is the heat even on?

1.
"Is the heat even on?" was the first thing that came through my blistered lips this morning. I was still wearing my suit, black insulated coveralls with reflective piping. My head felt like a Mountain Dew can shot through with the beebees from those toy guns the three of us would shoot before we were were allowed to have the real thing. There was no blanket, just the suit, and I was using a Sorel as a pillow. I felt a burn across my knuckles.

I was on the floor, at the foot of the couch.

I sat up, looked around; the places they usually ended up were empty. I was alone in the cabin. The potbelly stove held only reddened cinders.

2.
Most nights, my dreams are veined with violence. It pulses though me. I've seen the way my own death will play out, and I've brought death to many others. There have been quarries where bodies go unnoticed, empty factories and silos set ablaze, dogs and cats impaled on galvanized steel stakes, eyelashes plucked out one by one, blood beaded surfaces.

But my waking life is like a sieve for these things. As soon as my eyes open, it's like the thoughts never occurred, as if I wasn't capable of it at all. Nobody would imagine I could dream up such things.

Go on, ask. Everyone will say I couldn't, that it's not possible. Not me.

3.
Last night, I remember the tavern. The old men there and especially the girls. There was one girl who was maybe the onus, the reason the night cracked, splintered, and dropped like a sick tree. That girl, she has name that is as common as one of those trees, the ones that backdrop everything up here: deciduous, fallen, first overcome by borers and now overtaken by fungus.

She told me about her job scrubbing up after emergency surgeries, the harsh chemicals that sting her eyes.

Shots of whiskey were spliced between pitchers of beer that seemed to keep coming. I paid, insisting, inching closer, pretending the music was too loud and this was the only way to hear. She knew better and played along.

Our talk become more personal. She had an uncle who killed his best friend last fall. Gun hunting season had been extended. The population of deer was so massive that everything was at risk. Cars were getting wrecked, people were getting hurt. Killed, even. Deer were decimating the fields rowed with pine saplings. Predatory wolves were strong on venison; they were breeding like mad, running amok and killing domestic dogs.

One shot did it. The uncle was in his stand and the bullet went through the crown of the best friend's head and dropped him right there. The uncle blamed tiredness and a heavy morning fog, but the jury saw it as malice. It later came out that they were right.

My mom had died, I told the girl, bubbles in her bloodstream. She fell over in the gift shop she ran for the tourists. It was the off-season and nobody came by so nobody noticed she was dead until hours later, when we got home and dinner wasn't on the table. We drove out there and found her curled into herself on the worn linoleum. Her features were as gentle as ever.

We couldn't afford to bury her a casket, or pay for any part of a funeral for that matter. But the community rallied and helped us out with a modest goodbye. My dad never got over her, but he remarried less than a year later. My sister was too young to remember her. I'm somewhere in the middle. There are images that come to me, but nothing I can invest myself in. She's just someone who was there once and now isn't.

4.
The girl and I drank more. We exchanged numbers, put them in our phones, texted just to test them out.

Then there was a split second where something set us off. You've been there before, I'm sure. It's where the slack goes out of the conversation, suddenly everything said before that is phantasmal; the only thing that matters now is the tightening, the tensing. You both recoil, even though, seconds later, there's no concrete trace of what was said or who said it.

It just happened. It always seems to happen.

She went back to her friends. Mine came to me. We yelled for more shots, demanded the whole bottle.

Last call had already been called, but we hadn't heard. The bartender kept slowly picking up glasses and mopping up the rings they left. He looked at us in a way that showed he was apologetic, but not truly sorry.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her leave.

I ran to the door, yelled out as loud as I could, "Fucking bitch!" She didn't even turn around. I hoped she hadn't heard, hoped my voice was just held hostage by the cold air.

5.
I ran back to the guys and said let's go. We'd follow her, keep apace of her car. We'd catch up. I could make amends, apologize. Let her know that I was sorry, that most of the time I just mess things up and could she forgive me? Could she love me, not right away of course, but eventually. Could we work up to it? I thought we could. Knew it. I was sure. I wouldn't say that, not yet. But she just needed to hear me out. It was the drinks, I'd tell her. The beer, the whiskey. Us, both of us, we're just fine. We'd only get better. I was sorry. Did she believe I was sorry? Did she believe that I could be sorry?

By the time we got the engines running, she was gone. I just kept muttering "fuck, fuck, fuck," feeling totally lost.

Snow had been falling. We realized they were the last ones to go out of the parking lot, so we found their their tire tracks and followed them.

6.
It was the usual brutality of my dreams.

We gunned it, weaving in and out of each others' path, going in circles. The world sped up, everything more urgent than ever, the way it is when you're drunk and feeling desperate and chasing some purpose that keeps slipping your mind.

The moon was bright, reflected by the snow. It was so bright we cut the headlights.

Fields of alfalfa we've hunted a million times. Fields we've ridden across even more.

Startled, they ran, sprinting off in a different directions. There was screaming—I didn't know they scream. I didn't know they know how to scream. We kept at them until several fell. We rammed them, kept at them.

With the engines still running, I jumped off and knotted rope around the leg of one. I threw the rope over the tree, pulled it taught, heaving it from the ground, and tied the rope off on a branch. Blood drained from between its watershed ribs. The thing hung there, still alive but barely moving.

Back on the seat I motioned, let's go.

They followed, throttles pulled.

Eventually we stopped, the way everything stops.

The door is never locked; we walked in and that was it.

7.
My phone was in my back jeans pocket, so I unzipped the coveralls, reached in, checked it and saw that I hadn't missed a single call. Nobody had tried to reach me.

I went to the window. The were right outside the cabin, spraying a hose and a using Brillo pad to get between the grooves in the treads.

They looked at me and made no gesture, just kept working. Kept at it, spraying and scrubbing.

The runoff stained the snow bright red.