Stampede
by mindy hitzeman
Hannah fingers the vial of pills in her coat pocket. She should have taken one that morning before Danny picked her up to go hiking, but she didn't want to listen to him complain about her being so out of it all the time.
"You never smile anymore," he tells her when she sleeps over at his apartment on the weekends. "You need to go out more," he says before leaving to shoot pool with his friends on Thursday nights. Danny is right, but Hannah doesn't know how to listen to him anymore–she's too tired to try and remember how.
Hannah has been too tired to go to work lately, and she knows that soon her boss Buzz will hire another waitress to replace her at the diner. Hannah needs the money because she and Danny are saving up for the wedding, but she can't seem to recall what time she's supposed to be at work in the mornings. Somewhere between Live with Regis and Kelly and The View she usually remembers that she should be at work, but by that time showing up would be useless.
Danny gets angry with her when he finds out she's missed work again, and he asks her how serious she is about marrying him. Danny is very serious about work; he was laid off from the GM plant three months ago, so he's been taking a course in gun repair through the correspondence program Sally Struthers promotes on television. When Danny completes his coursework he's going to open a shop with his brother Phil, and after that Danny says they'll all be on easy street. Hannah doesn't like the look Danny gets when he says "easy street"; his mouth opens slightly and exposes his sharp, white incisors. She finds herself staring at his teeth until he yells at her for not paying attention to what he's saying.
Hannah's been trying to avoid Danny for the last few days, but this morning he called at seven to tell her she was going with him for a hike at the nature preserve. "You need to get out of your apartment," he said. "The sunlight will cheer you up."
Danny doesn't understand that the sunlight will shine right through Hannah, right through the walls of her heart, thin and crinkled as parchment, and right through her brain, the dark heat hovering before spilling through the other side. She should have told him what she learned while watching Nova–that light is nothing but an optical illusion–but she could not remember the words to explain this to him.
Now Hannah is with Danny, dragging her feet through the dirty slush left on the trails by the unnerving warmth of an early February heat wave. The woods around her are vacant and brown, and Hannah closes her eyes to the great mounds of mud and orphaned snow lining the trails. She tries to imagine the woods in the spring–bits of green and red bursting from black branches–but the colors seem foreign to her now, and she cannot conjure their brightness.
Walking briskly in front of her, Danny whistles a nameless tune, and Hannah understands that he is bored. She struggles for words, for some emotion, stirring or otherwise, to bridge the cold ocean between them, but she finds nothing.
As they reach the top of a brief hill, sunlight pushes through the treetops, and Hannah turns her face away from the light, afraid Danny will turn suddenly and notice how the light divides her. But Danny doesn't turn. He's looking down at the creek bed, and Hannah watches his breath curl like smoke from his nostrils. "Look, Hannah," he says quietly. "Look down there."
Hannah slowly turns her head and hears shouting in the distance. "Jack," the voices cry. "Stop!"
In her eye's corner is a flash of movement, a faint flicker of tails and hooves–seven deer delicately stampeding in pristine unison. Behind the deer comes bounding a brown mutt, driving the herd across the stream with his playful yapping. Moments later a woman and man in red jogging suits burst through the trees. "Stop!" they cry, but the dog and the deer keep running until Hannah can no longer see them.
Hannah and Danny stand in silence, both staring at the place below, now empty of movement and absent of sound. The dog's gleeful barks fade and grow in the distance. "He's going toward the street," Danny tells her. "He's not going to stop."
Hannah thinks of the men who stop at the diner for biscuits and gravy after an early morning hunt. Longing for invisibility, she quietly hands them their plates, but they thrust polaroids of their victims in her face anyway. The pictures are always the same–a man in a flannel shirt and John Deere cap holding up a deer by the antlers, twisting its head to invoke some gross interpretation of the deer's former existence. The deer's glassy black eyes haunt Hannah's thoughts, and sometimes she dreams it is her head the hunter is holding up for the camera and her unblinking eyes cemented on the photographer.
"We'd best get going," Danny says. He reaches for her hand, but Hannah does not move. She watches for the barking dog to reappear, but he has vanished from the woods like film too quickly exposed to light.