By her twentieth birthday, there are a few things Valarie Ricci knows for certain.
She knows that her waitressing job barely covers the costs of living out of a beat up old van. She knows she's stuck in the dead end hometown her high school friends...
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Warmth seeped from Valarie's neck as she climbed out of the van. She prodded the still-burning cut and her fingertips came away red. It didn't matter. She continued on, trudging down into the muddy ditch beside the road. Her eyes locked onto the blood spattered across the pavement, which trailed off into nearby trees. Everything inside her twisted around in all the wrong ways as she followed the blood and the faint, distant sound of a whining animal.
Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay.
She didn't feel the sharp and sticky ends of pine needles cutting into her skin as she pushed past the dense branches of evergreens. The trail didn't lead very far, and her search soon ended at the base of a half-dead spruce.
The deer was absolutely not okay. It collapsed into a bleeding heap of strained fur, mangled legs, and a caved-in chest, which maintained its desperate struggle to rise and fall. The panic in its huge, beady eyes when it looked at Valarie matched the same horror that caused her heart to pound against her ribcage.
"Fuckfuckfuckfuck." She took a step closer but fell back when the deer's legs spasmed towards her. "Let me help you." She needed to help. But how? She didn't know how to calm it down, how to stop the bleeding, how to not get kicked in the face for her efforts. She felt her pockets for her phone. Nothing. "Fuck!" Why had she been stupid enough to leave her phone in the van?
The deer continued to watch her, utterly helpless and terrified. No, she decided. This was not going to happen. The deer wasn't allowed to die. It picked the wrong day to jump in front of a car. She rolled up her sleeves and took another determined step forward. Her hands hovering towards the barrel-like chest in front of her. "It's gonna be okay. You don't have to be scared."
Its breathing grew slower and slower.
"I'm sorry." She spoke as softly as she could. "We hurt you, but we can fix you, too. It's not all bad. We can call a vet or–or animal control. They can fix you. That's what they do. I'm so sorry." She gasped through the next words. "You shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be here either."
And then Valarie wasn't looking at a deer but a hospital bed, watching Nonno take his final ragged, slack-jawed gasps of breath. Skin pulled tight against his skull, milky eyes half-closed, rib cage penetrating a shirt that wasn't his–a hospital gown made for dying. Dried, yellowed flakes of skin and mucus crusted his tongue, building up ever since he'd forgotten to swallow. His limp, age-spotted hand was grey and thin against her own, so unlike how she'd always remembered it. The man who raised her withered, and she could only watch. Death and chemicals clogged her airway, fogged her brain.
She looked up to find Grace standing amongst the evergreen thicket. Half of Grace's forehead and scalp was caved in, her right eye bulbous with blood and mashed to a pulp. A silent scream ripped through Valarie, knocking her down to scramble back across the muddy forest floor. She blinked, and Grace returned to the expression of pristine blankness she'd worn in the motel room, her face intact.
