged that I have a label.
I’m being treated.
This morning, I had turned off my alarm in the pre-dawn dark. I texted my brother that I’d changed my mind. No. I wouldn’t be going with. I’m sorry. His bubbles appeared in grays that turned into white and back again. I didn’t wait. I rolled back into the pocket of duvet that still smells more like closet than me and told myself that I was asleep until I was.
I woke around noon—still in my own pocket. I was thirsty but not really.
Okay.
Reality is the two front seats and our funnel of headlights. Ice blackened ruts in the gravel disappear under the truck’s silver hood. Turn by elbow turn, we’re closing in on the pin drop of my brother and his elk.
What signs I see, or tell myself I see, are back bent by near constant prairie wind—invisible until a second pass. I’m the navigator, checking off our roads with a dying ballpoint pen. Their names slant down the stray napkin in my dad’s biologist cursive: Content, Regina, Fourchette Bay Creek, and last, the string of numbers that doesn’t matter because now, we can see my brother.
Or not, him. He’s the yellow circle of his headlamp—edges rounded by the rest of the night.
***
He leads us, single file, to his elk.
When I try to fall in behind them, my dad takes my elbow. He pulls me up between them. Weakest in the middle. Behind me now, he laughs.
He’s right. I laugh too but too late.
Snow flattened fields slope away under my borrowed hunting boots. For weeks, I’ve been tracing the same trails between my childhood bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and backyard gate. The Dog barks when she gets bored with being cold. Going out means the grocery store.
I’m breaking a rule.
We cut sideways down valley slopes and angle, across the grain, up the opposite. I follow the cone of my brother’s headlight and try to convince myself that I can feel the heat of my dad’s on my heels. None of us had thought to bring an extra headlamp.
My breaths are all edges—teeth out, elbows bared—in the back of my throat. I walk through my own exhales. Each is soft white. A scrap ghost. There until it isn’t.
On the down steps, I look up.
The sky stretches above us in cold, gleaming silence. My shell of steel and glass is gone—more than a mile behind me. The smallest stars gild the constellations who, suspended in their winter jewels, trail silver wakes.
They’re a court portrait in metallics.
I don’t know if it’s true or not—that this is my first time seeing the Milky Way. I tell myself that it has to be. I refuse to be a person who would forget.
My dad’s knees bump the back of mine. Pretty neat, right?
***
We climb the spine of a low rise. The elk lays on her side under a stunted cottonwood. We approach from the front. Her insides spill in reds and browns across hoof and boot printed snow. I circle. From behind, she might just be bedded down. The last of her desirable meat is strung from the tree in game bags.
Coyotes scream close.
I step between the cow’s bent, slender legs. My dad’s and brother’s headlight beams arc over the blood spotted snow.
The crunch of my steps is more feeling than sound.
There’s a picture taken of the elk and me. I crouch behind her. I don’t know how it happens, but there’s blood on my mittens. My brother calls me to the tree. He ties a single fore-haunch to my backpack.
He takes four, my dad three, and now, the tree is empty.
***
We descend in single file. My dad follows close behind my brother. They build plans in single sentences. There’s still so much left to do to the meat.
I make my own switchbacks down the slope. They forget about me without forgetting.
I don’t look back at the elk.
She’s the perfect weight between my shoulder blades. If I fall, I won’t be able to get up on my own. I don’t know how long I’ll wait before calling for help. I watch the toes of my boots and don’t think about what I’m not seeing.
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Josie Braaten’s work has appeared in Allium, A Journal of Poetry and Prose. She holds an MFA from the University of South Carolina where she teaches.