Treasure Hunting

Spark: Find all of these: something high up, something on the ground, 
something luminous, something flat, and something sharp. 
Then choose one to write about. Bring the item to class if you wish/can.

“Something Flat” is a chunk of layered rock, with lots of mica and lots of sparkle. It’s from the castoff piles that kept expanding and receding off Rt. 13 – after you pass the railroad bridge across from the high school and before you get to Audrey Edelman Realty.

The stone and tile store, before that management change, used to dump countertop butt ends, cutting mistakes, broken pieces in the empty lot next to the parking lot – the pieces ranging from an inch square up to pieces 14, 15 inches long. Some marble, mostly granite in all its high-end highly-polished permutations.

But hey! I wasn’t going to write about “Something Flat.”

“Something on the Ground” really is “Something on the Floor.” For a minute, I stood in the middle of the living room, confused…  was this whole treasure hunt supposed to be conducted outside? Executive decision – I’m inside, it’s late at night, it is what it is, so I’ll just go from here.

“On the floor,” however, is not much of a limiting parameter for me. Because a floor is just a great big shelf that nothing can fall off of, casually curated collections form, dissipate, re-form. Items creep from the baseboards towards the middle of the living room, the dining area, the guest room, the office…   flotsam from high tide that gets blown into crevices behind the big rocks on the beach.

“Something on the Ground”  is another chunk from those stone piece piles. Whenever I stopped off, there were new species of countertop to be found, its pieces sometimes huddled all next to each other, like when a deer dies in the woods and you find the entire skeleton (except for the leg bones, which are never where they should be).

But sometimes a shiny broken granite countertop was scattered amongst the different piles – as if after the deer died (and the dogs stole the leg bones as usual), the rib bones had, for some reason, rolled over this way, while the vertebrae began to trickle down, inexorably, towards the stream.

Suddenly I am reminded of a scary thing: a couple years ago, when I was out of town, Bob, the dogsitter, called to tell me about a sick deer, obviously dying, unable to stand, right outside the dog fence. What should he do? Bob had called my brother, but there was no answer.

“That deer is suffering,” he told me. “All I can think of is to hit it with a hammer.”

Bob was frail, in a wheelchair most days. My house, with a half flight of stairs up and a half flight down, was challenging, but he loved the dogs and they loved him. Bob didn’t have the strength to lift a hammer more than once or twice, and I doubted he could manage to wield it with enough force to kill the poor thing. Come to think of it, he would need about a half hour to recover from carrying a regular-sized hammer out there.

I’d left Bob all sorts of phone numbers for all sorts of emergencies. It hadn’t occurred to me that dying deer would come staggering out of the woods.

One of my neighbors likes to target shoot from his backyard. I heard once that he’d shot a bear during deer season. That’s revolting, but suddenly struck me as rather handy.

“Call Brian,” I said. “He likes to shoot things.”

Bob called Brian. Bob said, “Kathy says you like to shoot things.”

Brian came over and shot the deer.

Bob called me back. “Now what?” he asked. “What do you want me to do with the dead deer?”

Because temperatures were below freezing, and I was due home later that day, I told him to let it lie there. Just don’t let the dogs near it. So there it was when I got home.

I’m not one of those outdoorsy women. Or a country woman. I don’t own a big plaid wool work shirt. I don’t have one of those big ugly mercury lights in front of the barn – I don’t even have a barn, but you know what I mean. However, I live in the country by myself, and felt like this was something I should be able to deal with.

Definitely not a farm girl, yet not a city girl, either. I don’t like sidewalks. I don’t like smelling what the neighbors are cooking. I don’t like being scared when I’m outside at three in the morning.

Committed to getting rid of the deer, I told myself that they die in the woods all the time. Somebody will eat it – a mountain lion, a bear, a wolf, a coyote – or a bunch of little bugs and slimy maggots. Regardless of who would take care of it, I didn’t want to spend the next few weeks living so close to the miracle of decay. I had to bury it or move it while it was intact.

But it kept looking at me. I had to cover it with a tarp. Then, yelling out loud like a crazy person – You’re freaking me out! Why are you so heavy?! Stop looking at me! – I got it to the edge of the ravine, closed my eyes, and pushed. It rolled and slid halfway to the creek, taking the tarp along with it. I retrieved the tarp, covered the corpse with dead leaves, and hoped for a really quick, odorless decomposition.

Two days later, I peeked over the edge of the ravine to see how it was going. And ick! Apparently it had been going! It was further down the slope than it had been two days before. Over the next few days, it kept moving closer and closer to the creek. Something was moving the carcass during the night. I tried not to imagine what was happening – maybe it was awakening at midnight, staggering towards my house zombie-like, trying to scrabble out of the ravine, intent on getting back at me for signing that order of execution, every night a fight against gravity. I tried not to see a decaying deer corpse swaying in the moonlight, rearing up, sliding back down, further down into the ravine, being drawn backwards as if to the very Gates of Hell.

Let’s see… “Something Luminous” was a glow in the dark star. “Something up High” was the row of iridescent ice cream sundae glasses on the top shelf of the kitchen hutch nailed to the wall. From my childhood, they remind me of pixie haircuts, brightly colored aluminum drinking glasses, and a little sailor shirt and shorts set.

When I picked up the second chunk of granite, the times I had found pieces of the same broken countertop scattered throughout the different cast-off pile came back to me. Like deer bones dispersed in the woods. And unbidden, up popped the zombie deer.

When a zombie deer raises that undead head, drop everything. Tell its story – to whoever is there. They tell me it’s the only way to be really sure that you’ll be really safe for the rest of the year.

________

Writing Through the Rough Spots. April 2017.