“Yeah. A deer. I think you need to get someone specialized to remove it. So, I wanted to tell you.” In fact, I know they do. I looked up the companies yesterday when, instead of losing myself in different doomsday articles, I researched how to safely remove a rotting animal corpse. It’s not something anyone can do. “On what side of the trail again?” “If you’re walking straight out, you get to a fork by this meadow. If you take the left, there’s actually a tree down, so you can’t go that way. But if you go right, it gets wet, and muddy, and then you start to smell it. If you keep your head straight, you’ll see it.” The man says thank you and assures me he’ll do something. I leave my name and apartment number, in case he needs to call. For a few days, I wait by the phone. Part of me is convinced that once they go to remove the corpse, they’ll discover it is a human body. That I’ll become entwined with the crime scene, a witness who arrived far too late. But no one calls. I think about asking the man at the desk for an update, fearing he never did tell them, but I either miss him or worry he’ll find it strange. I decide the corpse must have been a deer, otherwise there would have had to be an email and news cameras and cold cases dug up. It would have been a mess, an anxiety-inducing story I wouldn’t have stumbled on mindlessly, the safety of a screen, of being able to scroll past the pictures. It’d be death in my backyard, the evil I’ve always feared come immeasurably close. But, maybe, management never called a removal crew, never did anything with the information I left that day. Maybe they didn’t actually care that there was a corpse. The man I spoke to brought the note to a meeting and everyone laughed, never thought the worst, never crashed head first into the most disastrous possibility of an otherwise common occurrence. A girl saw a dead animal in the woods, they’d say. Big whoop. If a removal crew never came, then I could walk out into those woods again and visit my corpse. I could smell it again, try to point out the bones under the first snow fall. I could keep this thing company, turn the possible curse into a mutual bond of protection, watch as the bones decompose, count the days until just a memory remains. There is only one rib difference between a human and a deer. One miscalculation, one bone gnawed off by some woodland thing. A human or a deer. Nature or unimaginable violence. It’s not worth worrying about right now. That’s what I have to tell myself, often: It’s not worth worrying about the thing that has not happened, may never happen. While the corpse did happen — a living thing turned unrecognizable — now it is forever resting, pieces of itself becoming food for mushrooms to return as energy to the earth, for the animals who call it home. I have to hope it’s nothing sinister, nothing more than life’s cycle. One tree of many fallen in the woods, now seen and heard.
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