Stag

by Karen Russell

Interestingly, I have no problem calling Fern “my ex.” Her absence does belong to me. I authored it, didn’t I? I destroyed us. I carry it with me, folded over a thousand times like origami. My ex-life. My abyss. It’s a tight squeeze, even for a big guy like myself.

Humans kicking the can down the road and changing nothing about the way we live. I could feel my blood stirring, a sound not unlike the roar of traffic.

did not share our species’ terrible compulsion to name and know and narrate. To mean something to one another.

wasn’t certain of anything in this lighting; although who knows what shape the dead might take if they return to visit Earth?

Now answer me truthfully: Is there a love alive that death cannot part? People talk about heaven as if it’s a sort of haunted mansion suspended in embalming fluid, but this is not the eternity I imagine. I want to believe in a heaven of red and living blood. A heaven where I will know my daughter.

There is a loneliness that cannot know itself, that needs us to walk alongside it.