Roadkill
by Payton McCarty-Simas
And I’m hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway.
—Genesis
Freddie and the truck’s tires screamed together as the animal hit the front bumper with a thick, heavy jolt in the dark. She hadn’t seen it coming, only felt its presence prickling her neck in the fraction of a second before impact like a ghost in a dimly lit hallway. She had been driving fast, thinking of frozen pizza and the DVD she was expecting from Netflix in the mail, the last one Sequoia had ordered before she split for good: The Creature from the Black Lagoon. This stretch of highway was narrow, the woods bloated with yesterday’s rain, breathing heavy against her foggy windows. Her back thudded on the cracked leather when she pulled up short, steering her way cautiously to the shoulder. The truck stopped with a crunch.
Clutching her sweater close, Freddie pulled a flashlight from the glove, unbuckled her seatbelt, and stepped cautiously from the cab, feeling her way blindly down the dripping metal. She switched on the light, a feeble gash conjuring the hem of her long skirt, her sturdy hiking boots. Are you okay? She called to the animal she hoped had already limped away, bleeding but intact. She walked around the truck, the beam of her light barely denting the soupy darkness of a Vermont night at the very end of winter.
This should have been Sequoia’s job. In their seven years together, it was Sequoia with her rough hands and dry humor who killed the spiders, caught the wasps under chipped teacups, untangled the windchimes from a brazen squirrel’s bristling tail one summer. Freddie had stood in the doorway, cautious, a butterfly net in one hand and a can of bear mace in the other, racking her brain for facts about rabies, infections, sepsis. When Sequoia finally lost patience, telling her her fears took up too much space in the rhythms of their shared life, Freddie had locked the bathroom door for an hour after a wolf spider found its way through the window screen and perched itself on her showerhead, fat and tan and grinning. Sequoia had taken her favorite things in four neatly packed boxes, her rifle slung on her shoulder, her hunting goggles hung around her neck, leaving the things she found unnecessary to Freddie, one loose end among many.
The animal made no sound as she probed the darkness with her outstretched arms, eyes scanning the glistening asphalt rapidly, jerkily, over and over. Are you there? she whispered. The silence felt like a reproach. She shuddered.
After a handful of agoraphobic minutes combing the edges of the trees, she reached the other side of the cab. Her light made the truck’s tires sparkle strangely. Slickly. She hissed with grim (un)surprise when she finally allowed her mind to honor the tarslick on her fender with its true name: blood. She followed its drunken slugstream right, towards the edge of the road. It petered out, became delicate pawprints, then faint smudges like a happy child’s fingers leave on a car window. Freddie traced them with her eyes. Slowly she edged her gaze over the form at their terminus, a soft mound, a drowsy tumble of limbs, a soft bottlebrush of striped tail, glowing in the light of her interruptive presence. A raccoon.
Freddie moaned in the dark, turning her whole body away from the sin she'd committed, wallowing in her solitude and the warmth of her machine. She took three seasick steps backward before she felt Sequoia’s reproach thrumming from inside her skull, pulsing in her gray matter. She felt the sudden squelch of a frog she’d once run over jitter up her arms and spine. It had popped like a cherry tomato between teeth. Her breath caught, went shallow as she turned back, willing her feet to undo their work. It was like pulling fresh stitches, but she knelt beside the creature’s deathslick and looked again, face to face this time.
Her paws were curled under her tiny chin in sweet, soporific supplication; her fur beneath was jeweled with rubies of heartblood from her newly seamed chest, a downy coat carelessly unzipped by an unseen hand. Freddie’s vision blurred, making her glimmering all-black animal eyes—blackberries, Freddie thought—blink. Animals are like us, Sequoia had once told her after returning from a deer hunt with a freshly killed doe whose children she hadn’t seen until it was too late, they need companionship, they make families. We just don’t like to think about it too much. Sequoia had grilled them venison steaks for most of their last summer together. The fawns had lived in Freddie’s dreams long after she had left her bed. Smoothly, Freddie shrouded the raccoon in the folds of her skirt, secreted her up inside, and returned to the warm cab.
At home, newly swaddled in plastic, Freddie slid her into the place where her frozen pizza had been waiting. She left her to sleep among drifts of ice crystals, kept company, Freddie hoped as she ate, by the muffled sounds of the television.
–––––
Everything in the basement was exactly as Sequoia had left it. Freddie wore a thick grey sweater and a pair of Sequoia’s dark jeans from the men’s department of Filene’s Basement to stave off the early morning chill. She selected her tools with the care of a seamstress: needle, thread, plaster, long dowels pulled from a high shelf, coils of copper wire the color of her ex-lover’s hair. She pictured Sequoia watching with approval. Her creature lay on her back during these preparations, ice crystals only just beginning to melt into her silky fur. Freddie half-sang delicate reassurances as she donned kitchen gloves and shampooed the redness from the fur of her chest, from the stripes of her tail. She hummed as she used an old towel to dry her paws one by one, cleansing around her kohl-rimmed eyes, along the stripe that bridged her nose, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration behind a surgical mask. That feels wonderful, she heard her creature sigh. Freddie pulled off her mask and smiled into her blackberry eyes.
Her skin prickled with anticipation when she traced a line down her creature’s stomach with the knife Sequoia always used, parting the fur to reveal the delicate pale skin underneath. She’d sculpted her creature into a plaster mold the morning before, shaping her curves in clay, getting to know her contours, her angles. Take your time, she’d said. I want you to make me beautiful. The cast, while still a blank, had come out lithe and sensuous, belly up, legs lazy, paws tucked coquettishly under her chin, asking to be admired. Now, freshly out of the freezer again, she needed to be undressed.
People sold Sequoia’s taxidermy in tourist shops for miles around, and she’d taught Freddie years ago. Freddie had never enjoyed it before, so focused on the death in front of her that she couldn’t see the resurrection to follow. But here, alone with a creature she’d taken in the dark, she felt warm and excited despite the fog her breath still made in the basement. Patience, she reminded herself. Patience, her creature purred.
She slid the tip of her knife into the slit her truck had already made, gentle and speculative. She twisted, making a hole big enough for the tips of her fingers. The latex of her gloves squeaked softly as she gently parted the skin, sliding her hand along the slick, firm muscles of her creature’s chest. She pulled her hand free, brought her knife back, and slowly pulled the slit wider, first up her creature’s neck to the point of her elfin chin. The thin, delicate membrane of her creature’s esophagus almost succumbed to the tip of her instrument, releasing a slight, almost surprised exhalation with the pressure. Careful, she whispered. Freddie felt herself shiver, breathing in the earthy smells of fresh death and lavender shampoo. She traced the path she’d made all the way down, only as deep as she was allowed, unzipping her legs, her arms, her tail; she revealed her creature from head to toe, a pink, oozing animal like any other. She thrust her hands inside and parted skin from muscle, reveling in how she melted under her fingers, first resistance, then loosening, then sudden openness, new spaces to explore.
After she’d felt every inch of her creature from the inside, panting with the exertion of disengaging reluctant skin from clinging muscle, lips from gums, round eyes from hard sockets, her own muscles aching deliciously from pushing her creature’s face and body into new, exciting shapes, she rested. She thought idly of the viscera under her nails, of rabies, infection, sepsis, and shrugged to Sequoia, whose shade watched her from the corner, arms folded, eyebrows raised. Speculative. The two never stopped having sex, even on that last day, their bodies always too eager for each other to let their disjuncture intervene. Freddie liked watching her work here in the basement, waiting for her to finish before taking her back upstairs, even when it frightened her. Sequoia had been sculpting a crow when Freddie had finally broken the camel’s back, asking where she’d found it. Is it clean? she’d worried. Nothing’s clean, Sequoia had mumbled, cracking a wing joint.
Finally, Freddie slipped her creature’s skin off in one smooth movement, inverting it to reveal the shock of pure freshness underneath. She collected her teeth with thin pliers, letting them fall into a waiting teacup at her elbow.
The next few days passed in a halting blur; waiting and touching, waiting and touching. She massaged salt into her creature’s delicate veil of skin, left it to dry. She separated bone from lungs from muscle from heart, cooked stew with her tangy meat, replaying the DVD which she now never planned to return on a loop. The drying process passed slowly. Salt, massage, salt, scrape, tanning oil, massage. She brushed and rebrushed her creature’s fur. In return, her creature whispered stories from the woods, conjuring images of wildflowers and carrion and that final rainy night. When her hide was finally supple, Freddie draped it gently over the new body she’d built, smoothing the wrinkles, making her tight and agile. She sewed her back together with elegant, nearly invisible loops. She gave her a new set of deep, black eyes and placed her glistening predator’s teeth back into her mouth, childhood in reverse.
I love you, her creature told her when Freddie finally laid her down on the wide, wooden front porch. She rolled off her stomach, stretched languidly, and loped into the dimness of evening without a second glance.
Payton McCarty-Simas is a writer and artist based in New York City who loves all things horror. Their essays and film criticism have been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Film Daze, and Horror Studies among others, and their short films and screenwriting have appeared in a number of festivals including Horror Unleashed and Oregon Screams. Payton is the author of two nonfiction books, One Step Short of Crazy: National Treasure and the Landscape of American Conspiracy Culture and That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film. They live with their partner and their cat, Shirley Jackson.