Deer Hearts

When she was thirteen her parents got divorced, and the week after the papers were signed her father sent her two deer hearts in the mail. Not one but two. The hearts smelled like iron and rot. Shamefully she was reminded of her period, which had just arrived the month before, materializing like a magic trick in her clean panties. The red looked—well, just wrong in the Frozen underwear she had worn since elementary school, the blood streak marring Elsa's faded princess face. Her dad was a hunter so she wasn't afraid, just saddened by the waste. If hearts meant love, wasn't one enough?


Crystals

After the divorce, her mom got into crystals, and when she wasn't working at Sheetz or using, she liked to talk about the witchy stuff she watched on TikTok and Insta. A budding astrologer, her mom made up self-serving horoscopes on the fly, opening up a box of stale donuts while pronouncing, "Luna faces off with Pluto tonight and you know what that means." The girl did know. The planets were always sending new men, dispensing them like Pez, and boom, before you knew it, they would find themselves living in yet another hungry-eyed guy's tired, sagging trailer.

When they moved in with Solly, a gentle meth head with a trembling smile, her mom gave her a necklace with a small cloudy amethyst hanging on a tarnished silver chain. "For protection," her mom said, laughing, her voice different, sharp as a slap. When you looked closely, you could see the crystal had a crack running through its middle like a river or a vein.


Bang

Her father moved down the road into an exhausted-looking apartment complex with peeling siding and an array of sketchy people who sat outside in lawn chairs, as permanently fixed to their spots as garden gnomes. When she went to visit him, he was in a mood, jittery and electrified, so she did not mention the shiny-eyed men or deer hearts but instead sat beside him on the lopsided corduroy couch. The air around him smelled metallic as he cleaned and reloaded a new gun she did not recognize, an ugly thing: dull grey, squarish and squat.

"Nice gun," she said, because he often liked it when she was brave and saucy. He held it up pointing it at her, sighting her over the barrel. "Bang," he said, his teeth white and even. Time stood still for just a moment and then he placed the gun in her hand for her to admire.


Dream Catcher

Her father started showing up late at night outside Solly's, parking his truck on the access road, keeping fifty yards away. He just sat there, quiet and still. Leaning on the edge of the porch, her mom watched him, arms crossed, her plump mouth puckering with something sour. Mom hung dreamcatchers in all the windows: seven handmade spiderwebs of macrame, plastic beads, and feathers. "Be careful what you dream about," Mom said. As the girl looked out the window to watch her father who sat under the streetlight, just a dark outline in his truck, she wondered if he was sleeping and, if so, what occupied his dreams.


Tom Petty

Her father didn't drink or use, but he had strong ideas about things and you'd best agree with him. But you had to be careful—he could change on you the second you nodded your head. He told her it was to keep her on her toes. She thinks she remembers dancing once with her father. Their feet shuffled, her just a tiny thing standing on his big muddy work boots, her fingers engulfed by his giant hands, a Tom Petty song about American girls crackling and tinny on the radio. But now that memory flip-flops like a hooked bass, and she can't pin it down. In sixth grade, she was briefly a big reader, and she wonders if the whole thing actually happened to a girl in a book.


Quarry

One weekend the girl and her friends met some kids from Harper's Ferry at the swimming quarry. Someone brought beers, and the boy from health class materialized like a miracle. The sight of his lean tanned stomach over his cut-offs startled her. When the girl swung on the rope over the water in her new yellow bikini she felt like sunlight and a promise, but as her head broke the surface of the mineral-dark water, she heard deep voices echoing from the woods. First, she saw the familiar work boots, then a hand holding the smooth hilt of a shotgun. Her father. Accompanied by a strange man with tattoos of spiders climbing from his neck, dancing across his cheeks, alighting on a web spreading across his forehead. The kids were transfixed, silent as in church or maybe just frozen in the crosshairs. Her father stood staring at her. The tattooed guy started to laugh and everyone scattered like mice.


Solstice

Living with Solly lasted just two months, and they moved to the next town over, a new start. Her mother insisted they cleanse their chakras by dancing naked in the light of the full moon on the summer solstice. The goal was to drink in lunar goddess energy, to be bathed in her protection, or some sort of futile ancient voodoo. Her mom made them strip down and the girl cringed as her small breasts bounced, her nipples exposed and crinkling even in the humid night air. Her mom's new guy, the Civil War enactor with honest-to-God old-timey huge sideburns devouring the sides of his face, stood on the sagging front porch and watched them gyrate on the scraggly summer grass. As they danced, she heard the crunch of truck tires coming up the gravel driveway. When a cloud crossed the moon blotting out the light, she bet even her unimaginative mother with all her fake prophecies knew it was not a good omen.

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