The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bad Animal by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer

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content warning for animal death

Prayer

Like this, the dead elk was deposited onto the tarp:
rain crowned its antlers, the scruff under

its neck glistened with dew. In murder, as in living,
the animal sound was paramount, the death-cry, the orgasm,

how we communicated we were in danger, or pleasure. I heard
nature cry out that day. What it meant, I still don’t know. The birds

lifted from the trees, an eyelid fluttering open.
The trees shuddered their leaves against the blood spatter.

I was younger then. I knew nothing of death except my father
wielding the rifle, then the knife. My hand gently patted

the elk’s dead, dead flank as my father grabbed a handful
of its hair and held it steady, began to cut. I thought I was

comforting it, or maybe I was comforting myself.
Nothing will be wasted this way, I thought. Nothing left.

Silence in the car as we drove home, the elk in the backseat,
blood pooling in its two tusked ivory teeth. I have the luxury

of writing about this violence in hypotheticals. We never
killed the elk. We never opened the animal from sternum

to groin to see what organs lay beneath; we were never
that fascinated with our own bodies, their sounds. The elk was dead

when we got there. The blood already seeped into the soil.
Tiny animals already made their homes in the bones. Eyes

had become less than eyes. A cluster of maggots peered through the flesh
shyly, like girls around a velvet curtain at a ballet recital.

We didn’t know what to do with ourselves, or the body, so we left it
there. I could say something about nature taking itself back. I could

say something about the murder. Here it is:
nothing was wasted, nothing was left. But—

in the center of its forehead,
a bullet nestled like a small child.