
I was walking my dogs in this great park in a bad part of town. It was beautiful in its own dilapidated kind of way like nature had thought better of letting us stake a claim and taken it back. The park was large and no one was ever there, and I could let the dogs off the leash without worrying about pet parent hysterics. The dogs were off and running and having a good time when one of them starts baying to bring down the sun and chasing after something under a tree that I couldn’t see. It’s a fawn, and it bolts, tears like mad across the open space of the field looking for cover. Her legs stretch and hammer and pull like a cartoon roadrunner, and her strides are long—clownishly long and nervous quick—yet my dog keeps gaining on her. She’s a houndish sort of mix breed, short and long, but even so, she just eats up the ground with the whipping curve of her back, and now the other dog picks up the scent and joins in. He’s a tall working type, and comes up harder still, cutting the fawn off from the tree line and herding her back to the field. All this happened in less time than it takes to open your mouth. I shout for them to heel, to give off, to leave her alone, but their instinct has kicked in, and they bring that fawn round and round until they’ve cornered her in a little piece of fence that must have marked the edge of pitch or field in more prosperous times but in its desuetude is mostly sumac and pigweed. She turns at bay and is screaming now—screaming like a human child. The mother is nowhere at all. And she’s screaming and screaming and screaming and frothing and her eyes are rolling in terror and the dogs just bark louder and louder to drown her out and I’ve started screaming too. At the dogs. I can’t help it. I feel like I’m going to burst the throat out of my neck, but the screams keep coming. Yelling at them to stop, to back off, to leave her alone. It never occurs to me that this might frighten her every bit as much as the dogs. But the dogs keep on barking fierce and proud and taut-lined the way nature made them. The blood is pumping through and over me now, pulsing and stopping, pulsing and stopping, and I can hardly hear a thing except my screams and the screams of the fawn, and I grab the little one and pull her away and tie her up and she gives over. I may have kicked or pushed her, I don’t really know, but I was rough, and the older one is suddenly ashamed and slinks away now that he sees the state I’m in, and the fawn has stopped screaming and is just laid out prone on the grass, and I don’t think at all, I just pick her up and carry her back to the tree where she bolted from, and her eyes are all rolled up and her pulse is quicker even than mine—dangerously quick—that’s the thought that pierces the fog; and I’m hoping and praying the mom will be close, that she’ll come and lick her and I call my dad to come and help me with the dogs. By the time he gets there, the fawn is dead. There is a fly walking on the white of her eye. We didn’t even bother to check for a pulse.
            And I cried there, into the shoulder of my dad. Cried and cried because the fawn and the dogs didn’t know. The fawn couldn’t know that the dogs wouldn’t hurt her, that if she just stopped they’d let her be. Even under the heady thrill of the chase, they never made a snap at her, never tore at her, never even touched her. They just knew they needed to chase, to bark, to run. For them, it was merely a pure and harmless joy passed on a thousand generations. It was in their blood as sure as my screams, the tearing pain in my throat that was coming out now in sobs. They didn’t know, couldn’t know what they were doing to her. Couldn’t know a cornered fawn will just die so it doesn’t hurt when she’s torn. There was no conflict there, but fawns will run and dogs will chase. And I wished in that moment that I could make them see how the world was.
Micah Muldowney is the author of the collection Q-Drive and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2022). His fiction and poetry have been featured in The New England Review, Cleaver, Descant, West Trade Review, and many others. He currently lives in greater Philadelphia where he is working on a novel.
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