Goodnight Moon (July 20, 2009. Issue 7.)

Every time we drove at night she would reach over and caress my titanium leg.

“Slow down, Moon,” she would say. Our dog Thor, a Great Dane, always blocked the rearview mirror, looking back at me with eyes of shame that said, ‘Let me out, please. I’ll live on squirrel and small children.’

We were driving back from the cemetery after fucking on top of her father’s grave. She was talking about forgiveness, and it wasn’t a second or two after she reached over to touch my leg that I came around a switchback curve and saw the elk bound up from a wretched blackness snaked out in the road ahead.

The slide brought the impact on her side, my eyes locked on the elk as it held ground and lowered its antlers to take on my Audi. The scream of the brakes blended with a small whine from Kami as I tried to steer away from road. The force of Thor catapulting against the back of my seat slammed my head into the steering wheel air bag. She had begun to pray as I was showered with the passenger side window glass and hot spray of her blood.

I came to with Thor licking my face clean, the Sinatra CD skipping over and over “…the summer wind…the summer wind…” She was impaled on an antler that was no longer attached to the elk.

Stumbling out of the car with Thor, my head pulsating in syncopated dizziness as I looked up to the sky, I counted stars, blood from a wound seeping into my eyes. A meteor blazed past Orion’s belt as I looked over, half blind, and saw Thor on the passenger side of the car, his mouth gnawing on the end of the antler stuck in Kami’s neck.

“Go pee,” I told him. “It’s a long walk home.”