Free A Single Shot by Matthew F Jones

manicured pubic bush, emanating the smell of apple-essence shampoo? The wet, musky taste of her?
    In his sleep, John thrashes out with an arm, pushes open the truck door, and, with several empty beer cans and a schnapps bottle, tumbles onto the dew-covered grass surrounding the trailer, now convinced that his crime is more atrocious, even, than murder. His head hurts. His vision is blurry, though clear enough to see that the truck sits in the center of his unmowed lawn, a few feet from the trailer’s front door. He has no memory of parking it there. He can’t recall driving it home.
    A damp, dew-marred morning breathes an earthen, fresh smell, slightly tempered by the odor of just-spread cow shit. Sitting like a pillow on the valley, fog obliterates the world past a hundred yards. Nobies’ electric barn cleaner drones beneath the bone-white canopy. Their yellow, toothless hound howls. John wonders if following his discovery of the dead girl he went into a trance-like state during which he committed horrendous, unforgivable acts he can’t consciously recall. The thought is nearly unbearable. He picks up the schnapps bottle and knocks himself over the head with it. The bottle’s refusal to break infuriates him. He flings it at the pond. The splash starts the frogs croaking. Two ducks lift off.
    Drinking coffee later at the kitchen table, he consciously summons her face and finds it lacking in particularities, those individual nuances that make a person unique. This strikes him as being as sad almost as her death itself. He feels intimate with her, a closeness beyond his ability to understand. A familiarity that has nothing to do with sex. The coffee tastes bitter to him. He throws it out and opens his first beer of the day. He picks up a deck of cards, aimlessly shuffles them,starts playing solitaire. At the very least, he thinks, he owes her loyalty, which requires that in his memory she be forever preserved as the person she truly was and not as he dreams her. The implications of this are muddled and horrible.
    The phone rings six times and stops.
    The deck screen door creaks open. Something enters. The door bangs shut. Mutt, the three-colored stray that lives at John’s when it feels like it, shoves its wet nose in his lap. “Where you been, Mutt?”
    Mutt wags its tail.
    John stands up, walks to the refrigerator, pulls out leftover spaghetti, dumps it with milk in Mutt’s bowl. Mutt greedily gulps the food. Idly scratching the dog’s burr-impacted neck, John gazes down the valley at the slowly rising fog while mentally trying to reconstruct the previous evening, which in response to his thoughts roils like a quagmire of ambiguities. He remembers Obadiah Cornish openly referring to John’s poaching and, later—had he been dreaming?—the dead girl’s transmogrifying body and his orgasmic spasm entering it like a gunshot.
    The phone rings again. This time he answers it. It’s Cecil Nobie wanting John to come down and give him a hand pulling a heifer out of the muck.
    “Anne and the kids is to her sister’s for the day’s why I troubled ya.” Nobie spits, then shakes his head, too large for his bandy-legged little body that’s wearing fishing waders. The cow’s in up to the tops of its legs in a quag at the rear side of the barn where runoff from the meadow and mountain pools.
    “What happened the fence?”
    “Power went dead.”
    “And she walked right through her?”
    “Like muck was molasses.”
    “Goddamn dumb.”
    “As a tongueless Polack. Figured we didn’t get a rope round her pretty quick, she’d be clear to China.”
    Standing at the edge of the quag, John grips Nobie’s left hand while he wanders as far as he can into the slime before tossing the looped rope he’s holding at the cow. He tries unsuccessfully several times to lasso the animal, which lows, exhales phlegm, and sinks deeper. With each failure, Nobie’s ruddy, sun-chapped face gets redder. In John’s injured shoulder, the burn