11.21

It's obscured by the corner of the building and a travel trailer and all, but the spilling light from the garage through the keyhole slit illuminates more than I care to see. His back is to me, and he hovers over the deer's carcass, meticulous in his movements. Every now and again, I can catch a shallow glint of moving steel. I'm on the other side of a pane of double glass--double far, it seems, from the emotion I should feel. The clock in the background softly calls the time and the refrigerator hums a harmony too soft to compose. And I, man and child both, watch a hunter in his necessary work. And I, horrified and still, watch with an unmeasurable dread as a sanguine disaster spreads across the bed of his pickup truck in the half-cold air of a dead November evening.