Deer Hoof
Essay 4, Finite
By gayla mills
Something caught my eye on the rug, a few feet from Zoey—Zoey, lying there, eyes closed, with her head resting on her front feet. Or were they paws? In any case, there she was, her winter coat thick and lustrous, the brown hair with the black tips interwoven with blondish strands. I wanted to curl up next to her on the floor and run my hands through her soft coat, as I often do.
Yet before her, on the rug, lay the hoof of a young deer. There was enough fur still attached to make clear this wasn’t some bone purified through heat or smoke, wrapped in thick plastic and sold with a bar code under florescent lights. No, this was the part of an animal that had recently used it, along with three other hooves, to fly through the woods, soaring over the backs of mature bushes, weaving through saplings with twists and turns that suggested he had no bones at all, just sinews and will.
Now part of him lay on my rug, a reminder that the sweet girl before me was, also, an animal. An animal who wasn’t concerned that the
object before her had lived and breathed just a few short moments ago. So she didn’t understand why I gingerly picked up her prize with a plastic bag and disposed of it in the Supercan outside.
Then I used some Nature’s Miracle on the rug.
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