Stag

by Karen Russell

Burning through money—what more annihilating pastime is there? Gambling can feel like burning yourself in effigy, a penance for having money to lose.

Whenever my thoughts slip across the median into self-pity, or frothing grandiosity, or the darker fantasylands of skipping out on life a little early, Fern’s the bitter echo that returns me to myself. And like an echo, she is everywhere and gone.

There is a loneliness that cannot know itself, that needs us to walk alongside it. I should tell my hosts that I was wrong: it’s not only the laugh track we humans supply to the desert. The God I still pray to is something like this: a night that wants us to inhabit it.