In “Familiar Stretch,” Carla Jean Mayer renders a rustbelt world of competition and contradiction, where desperation and aimlessness coexist with prosperity and tradition. The promise of suburbia has undone the values it was meant to uphold and ceded to a stern reality of shopping malls and highways. To maneuver this perilous landscape, where roadkill takes many forms, our unnamed protagonist seeks out its interstices, the middle spaces in her physical environment and between the categories that structure her world.—The Editors and the Fiction Staff
Familiar Stretch
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear: A headless deer walked across the road. It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t a spirit, it walked across the road in no hurry.
About ghosts: A whole family in Wisconsin went up in flames when a taillight fell off a truck, bounced, and punctured their gas tank. The truck driver had purchased a commercial driver’s license from the State of Illinois. That is to say, he paid somebody off instead of passing a test that would demonstrate he knew how to drive and maintain a truck. He chose not to stop to fix the taillight, even when other drivers told him to take care of it.
Who move unforeseen obstacles: Trapped against the concrete median. Lower head, raise shoulders, clench thighs, sway a half step back to leap, car hits back half, swerves right, keeps moving, head hits asphalt, eighteen-wheelers careen, can’t lift up, can’t move away, can’t get out of here, can’t wonder, can’t want, can’t leave, can’t explain, can’t imagine, can’t wish, can’t suppose, can’t forget, can’t. Was almost free. To be hit again.
At the mall, children are acting up: Flushed and circling the frozen lemonade kiosk, smelling like grass and gasoline, yelling for more stuff. A medium-sized child finds a quarter and pretends to throw it over the railing. When she calls, We’re leaving, they quiet down and follow her out.
Dead grass, color of: Smallish though antlered. Relaxed, soft, collapsed. Today’s fire warning rating is orange. Trucks never stop coming. Flicked from the window, cigarette butts flare, embers sucked into turbulence behind. Trucks never stop coming.
Soft and relaxed: She drives by a dark mass on the side of the highway up ahead.
Her accountant: At the county fair, her brown children count the other brown people who number fewer than ten, three of them serving up callaloo. The evangelical college nearby sends missionaries around the world, attracts global students, which means this particular corner of the upper Midwest, unlike so many others, offers unexpectedly delicious food.
Cut and paste: Necks with heads still attached crane backwards. Drive home, drop the kids, get the chain saw, circle back, beat other gleaners. Flat circle, clean cut, no antlers, no head. Head with antlers bagged. Gleaned. Trophied.
With limited access: The nation’s first urban depressed freeway was in Highland Park, a garden city territorially surrounded by Detroit. Highland Park was the home of Henry Ford’s first assembly-line automobile factory and later Chrysler Corporation’s world headquarters. Today, it has a tight community of loyal, largely African American homeowners and a barely functioning municipal government. The original chainsaw was invented fifty-five years before the automobile by a German orthopedist to cut through bone, making amputations more precise with reduced risk of infection. Earlier still, some Scottish doctors created a similar tool to cut through the cartilage of a pregnant woman’s pubic bone in order to flex and open the pelvis, to assist with delivery.
Careful: She parked her car on the off-ramp and walked back toward the headlights.
Fight or flight: Making quick work as nighttime drivers near. It’s so loud out here. He’ll be so happy to come home and find it in the garage resting nose up. A head on the wall at home. Ignoring children acting up. Black-tipped nose up.
Somebody should call the troopers: Bloated, round, stiff. Deer or blown tire. Next state of decay to do with torn flesh. Who would do such a thing?
Merging traffic: She walked up to the headless deer, bent down and stroked its haunch, then laid down alongside it, hugging around its middle. She lay there until midnight, maybe longer. Then climbed inside its fur and stood up.
You get what you can: So what if it’s not an honest shooting. Scurry to save what’s worth saving. What’s fair anyway? Can’t waste her. If I’d had more help, I’d’ve got the whole thing. Cut her up. The family could use the lean protein.
Taking hold: Still-clotting blood tugs hardening skin like a pull string closing a plastic bag. She kneels and plunges her hand deep into the opening, wiggling her fingers, reaching for the bottom. Stays there up to her armpit until she can’t feel her feet. Then stands holding the heart by her side.
With few exceptions, she doesn’t talk to her neighbors: I can’t understand the meaning of what I’ve seen.
Awakening, raging, kicking tractors, stomping garages with Chryslers inside: In search of what’s missing.
One commonplace occurrence: A little girl wearing a red hoodie and high-top sneakers and the head of a deer where her own head should be tricycles past.
Safety net meets skill set: The weight of the tray of venison causes her to stumble. He offers a hand and in the same movement hoists her over his head.
Missing trophies: With her heart in her hands, shaken and angry, surveying her property, wondering where she finds herself. Why did I think this was going to be any different?
Leave your plates on the table: Stalking alone with uncertain strength. Peeking in windows for spirits, teeth and skins, shower curtains to roll up the bodies, foundlings.
Tracking a still object from a moving vehicle: Sitting right here next to me, she sees a distance I can’t conjure.
Flex and open: Though rare, female deer with high levels of testosterone can grow antlers. Occurrences are generalized as one doe in ten thousand. It is hard to confirm whether this is a ratio based on data or if it’s used simply to show how unusual it is.
Good morning: Pausing in the doorway, drinking her coffee, watching her twelve-year-old get the little one ready for school. Maybe they’ll be on time today.
Mumble: Please don’t have a Confederate flag please don’t have a Confederate flag please don’t have a Confederate flag. If she has to turn him away, who will cut the grass?
Rehabilitation: The headless deer smiles at the family who stares as she makes her way up the embankment.