d. w. merriman

The two of them had grown used to arguing all morning, without fatigue. They would never say what it was really about. We don’t love each other right now? If I do love you, I regret it? It was always this way, like a coordinated hunt for something too startled to be approached directly. Hunters of skittish deer. So when the argument left them it was easily forgotten, until of course their next altercation, when they would find some other conduit to indirectly approach what they could not say – we could say that these sorts of occurrences add up to something we could call a ritual, and for them it was a ritual with about as much love and familiarity and comfort as any other. It was especially frightening, then, when they had their first real fight, when the problems the one had with the other were expressed directly and firmly, the way a hunter must feel when the deer he has been approaching suddenly appears too close to the gun; the hunter must fire, for that was the point of it all wasn’t it, and watch the doe’s skull break open or see it hobble as its stomach falls apart and it writhes with understanding – not an abstract patch of color and sound from far away standing and then falling but a real creature, with a smell, facing the gunfire with that mixture of extreme composure and a lack of composure that seems unnatural to us when animals die – unnatural-seeming, in fact, since it is the most natural of all events. Or no, maybe it is the gun which makes its death seem unnatural; nothing in nature explodes so small. Playing God, that’s the phrase. So with an argument like that, what do you do? What?