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2023 Paul R. Voertman Prize

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Animal Story

by Dan DeVaughn

 

In the half of the world where May is spring, a wife and her husband drove outside the town to the natural zone, the one the councilmen voted better to protect—prairie wind-swept, bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, the arcing crickets that ticked through air lifting passenger jet-planes as they flew to the sprawling city to the south, a hoarse roar following after like a wake in the sky's down. The dog was with them too, the man and the woman, was hungry and so would lunge for the leaping, many-legged creatures but not get to them, ringing in her chains and fur. They were bound to one another, the three having come far in pain and fact, and enjoyed the animal calm of after. But now they were leaving the dry plain and entering woods. The woman was ruby suddenly, was quiet, and sobbed. Words failed. His hands became a sash about her waist, and she broke it. They eyed one another and waited for whatever was to come next. It was the dog pissing in the dust, an armadillo scuttling into its margin of green and out of history. She marveled in herself at their differing silences, oh we are this kind of creature, and he comforted himself in remembering quiet, yes, but how the ways to fill it are innumerable. They spread out, then, like two landscapes, and in each a dark dog whined to go on, in each a woman's body, and a man's. They remembered in the dimness of their body's privacies the long day, then the night, at the hospital in the city, and after, the moon full as a belly in a starless sky. At home, they stripped then made the bed for themselves, the new sheets filling, suspended for a moment, then falling to flatten on the mattress. They slept a human sleep. Now, through the overstory shadows and the light that pooled in the foot-path, a stranger was nearing. It was a man—from the town? they didn't know. He wore a vest with bulging pockets, a cap pulled low, nearly over his brow, even in shade. He wore a holster on his hip, but had no gun. His eyes were an animal's. He asked the w

 



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