Riley Manning
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Owl
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The Trace at night is as dark as the inside of your body, an endless corridor of trees, the
occasional orange marbles of deer eyes crowding the embankments. Alarming for a split second,
but by the time you register this alarm, the danger has passed. Conversation between you and
your husband has died, drowned in the soft heartbreak of a good marriage.

On the back window, a fresh Millsaps College sticker. You are childless and alone for the first
time in a long time. Motherhood is a song that fades out. You can’t tell when exactly you quit
hearing it, and maybe it’s still going on somewhere else — “Start Me Up” keeping its dim
promise, your only daughter bedding down in her dorm.

It’s not a deer that gets you but an owl, swooping low and out of nowhere, swallowed by the
Escalade’s face, the brutal crunch-cry cracking the night like a dropped porcelain plate. Hustle
out, though he tries to make you stay in. It takes a minute for you to see it, the alien eyes
peeping from the wedge between the grille and the crooked bumper. The disc head ticks and
squints and chirps with animal pain, shrinks away from your husband’s hand as he reaches for
it. Impossible to get a sense of the shape of it, or the size, or where it might be broken.

Your husband is bald and curious for the first time in a long time, polo shirt tucked into khaki
cargo shorts. Leather sandals. He spades his hands into the cracks. Hold your velvet breath,
clutch your sweat-damp collar, imagine the feathering bulk on your own palms, its tender
beating.

A commotion, a caterwaul, wings thumping against Cadillac polymer like a mad heart. Husband
falling back, raking his arms crying, “Ants, ants, it’s covered in fucking ants.”

You peer in yourself and hear “Jesus” jump out of you.

He tugs at the bumper, but nothing doing. Hands on his forehead in the blue light of the
Escalade made sepulcher.

“I can’t,” he stammers like a boy. The lump in his throat in yours, too. The night is a knot of wet
rope.

The horse doctor is the only doctor awake, waiting for you in your driveway — “Lemme see
what we got here,” like it’s not three in the morning. Tan leather gloves up to his elbow, heat
fogging up his glasses. He clamps the owl, turns it, frees it like an abortion. Flings the mangled
creature onto the concrete. It looks nothing like a cartoon owl or a stuffed animal owl. More like
a tangle of wire coat hangers. A failed architecture. That story about the witch who lives in a
house stood up on chicken legs. Your husband sprays it with the hose to banish the ants.

“We can’t taxidermy it. It’s illegal,” he says. “I don’t know how I know that, but I do.”

He closes the owl in an empty printer paper box, then that into a black trash bag, then that into
the city garbage can.

“It was dead no matter what,” the horse doctor says. He packs a plug of RedSeal into his lip and
points to the Escalade.

“My brother does cars. Take a look at that bumper, if you want.”
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From the owl, your husband steals a silky feather, no bigger than a thumbnail. He closes it in an
almost empty box of matches beside the bed. You catch him looking at it from time to time,
until the cleaning woman throws it away.

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Riley Manning is a Mississippi writer living in Tupelo. A graduate of Millsaps College and the University of Tampa, his work has appeared in Hobart, Archetype, Rejection Letters, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. When he isn't writing, he is boxing.
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