what was him

A once five point buck is pulled back across the hood, of a stalled out, seven shades of beige, Buick Continental. What was him is now home in the diamond cut grille.

He's been to California and all across Utah to Delaware, Tasted all twenty-one flavors of road kill in between both Dakotas. Seen half a country where what was him, has now become a stain in the memory of every crossing guard.

It lingers longer than I'd hoped, I had never heard someone use the word molt in that way.

You take a skinner' knife, and like the bloodied red velvet antlers of a moose in October, you help it to molt.

He used a hacksaw, to separate head from shoulders, if bucks have shoulders that high on up?

What was him, had been helped to molt, into a few distinct ways of being.

I asked, if you sort of pickled it? Before what was him gets mounted on the wall, laughs fell out, as their tongues started to resemble that of the bucks.

Eyes in the heads on the walls are often glass. Maybe they make prosthetic ones, for the veterans who can't afford the real deal, out of what was him.

Venison, he said, is gamey and sinew-esc waxy in the gullet's company of stale beer. Gamey, to me at least, was the sport he enjoyed.

He only ate the brains from a cereal bowl.

What was him was aging with Parkinson's and slowly succumbing to the later stages of rigor mortis.

Remington sat above the kitchen window, like a caged bear, let loose onto a dewy morning.

A rabid lover's slaughter, the likes of which, time couldn't even imitate.

What was either of them, had been tortured beyond comprehension, inside jungles beyond the modern depths of sanity.

What was specifically different between what was one another, that is the buck and the man who ate his brains, is left alone to fade,

Like cigarillo smoke, up through big bright purple blocks of bigger sky country.

What was him is not easily separated, from what now sits in a deep freezer in his shed, and what got buried under those hard black candy rock mountains.

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