Road Kill
Sometimes a coincidence, a confluence of improbabilities, gathers on you like it had been in waiting for your arrival for eons now. Buried under layers of the Earth’s crust, some ill-advised drilling lets it out and nature really lets you know she’s out there. At least, that’s how it felt for Ray driving to work that morning. The road was quiet so there was no fuss when he banged down on the brake pedal and mounted the kerb to stop. He flicked on the warning lights and looked out of his window into the road.
Lying there, diagonally across from one another but in the same lane, were two foxes, evidently killed by the sparse night traffic. They appeared arranged, with still-shiny eyes looking towards one another. The belly of the fox nearest Ray’s car had split like overripe fruit, pulled back like a shower curtain; the intestines were dragged out over the tarmac. They gleamed, unsightly jewels in the summer dust. The other fox was flattened from the hip to the end of its back paws. The tail, savagely blood-matted, curled around the fox’s rear as though it was shyly failing to hide its wounds. Streaks of blood continued meanly down the road away from both animals, the smearing out of lives, spread too thin for them to pull through.
Ray stared at the cruel improbability of the scene. He took out his mobile phone and dialled his office. Ray was always early, part conscientiousness, part eagerness to leave the house; he got the answering machine.
I won’t be in today, he stumbled. Uh… family emergency, I guess you’d say.
Ray hung up and pressed the poor excuse from his thoughts. He got out of the car, closed the driver’s door and opened the door behind it. Studying the foxes again, he opted for intestine-spiller rather than crushed-haunches. It looked a shadow closer to life. Fewer flies circled its wounds, alighting and rising in a cautious dance. Ray squatted down beside the animal and slipped his hand uncomfortably underneath its rear end. He scooped the intestines with the same hand, grazing his arm slightly, and cradled the head and neck with his other arm. Ray stood up and placed the fox with a midwife’s care onto the back seat of his Audi. He wiped his hands on the cleanish fur on the fox’s back, trying to keep the whole thing as one, trying to minimise the sudden entropy of its death. He returned to the front seat and swung the car around, avoiding the second fox, which lay on, unthinkable.
Ray’s wife would have taken their daughter, Beth, to her swimming lesson before school then gone on to work, so he was returning to an empty house. His wife, Irma, was a judge, who lacked judgement, Ray often thought bitterly. She’d chosen him, her intellectual inferior, and never seemed convinced that he was the right choice.
He pulled into the drive sharply and jumped straight out of the car. He opened the front door then went back for the fox. Carrying the corpse into the kitchen, Ray lolled it down onto the marble breakfast bar. Its head fell awkwardly, the tongue slipping sideways like the fox was playing a child playing dead. Ray wiped his hands in the same way as before then rushed to the bathroom. Tipping over a basket of shampoo and cosmetics, he stuffed it with the contents of the medicine cabinet. There were plasters, medical alcohol, safety pins, tiny scissors and painkillers. He wasn’t sure what he would need to fix the animal on his worktop. Ray took the lot then dug through the drawers of Irma’s dressing table to find a sewing kit.
Ray’s first priority was to deal with the guts. He placed the basket of supplies on one of the tall, shiny black stools and sat down on the one beside it. The halogen spotlights blazed above: his operating theatre was ready. He examined the intestines carefully, studying the membranous peritoneum with the meshed blood vessels tracing paths through it, looking like a diagram of time’s arrow branching into the multiverse that Ray has seen in a book once. The peritoneum looked close to intact, and Ray pushed the intestines back inside the fox’s abdomen. He paused then attempted to push the body onto its back, picturing the classic pinned-out frog for a classroom dissection. The fox kept tipping either towards or away from Ray, so he grabbed a couple of piles of recipe books from the shelf over the sink and arranged them like a scaffold to hold the fox in position on its back, x legs pointing upward like it was slung from a stake by two triumphant hunters.
Now Ray could take a better view of the fox’s viscera. He pushed and pulled the stomach and liver around, stuffing them a little more underneath the ribcage. He lifted the intestines out again to check the kidneys, which seemed in good condition, glistening redly up at Ray. After replacing the lurid guts, Ray selected a red reel of cotton and threaded the end through the finest needle in the sewing kit. He began at the bottom end of the gash, which ran at an angle from the fox’s groin, at the left, to the lower edge of the ribcage on the right. Ray stitched as neatly as he could, drawing the skin together as evenly as possible, but still little lumps emerged as he went. In the end, he unpicked the unsatisfactory repair and tried again, neater the second time. He clipped off the excess thread and looked at his work from a few angles, an intense expression running over his face.
Next, Ray tried to set the fox’s face into a more respectable pose. He pushed the tongue back into the maw, but it just fell out again. He tried kind of tucking the tongue behind the teeth, which didn’t work so well; rolling the tongue back under itself like pastry around a rolling pin was more successful. The mouth would not stay shut, however, so Ray settled for a single stich joining the top and bottom lip on the left side of the fox’s mouth. He reasoned that a fox could easily snap the tacking thread by opening its mouth, without any damage to the tissue around the edge.
Ray spent some time gently stroking the fox’s head, considering how to return the blood on its fur to its circulation. He wanted to restore the fox to its condition pre-death. If only he could get it right, Ray might be able to save the beast. Returning to the bathroom, Ray dug through all the cupboards in there, and eventually came across the vital tool – a hypodermic needle. He didn’t stop to think where it might have come from. Unable to simply draw up the clotted blood from the fox’s dulling hair, Ray gently rinsed it off, using minimal water, into a plastic bowl usually used for tossing a salad or some such ordinary culinary task. Thoughtfully, he crushed up an aspirin in the pestle and mortar and added that to the blood and water mixture before drawing it up in batches to the needle. He injected it carefully into the only vein he could find, crossing over the bone in the fox’s right foreleg. The liquid seemed to gather there, so Ray carefully massaged it down the leg to spread it out. Feeling like the repair was close to completion, Ray glanced at the clock, immediately realising that he had taken too long. Beth would be home within minutes, unless, as he hoped, she had dallied with friends.
The front door rattled and Ray felt heavy in his core. His daughter was thirteen; Ray assumed she was still naïve and wasn’t after some sort of ‘loss of innocence’ moment. However, there was nothing he could do and Beth walked straight into the kitchen.
She halted, and there was a long silence. Ray felt only dread at the truth about to be revealed. Beth didn’t react how he’d expected, though. She whispered, urgency in her tone, we can’t let mum see this.
Beth stepped past her crumpled father and gathered up the fox’s body in both arms. Follow me dad, she said over her shoulder, clipped, professional. Ray stood and went after her into the garage, through the door in the back of the utility room. Grab a tarp, dad. Ray did so, too dazed to reflect on his daughter’s actions. Beth gently wrapped the fox in the sheeting and hit the button to open the garage door. Dad, open the boot of your car.
After stowing the corpse, Beth climbed into the passenger seat and waited for her father to get in to drive, a metallic taste in her mouth. Ray remained wordless as Beth uttered directions where needed. She put the radio on low, and the father and daughter both listened carefully, as though the music was playing only for them. Take me to the river, wash me in the water. Beth led her father to some woodland nearby, popular with dog walkers in early mornings, but quiet in mid-afternoon. She retrieved the fox from the back and carried the parcel way off the track, stepping through the undergrowth. Ray followed her, a headache bedding down below the bridge of his nose, a troll. Permission to pass, permission to do, he needed permission from his family to just be.
Beth cast about her then laid down the body. Ray realised only then that Beth had hooked a trowel from the garage wall around her wrist using the leather strap. She knelt, and started to dig into the ground, scattered with brown pine needles. Work was slow, but Beth progressed steadily, concentration on her features. When a shallow grave emerged, Beth went to her father and laid her hand on his forearm. Dad, you need to bury the fox. The fox is gone, you can’t fix it now.
Ray looked his daughter in the eyes, feeling a rising warmth and gratitude towards her. His relief was vast; his thirteen year old daughter had set him free. He bent and unrolled the tarpaulin. Ray lowered the fox into the trench in the woodland earth and used cupped hands to slowly move the soil over the body. Beth crouched to help, and the pair ceremonially buried the animal, the marriage. They stood at the same time and held hands like Beth was a seven-year-old again, not a teenager. She squeezed her dad’s hand, not needing to say, don’t worry about me, don’t try to save it for me. Ray had permission now, but permission from the most important person to him. She was giving him the gift of giving up and letting something broken go.
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