Page 2 of What Rough Beast

“For the seizures to start, for him to start walking in circles and never stop, for him to choke to death on his own snot.”

Apparently, the raccoon is a him.

That makes it easier for me to pull the trigger.

It’s a simple movement. My finger curls, and the raccoon flies backward, head transforming from something solid into a mist of blood and bone. Some of it lands on the tips of my shoes—brand-new, steel-toed, the soft, buttery light leather now decorated with ruby splatters. The body rolls and kicks. I take an instinctive step forward, but Widow stops me with her words.

“It’s gone,” she says. “That’s just muscles moving.”

Kind of like how I am now.

Widow comes to my side and takes the shotgun, breaks the barrel, and checks the chamber. It rests in the crook of her elbow as she bends down for the spent shell casing, knees creaking.

“You only gave me one shot?” I ask.

“It only holds one shot,” she clarifies as she straightens up. “And if you need more than that to shoot a raccoon six inches away, you’ve got no business handling a gun.”

I definitely qualify as a person who has no business handling a gun. I also have no experience with body disposal, mange, or feral animals—all qualities that would come in useful for an employee of Restoration Acres. When Widow called to tell me I got the job, I almost asked, Why? Then I realized that she probably knew, had probably heard about what happened to Ava Germaine, more commonly referred to as “the new girl” even though we moved to Bethington six months ago. That was enough time for me to make one friend, a lot of enemies, and to earn the pity of the only other social outcast—Widow Zedeker.

The raccoon has stopped kicking, a pool of blood starting to spread underneath it. Widow picks it up by the tail. It dangles from one hand, the shotgun still resting in her other arm.

“C’mon,” Widow says. “I’ll show you where the pit is. Get the lye.” She jerks her head toward where she’d been sitting, and a smaller bucket that had been at her feet.

I grab it and hurry to catch up to her, rushing past the pen where Tripod—the resident three-legged fox—is peeking out from around his shelter. Earlier this morning he’d been running around his enclosure, a squeaky toy held high in his jaws, and when Widow scratched him under the jaw he’d actually laughed. I’d almost turned around and gone home right then, not because it was creepy as shit, but because a fox with three legs who will die in captivity has a reason to be happy, and I don’t. Now, his nostrils flare, detecting the gunpowder that still hangs in the air, the metallic scent of blood, and whatever I must smell like to him. Social ostracization and organic deodorant, maybe.

I follow Widow along a path toward the woods, leaving the collection of outbuildings that comprise Restoration Acres behind us. The grass on either side brushes against my jeans, and a light mist leaves my clothes sticking to me. It’s barely noon on a chilly, wet fall day, and I’ve killed something for the first time in my life.

“Check for ticks when we get back,” Widow says over her shoulder. “Lyme disease is a bitch.”

I open my mouth to answer, but no words come out, a situation I’ve found myself in often since about a month ago. I don’t have anything to say about the character traits of Lyme disease, but that’s not what keeps me silent. No one would listen to the last important thing I said, even though I screamed it. Sometimes I think I can feel the furrow it gouged in my throat, one that’s still healing, even though I speak less now.

Much less.

“Poison ivy,” Widow says, using the body of the raccoon to indicate the three-leaved plants growing on both sides of the footpath. I nod, even though she can’t see me, and do the same when she pauses moments later, this time using the shotgun to nudge a white-capped mushroom.

“Destroying angel,” she says. “Poisonous.”

I’m starting to wonder if we’re just going to walk through the woods while Widow identifies things that can harm or kill me when she comes to a sudden halt. I’m still looking at the mushroom, so I almost walk into her shoulder blades. It’s a good thing I don’t, because if I had, I would’ve knocked her into a pit full of dead animals.

“Oh,” I say. And this time it’s not because I am holding anything back; I actually have no words when faced with a pile of dead things in various stages of decay. Widow unceremoniously tosses the raccoon in, where it lands on top of what I think used to be a possum. A bird’s wing juts out between the rib cage of something else, the last few clinging feathers shifting in the breeze. What’s left of the raccoon’s jaw comes to rest against the spinal column of a deer.

“This is illegal,” Widow says, her tone indicating that she doesn’t feel any particular way about that. She goes quiet, but I can feel her eyes studying me as my own wander around the pit, following the whitewashed curves of broken spines, the jagged edges of a thousand exposed teeth. Before, I might have said something about how no one is above the law, and we can’t pick and choose which rules we follow. Now, I know better.

“I’ll take doing illegal things over having them done to me,” I finally say, turning to her.

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Widow says. “Dump the lye on him. It’ll speed up the decomposition. I’m supposed to bury or burn them, but I don’t have that much time and can’t afford an incinerator.”

I step forward and toss the lye just as a breeze kicks up, blowing some back toward us. Widow grabs my arm and pulls me out of the way. I jerk out of her grip, a low growl traveling the furrow in my throat, my hand going to the place where she touched me. The soft spot inside my elbow, where the bruises had been. Her gaze trails over me, and I see something in her eyes I don’t like. It might be pity, it might be compassion, but either way, it sparks a fire in my belly, a flicker of the fury I used to feel.

“Did you give me this job because you feel sorry for me?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. “I gave you this job because I figured you needed to kill something.”

Tonight, my parents will ask me how my first day of work was. I can tell them that at Restoration Acres, poison grows in the shade and bones bleach in the sun. I can tell them that twenty dollars is what it costs to assuage a conscience and that Lyme disease is a bitch. Or I can tell them that I shredded lettuce for a bunny recovering from a broken leg and released a red-tailed hawk whose wing had mended. All of these things are true, but I’ve learned that people only want to hear about the good things.

Even when you’re screaming.

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