Our Whole History

On the night I learned the way of things the sky was moonless and intense, and my breath stank, and my son sat beside me in the car, and outside it was winter, the windows rolled up tight, and inside the heat was on, baking my bad breath along with the tension from an argument we’d abandoned an hour earlier, and I did not see the lesson coming. The road was narrow and left little room for error. Its edges were crumbling, and a steep ravine lay beyond on either side. I was speeding.

He saw it first. “Watch out!” he cried, and braced his arm against the door.

Then I saw it, too—a deer, a small one—and in the moment I could have swerved to spare it, I didn’t. Instead, I hunkered down like a race car driver, gripping the wheel and tightening my elbows, and I pressed hard on the gas pedal, thinking that I would shorten the animal’s misery, that I would do the most humane thing, the quickest and the sanest thing, thinking of my own mother directing me to do what is necessary no matter the cost when it comes to the road, to survival, that no animal’s life is worth a human life, that no other life is worth your own—

—and a thump happened and a groan, and my son gasped in horror, and all of it happened faster than it takes to tell it.

He would not look at me. The silence afterward was like a decade, a hole things fall into.

I said into it, “But we’re alive, aren’t we?”

He never answered. We kept going for some more years until one evening I looked over and saw he was no longer my passenger. His seat was empty save for the small, mangled corpse of a fawn.

I wept. I tried explaining myself. I had not meant to do harm, just the opposite. I swore I would do it over differently if I could.

The corpse listened, then sat up suddenly. It spoke in my son’s voice. It was my son.

“Watch out!” he warned.

And immediately I looked to the road ahead, my foot seeking the accelerator, never the brake, ready to repeat myself, my whole history.

That’s when I understood what I was and what he was, and the meaning of it—of this long night we share together.