A Single Shot

John lies down next to the girl. He stares up at the ceiling and softly talks to her. He tells her he is sorry he shot her and that most of the time he believes it was an accident but occasionally, when he thinks about how angry the world sometimes makes him and how little he seems able to change things, he’s afraid it wasn’t. He tells her that when he was her age his only plan had been to marry the girl he loved, move her back to his family’s farm, be the best farmer he could be, and raise his children to do the same, and that his father’s having lost everything when John was sixteen crippled John the same as if he’d been in a car accident and lost the use of his legs. He tells her about the many failures in his life and that the only things in it worth holding on to are his wife and son, but that they had left him.

The body is bloated with gas. It occasionally burps or breaks wind. Sometimes it shifts on the mattress. When its right arm jerks out and hits John’s elbow, he stops speaking and gets up from the bed.

Standing over her, he apologizes for talking only about his problems when he at least was alive. He tells her that, no matter what else happens, he will try to find out her name and where she was from and that, if he succeeds, he will somehow notify her family about her death and let them know either where her body can be picked up or that she has received a proper burial.

He lifts up the cadaver, stiff with rigor mortis, and slides the plastic out from around it. He takes off the dead girl’s shoes and socks, then wrestles her out of her jeans and blood-soaked T-shirt. She isn’t wearing a bra. He pulls off her panties because they are soiled and wet. He drops everything into the plastic. Then he takes out his hunting knife. After rolling the cadaver onto its back and eyeballing the bullet’s course through the torso, he goes after the slug with his knife. He locates it just beneath the skin’s surface, embedded in soft flesh. He quickly cuts it out, then drops it onto the clothes.

He walks down the hall to the bathroom, picks up from the floor a towel and washcloth, dampens the latter with soap and water, then returns to the bedroom and spends several minutes scrubbing blood, sweat, and dirt from the cadaver. He sees no star-shaped birthmark; no scar on her knee; no blood-red bull’s-eyes. Far from being large and womanly, her breasts, surrounding the bullet hole, are small and girlish. She has almost no pubic bush. For these things alone, he is thankful.

He pulls on a pair of Moira’s rubber cleaning gloves, then from the floor takes one of her combs, a tube of red lipstick, black eyeliner, and blush. After combing several hair strands away from the dead girl’s forehead, he unties her ponytail, combs out the snarls, and catches the hair again in a rubber band. He applies the eyeliner and a thin gloss of lipstick. Still, he thinks, she is too pale. He dabs blush on her cheeks and, less so, her temples.

After tearing the tags from one of Moira’s panties and a T-shirt, he puts the underwear on the dead girl. He considers outfitting her in a blouse and skirt, but is afraid they might somehow be traced to Moira, so settles for a label-less pair of her jeans. He dresses the corpse one side at a time, using a hand to hold the rigid body upright and another to slowly thread a leg into the pants. It takes him close to half an hour. All the while, the cadaver makes noises and jumps. The smell starts to make him nauseous. He rolls up the jeans, slightly long on the dead girl, then snaps them. He puts her old socks and sneakers back on, then props the body in a mostly sitting position against the headboard. He pushes with his fingers at the corners of her mouth, removing some of its slackness.

Afterwards, he stands back to appraise her. He thinks she looks almost alive and that if she were, she’d be beautiful. He tells her so. Then he runs and gets the Polaroid. Eight shots remain in the camera. He uses them all in a dull light, taking her portrait from midchest up at three different angles. He lays the photographs on the bureau. Now he’s not sure what to do with the body. What would make things worse or better? And for which of them? A part of him feels as dead as the girl. He’s tired enough to fall over. He wonders if in the morning the sun will shine everywhere but on the trailer, and in that sliver of darkness the world will see what awful secrets he is hiding.