As I tell it now, the fawn lives. Her eyes yellow and gleaming, she rises from the asphalt and turns her slender neck toward us, the guilty innocent. As she scampers back into the woods, we both release our held breath to hover above us in the cold – perfect, empty captions – and then get back into the truck with the one good headlight and drive. We turn up the radio and listen to the blues station coming in from over in Tennessee, our fingers touching in the middle of the seat, our very own electricity there at the ready, a danger. We are young and in love and full of the night’s gifts – later, we dream, collectively, of the fawn tucked under her mother’s chin, their bodies once again joined, the trees circled around them. We wake in the dark and make a new life, this time an accident so happy that it does not even seem of our doing – instead, some greater plan we could not understand. As I tell it now, all this is true because it must be.

And yet, it isn’t. Before the fawn’s blood dotted the winding, narrow road, there was a thump, the slight, impermanent weight of her against the bumper, as she was tossed into the air, flashing across the windshield, like the stubborn memory of her now sometimes behind my eyes clenched shut. The truck stopped, his hand reached across me to rustle through the glovebox, and the driver door opened, the thin moonlight casting my reflection on the window. The bruise, this time, around my right eye is lopsided, the shame, as usual, pulling my lips silent and taut. The shot echoed, trapped within the ring of mountains. Then he slid back on the seat beside me, the weapon between us, and steered the truck around the small heap on the side of the road, shaking his head at the inconvenience of his own power. “I bet her Mama comes looking for her,” was the only thing he said. Later, the sex was quick and rough, though, like always, I wanted it, each time a chance to unlearn or relearn love, to understand its patterns – and that night it finally earned me a lesson, though it was nine months slow to arrive.

When my daughter – born with eyes wide and bright and full of searching, eyes that now have already learned to look away – solemnly asks me if she’ll marry a man like Daddy, I return to that night. As I tell it now, the fawn lives, and her mother eventually sends her off on her own – a delicate, earnest creature that will learn the truth of the woods. As I tell it now, the gun never enters the story, though it is always, perpetually, waiting.