I’ve got a white-knuckle grip on a gut hook knife that needs to be sharpened, clumsily hacking off the asshole of a six-point stag, when it starts to occur to me that this whole thing reminds me of you.

Not just because I’ve had a finger up its butt, either. That’s what I’d say if you were here—make the joke and watch you grimace-laugh, curled up in the back of the truck and flushing red in the cold, since you wanted to keep me company.

You’re not here, though. The wind is as bitter-biting as November ever is, skimming over the endless sea of yellowed dead field grass ‘til it reaches the end of the clearing and makes the trees shiver, and there’s nothing but blood and an old beer cooler in the back of that truck.

Unfortunately, I think, sawing the milkwhite skin from the candy-pink bulk of the deer’s ham, I’m the stag in this situation, you fucking cocksucker.

The deer’s slit open now. I’ve got the knife under the skin, pulling up towards myself to keep the soft parts safe, and I’m thinking about it. You said, You’re a real fucking piece of work, Thomas, with your eyes all shiny, and I said, Well goddamn, what the hell did you expect?

I think that was a valid question. I mean, honestly—what the hell did you expect? Did you want a ring or something, Charlie? Want me to move out to the coast with you, wash dishes in a big nasty kitchen, ankle-deep in waterlogged, half-gnawed onions the likes of which my third-world hourly rate can’t even pay for? Is that living the dream, Charlie? Fuck you. You’re the one who went and said all that dumb shit out loud. This isn’t on me.

My dad taught me how to do all of this. The cleaning, I mean—I’ve got the skin pulled back and I’m laying the knife real surgical-like into the half-clear membrane of the buck’s hind muscle. The skin don’t want to let go, ‘cause it never does; it’s on there good, and for good reason. Don’t want to expose all that pretty meat and the sticky red mess of it to the mean teeth of the world, now do we? Daddy always said that’s why we bruise, you know—when you bleed, it’s the skin’s job to catch the stains for you, so you don’t get them all over your mama’s carpet. If you’re bleeding, boy, it’s ‘cause your skin wasn’t thick enough. Clean it up.

You bruise easy, Charlie. Bled easy, too—got popped in the nose once in high school for your big fucking mouth and bled all over my front seat like it was killing you. I never minded getting the shit kicked out of me: I was built for it better. Used to go to football practice and take every tackle with my whole back—neck to navel—painted up in belt-stroke technicolor, my daddy’s signature scrawled out right there in the darkness of it. You took a single solid hit to the face that one time and your whole face swole into this mean little multichromatic whirl of chintzy blue-black, eyes purpling themselves closed, blood in your mouth, your nose, your eyes, all over the both of us. Staining my goddamn seats.

There’s a sharp crack in the afternoon when I break the tailbone, and then we’re into the ugly part. I’ve got my hands wrapped around the red-soaked bone fragment and I’m using it for grip, yanking hard, tearing the skin down off the belly and exposing the long incarnadine lines of fat and fleshmeat at the stag’s sides. It’s easier than it should be.

I saw a kid die once, at church camp. His buddy pushed him and he lost his feet, cracked his head on a rock. Just some real “Jesus hates this guy, specifically” type shit. They were all laughing until the poor fuck started twitching, and I was just standing there, too dumb to know what the fuck I was looking at. Acts of violence, I figure, are just about always too easy, once you consider what they cost you. What it all can become; what it can do to you. All of that mess.

You kissed me in the kitchen of your grandma’s trailer, that first time, ‘cause you’d had too much to drink and I’d broke up that stupid fight on the riverbank you’d gone out of your way to start. And I was there, I guess. I don’t know. I kissed back. Then I fucked you on the floor like it meant something, even though my beat-to-shit ribs hurt like a mother, and then I stayed the night. That was all too easy, too.

It only takes a few more cuts on the shoulders and the hide rips right off, right up to the neck, where I hack it off around the head. The poor bastard’s naked all the way, after that.

I’ve seen a lot of deer in my life, mind you—hundreds, I’d say conservatively. Maybe more, since these hills are chock full of the bastards, and I’ve been living and dying in these hills since the day I was born. The thing that’s hanging by its back tendons in my yard don’t look like a deer now. Not in the way you know it, anyhow. It’s a grotesque glimpse into the big red ugly underneath, all pink and wet and bone and sinew, cut back from the shape of the familiar into something all too recognizable as meat. And once you make a thing into meat, Charlie, you gotta gut it: crack its chest open with great steel loppers and clear out the glaucous bubbles of its insides in little wet handfuls. See how it fits, hold it in your hands, and then realize that it’s all just really fucking sticky, in the end, and the smell will choke you.

I’m not going to call you, I’ve decided. I thought about it—thought about it in the shower, and when I was cooking, and when I was driving, and whenever I see your name in my inbox, three names down after my mom, my sister, and Diane. I wish I would, sometimes. I won’t. Swear to God I won’t.

And you’re going to go to the coast, now. Go to school, kiss someone else in the kitchen, get fucked somewhere softer than I managed it. It’ll be good, I promise. Violence is easy, like I said—swinging wildly ‘cause you feel like it, breaking things under your hands, bleeding all over the seats and laughing about it like it’s nothing, like you don’t scare me to death, you fucking dipfuck piece of shit. Making peace with the world you live in is the hard stuff. I’d say you’d better learn that someday, but I’ll be honest: I hope you never do.

You’re going to think this was your fault. You’re stupid like that. You’re gonna think, I shouldn’t have said all of that bullshit I said at the docks. I shouldn’t have pushed it. I should’ve been content with what I had instead of always fighting to first blood for more than people are willing to give me. And you’re right about all of that, you goddamn shithead, but still. It wasn’t your fault.

It’s just me, Charlie. I’ve never known a love that wasn’t a skinning.