In the Road
A 2008 World's Best Short Short Story Contest Finalist, From The Southeast Review Volume 27.1
In the road, on the line that separates coming and going, there is what is left of a dog. Seconds before we pass the remains, spilled open and scattered but still very clearly a dog, I know that the trip will not recover.
A weekend in the mountains, too much rain; we have nothing to talk about and sleep most of the day. And now this.
“Don’t look,” I say, but she has already seen, her hand raised to her mouth. There are no tears, but her anger comes easy and quick. “Someone left that,” she says. “Someone saw that in their rear view mirror right after they hit it and kept driving.” We are silent, moving further and further beyond the incident, and I hope that we might be past the worst.
There is an accident ahead, a car in a ditch, a police car’s lights flashing, the cop waving traffic around the tow truck. We wait in the line of cars and she says, “Tell that cop about the dog back there.” I don’t think he would care, but she insists. “He can call it in,” she says, “and someone can come get it.” This is the country. They don’t care about dogs. “He doesn’t want to hear about it,” I tell her and she slams her hand against the dash. “Somebody needs to know about it,” she says.
The dog is dead. It is not dying; it is already dead, and I wonder if my wife understands why this distinction is important, why I am not an awful person for not wanting to include someone else, to keep from spreading sadness around.
The cop waves us past and I drive on and she shakes her head, assured of something specific regarding the content of my character. “He wouldn’t have cared,” I say, but I wish, now that the moment has passed and I cannot have it back, that I had rolled down the window, leaned towards the man, and informed him of the unhappiness just behind us, still there, waiting for someone to remove it.
Kevin Wilson was born, raised, and still lives in Tennessee. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Greensboro Review, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection of stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, was published in April 2009 by Ecco/HarperCollins.
