Sally Collins is a writer and editor based in Wisconsin. She recently released her debut novel, Muddled Cherries. Learn more at sallycollinswrites.com. 

Impacted

Heather turns onto the familiar driveway. The gravel crunches, grinds, and pops beneath the tires of her Taurus as she spots Mom leading a single jersey cow from the muddy pasture toward the faded red barn. Mom’s determined, purposeful hunch contrasts with the cow’s tentative limp.

Heather parks beside her childhood home, swallowing the last of her lukewarm Kwik Trip coffee, washing down the dry, itchy sensation brought on from the salted sunflower seeds. She unfurls her cramped limbs, watching the cow raise a bony back leg after each lumbering step, trying to avoid the weight, the hurt.

“We’re the welcome party,” Mom says, a no-nonsense wave. She dons dirt and manure-crusted boots, overalls, flannel. Her graying hair taut in the ponytail she sports when there’s a job to be done.

“Where’s Dad?” Heather asks, zipping her fleece to fend off the November chill.

“Prepping deer stands with the fellas. Give me a hand, will ya?”

Heather anticipated a peanut butter cookie upon arrival, peppermint tea and then baking pies or piecing puzzles, humming along to Dolly Parton straightaway, the pre-Thanksgiving rituals. She fights the adolescent urge to demand they attend to the cow later or hand the responsibility off to Dad. But there’s urgency in Mom’s tone, the cow’s lameness.

“There’s a good girl,” Mom says, as Heather follows beside the heifer, wondering who she’s referring to.

Against the cow’s protests they contain her in the trim chute – a bulky apparatus, a trap, a cage. The cow’s head and eyes roll wild, distrusting. Heather’s brain triggers and trips to that night. She exhales, rests an open palm on the heifer’s rump, wraps her fingers gently around the jutting pelvic bone like a handle, like a hand to hold.

You’re okay. We’re okay.

Mom clamps the ankle. “How’s the drive, hon?” She tugs on blue latex gloves, glides goggles over her wire-rimmed spectacles.

“Not too bad,” Heather says, thinking of the billboard she passed. Michael’s giant head, a word bubble promising to sell the passing motorists a safe and happy home. Her spine curled, shoulders rose as if in defense against those tracking eyes, that bemused smile.

“After this, we’ll get right to good stuff. Got a thousand-piece landscape going. The crust dough resting.” Mom retrieves the hose and Heather maintains her grip.

“First we’re gonna get out whatever’s in there.” Mom clenches the nozzle, aims for the hoof. “Something’s not right.”

The words reverberate in Heather’s gut. They swirl then settle to the memory her mind keeps pulling her back to, the memory she’s fought to forget, to erase. But four years later, the smells and tastes and weight of that night continue to plague her. The aftermath haunting her. The silence.

Mom clears the manure and mud which cascades down the tip of the hoof to reveal the chalky white sole. She presses the surface with her thumb. The cow bellows, struggles, the black and white hide ripples with tremors.

Heather can’t remember how she ended up on the floor that night, bare back pressed against the grimy, threadbare carpet. Bottle caps biting her shoulder blades. Empties all around. Michael straddling her, knees pinning her elbows. A dazed and indifferent John Belushi looking away on the wood paneled wall. Roger Waters wondering if there’s anybody out there from someone’s cellphone speaker.

Michael. Her coworker at the restaurant, her friend. Why was he on top of her?

“Where is everyone?” she asked. Brain throbbing. Vision hazy. Michael’s face a bulbous, unnatural mass of black whiskers from that angle. Overlapping layers of neck and chin glaring with sweat. Lowering over her.

“Tyler said you were a bad kisser.”

Tyler. That’s why she was there. He used to live in that house on University Street. She once slept in his arms in the drafty room a floor above, but he had moved out, moved on, got a grown-up job. She thought he would come to the post-shift gathering. But he didn’t. And he didn’t answer the series of texts she sent while hanging out with an every-changing crew of friends and coworkers.

“u coming?” “Everyone’s here.” “I miss u.” She typed between pulls of Yellowtail pinot noir, shots of Old Crow whiskey. “Not ready for us to be done.”

There was a drinking game. The smell of fried fish and pickle juice. Someone opened to-go containers of cold French fries and cheese curds.

Where did everyone go?

“I’m gonna teach you kissing.” Michael smiled. That smile. The same smile on the billboard. Self-satisfied. Pleased. Something Mom would call a cake-eating grin.

He wobbled like a side-swiped bowling pin as he inched closer, his grease-stained, sweat-stained shirt billowing then smothering her bare chest. Heavy lips, two thick slugs, on hers. His tongue like a gag, flooding her mouth. Sour. Vinegary. Sharp. Fish and pickles and whiskey.

She twisted her head, cheek to the floor, coughed. Strands of hair and clumps of dust along the paint-chipped trim. She squirmed under his weight. He flicked her nipples like errant bugs then pressed his thumbs against her neck, rubbing the pads up and down over the hard knobs of bone and cartilage meant to protect the vital passageways, like tree bark.

“I kinda want to kill you,” he said, smirking.

He pressed harder while she wondered how much pressure bark can take before it cracks, breaks. Jeff Tweedy mumbled from the speaker, telling her to smile. So she smiled. She smiled. She smiled. Why did she smile? Then she vomited, sputtering and shivering.

“Whoa. Fuck.” Michael toppled to the side.

She apologized, a reflex. He rubbed her back while she wiped her cheeks and chin with the lacey shirt she wore for Tyler. She apologized again.

Mom peels away at the offending hoof like a potato, until a petal of pink like a light bruise appears over the plane. Mom bites her bottom lip, removing layer after layer of the bruise. A tiny hole appears. A thin mauve stream weeps from the opening.

Michael was funny, fun. The sparkplug of the kitchen. The sun of their social circle. He directed the crew and Heather followed, like the rest, laughing at his antics – stealing lawn ornaments from yards, climbing onstage during a band’s performance, leaping over a bonfire of discarded furniture.

“You were both so drunk,” said a coworker the day after that night. “So we left.”

“He was on top of me,” Heather said, her voice hoarse and weak, her body trembling and sweating like she was coming down with an illness.

“Oh, shit.” The coworker turned toward the kitchen window; the heat lamps glowed on Michael like a hazy mirage. He was cutting something up. Chop. Chop. Chop. “I bet he doesn’t even remember. You were both so drunk.”

“Something got weird,” he said later that shift as she pulled plates of burgers and French fries from the kitchen window. He didn’t avert his eyes. He smiled. And the coworkers surrounding Heather laughed, and conversation flitted to what she missed – a man spitting flames for tips on a street corner, someone throwing a burrito at a police car, a woman in thick red lipstick kissing Tyler.

A sharp, bright pain radiated behind Heather’s ribs. A pain she felt responsible for. Maybe she took off her shirt, lured Michael to the floor after she realized Tyler was through with her or maybe it didn’t happen, not the way she remembered – the flicking and pressing and gagging. Maybe it was a nightmare.

As a child, Heather didn’t call out after waking breathless from terrible dreams. She silently contained the fear, switched on a flashlight, and padded to her parents’ room. She crawled her way between them and woke to the soft brush of Mom’s fingers over her hair.

“You want to tell me, hon?”

Heather would shake her head. Daylight would erase the dream, no need to conjure up the images, describe the scene and sensations, relive the nightmare.

“Whenever you’re ready. I’m here.”

Heather began hiding in a bathroom stall between serving tables, side-stepping invitations, spending her free time with the laugh track of any sitcom, waiting to feel like herself again, certain the growing trepidation and unease would evaporate like a puddle on black pavement, certain her silence would push the memory to the recesses of her mind.

“Everything’s good!” she’d tell her parents over the phone.

“Are you sure, hon?” asked Mom. “Seems like you’re calling more, spending more time on your own.”

Then on a shift a couple months after that night, a bar patron hunched over The Chicago Tribune while Heather poured whiskey into a tumbler, eyes landing on a headline, darting across the tiny type.

A university student named Ruth ignored a man’s catcalls. So he strangled her in a parking garage.

Why didn’t she just smile? Heather thought. All she had to do was smile.

That night, after avoiding another gathering, scrolling numbly, absentmindedly through Instagram and Help Wanted ads, showering and scrubbing herself raw, she rubbed the pillowy down of her duvet against her throat and thought, like a revelation, Why didn’t he just not kill her?

She quit the restaurant the next day, got her own grown-up job, a receptionist for a couple who sell custom window blinds.

“Getting closer,” Mom says. The hoof’s shavings rain on the cold, concrete floor like cut-up paper. The bruise grows darker, the hole larger, the stream stronger. “Here’s the culprit.” Something black and jagged embedded in the sole.

“How could it go on with that thing in it?” Heather wonders aloud.

“What we can endure, huh?” Mom presses the end of the file against the rough mass, finding leverage, working it like a stubborn blackhead while the cow flinches and moans. “Until we can’t anymore.” A tear trips down Heather’s cheek.

Finally, Mom pinches the object with pliers and yanks it free, causing an eruption of blood, pus, shit.

“There we go,” says Mom. She hands off the pliers, intent on rinsing the wound, clearing the abscess. Heather plucks the stone from the plier’s grip, squeezes it, the jagged edges jabbing and pricking her fleshy palm.

She wonders if the heifer will ever fully heal. Will there always be a scar, a sensitivity with each step, a slight limp? But it’s not broken.

Tears continue to fall down Heather’s cheeks as Mom bandages the hoof. “There we go, girl. All done. Good job.” She releases the tended cow.

“I thought he was my friend,” Heather says, squeezing the stone in her palm.

Mom peels off her gloves and goggles, the wrinkles around her eyes etched in concern. “What’s going on, hon?”

“I thought he was my friend,” she says again, her lower lip protruding and quivering as she staves the sob at the cusp of her throat. Mom opens her arms, draws Heather against her.

“It’s okay,” Mom says. “Let’s get it out.”