I Ascend by Eric Daniel Metzgar

 

The sun woke me up, but Deer never woke up. I knew not to prod her. She just wasn’t alive anymore and I knew it before I even lifted my head from her brown fur. She was cold and wasn’t rising with breath. I put my face into her dirty hair and cried bending moans until I got stiff with anger. I cursed at God for hours straight and lost my voice in the course. With nothing left to shout, I covered Deer with snow and leaves, then uncovered her, reburied her in only leaves, and then burned her away in a big fire that took two hours to fully flame. The smoke ran off the mountain and out over the town. I’ll bet my wife smelled it all the way in back in her kitchen.

 

That night, still in the same spot, I called out to God in a different way. I set about tiptoeing towards him like a child. I let him feel big and let myself feel tiny and needy. I was out of voice, so I whispered under my breath. I asked him to turn back the day and let me die with Deer in the night. I asked him a hundred times and never heard back. I feel asleep asking him some more.

Come the next morning, I was still alone. Deer was ashes and my life felt like ashes too, except that I was painfully hungry. I couldn’t bring myself to hunt anything, so I ate a few roots, threw them right up, and decided that I would never eat again. It seemed right, so I left my pack behind and headed up higher into the hills.

I made up my mind that Gene Russ was a liar. Any god that would’ve lent a hand to Russ would’ve lent a hand to Deer in living a few more days, or lent a hand to me in dying along with her. I made up my mind that God’s job was made up, like in a fairy tale, and I pressed on up the mountainside without believing in anything. I didn’t feel sorry for myself, I just felt unfastened and alone, like a kite that’d been cut free.

Isolation started to eat at me after a certain point. It broke me little by little into a softer self. The loneliness made me grow eyes for sad things. For hours and hours, I thought of Deer. But slowly, as I climbed about ten feet per hour through the knee-high snow, a strange and warm few thoughts took root in me—that Deer and I were square, that I had only pure memories of her, that my life had been devoted to her, that never once did I do anything I regretted in regards to her, that she was my work, my love, and my best friend, that I saw her into this world, and that I saw her out. So, I reckoned that I had very little to whittle away at. Our union, Deer’s and mine, at every juncture, had been whole. There was nothing to lament. My love for her was sweet and round, and my memory was shaped as solid and spotless as brass. The surprise of her death began to fade.

My new surprise was my creeping thoughts. And what kept creeping in was the face of my wife, whom I loved not nearly so purely or wholly as Deer. Alone and thinking sadly and softly, I saw a million holes in my memories and thoughts of my wife.

Standing out on the front porch, I could always hear my wife’s television shows sounding through the window. She liked those daytime shows where everyone was all the time backstabbing each other and sleeping with each other’s wives and dying of diseases and dying in car accidents. And whenever anyone died, someone always cried and cried about not having the chance to say goodbye and to say how much they loved the person who just died. I used to shake my head every time it’d happen. Seemed like no one ever learned anything on those shows. With so many people dying, you’d think they’d all be running around telling everyone how much they loved each other.