Small Deaths

by Sarah Bradley

After she made sure the casita was ready—pillows fluffed, towels neatly folded, fresh liners in all the bins—Nadia poured another cup of coffee and went to sit on the front porch of the house her father had built. The view wasn’t particularly impressive, but it was all there was to look at: spiky sotol and gangly ocotillo, a dirt road winding its way toward the blacktop highway. In the distance, a cluster of low-ridged mountains pierced the horizon like broken teeth. It was late September, but autumn felt a lot like summer in West Texas. The sun was high overhead and merciless, the desert silent and still. The green SUV speeding down the highway was the only sign of life.

Not many cars passed this way, but it was too early for the guy who had booked the casita that weekend. His name was Daniel, and he looked to be about thirty, going by his Airbnb profile. His message said he’d be traveling with his girlfriend, which was the only reason Nadia accepted the reservation. Like most folks out here, she knew her way around a shotgun, but she didn’t like the idea of being alone on the property with a stranger who was also a man. Thankfully, it was rarely an issue. Most of her guests were young women off on some kind of spiritual retreat. When introducing themselves, they would speak in wistful tones of wanting to find themselves in the desert, but the empty wine, whiskey, and tequila bottles they left behind suggested they hadn’t much liked what they found. 

She tried not to judge. It made life easier out here—and anyway, she knew what that was like. The day she first drove into town, Nadia had to stop at the general store to ask for directions to her father’s place after her cell phone signal evaporated. The men drinking beer out front had leered at her, and one of them asked if she was from Brooklyn or Austin. Suddenly she felt very foolish in her vintage sundress and cowboy boots. The men were decent enough to her once they learned she was Billy Lambert’s daughter, but she made sure to keep her distance. She knew all too well that some people come out here not to find themselves, but to get away from something. 

The SUV came into focus as it drew closer, cutting through the silence with its engine’s metallic drone. She expected to see it go whizzing past, but instead it made a sharp turn onto her dirt road. Plumes of dust trailed like a procession as the car made its way toward her. When it came to a stop next to her father’s old pickup, Nadia pushed her annoyance aside and got to her feet. 

A man emerged from the driver’s side. It was Daniel, no question, though he was shorter than she had imagined, and he looked a bit older than his picture. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, both of which seemed tighter than necessary. His thick, wavy hair was the color of wet sand, and he had the bland good looks of someone who peaked in high school. Cute, if you were into that sort of thing. He removed his sunglasses and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. 

“Are you Nadia?” he asked. 

“That’s me.” 

 “Thank god. I was afraid I was about to get shot, trespassing on somebody’s property out here.” The tension in his face melted away as he gave her a sheepish grin, brown eyes crinkling. Okay, fine, he was cute.

“You must be Daniel. You’re early.” 

He nodded, replacing his sunglasses. “Is that okay? I know you said check-in was three, but I got an early start.” 

She frowned and looked back at the car. “Is there someone else? I thought you were bringing your girlfriend.” 

The shadow of a grimace flashed across his face. “She wasn’t feeling well. Came down with something last night. Didn’t seem that serious, but she didn’t want to chance it.” 

“Okay,” she said. “Let me show you the casita.”

He grabbed his duffle bag and followed her around the side of the house to the casita. The tour didn’t take long, but she was gratified to register his satisfaction with the decor: longleaf pine furniture, wool Pendleton blankets, a cowhide from a local ranch covering the stained concrete floor. Nadia knew her guests didn’t pay two hundred dollars a night for a roof over their heads. They were paying for an idea, a stylized image of the American West. The artfully composed pictures they posted to their friends and followers helped confirm that their money was well spent.  

 “We run on septic out here,” she said as she flipped the switch inside the bathroom. “And we’re in the desert. So try to conserve water where you can.”

“You’re saying no bubble baths?” 

“I wouldn’t recommend it.” She turned the light off and pulled the door shut. “I think that’s everything. There’s a binder on the coffee table, for all the shops and restaurants in town.”

“Is there a key?”

“On the cow skull.” She gestured toward the wall. Most people didn’t bother locking their doors out here, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “Enjoy your stay.” 

She turned on her heel and opened the front door. Daniel receded into darkness as she walked into the blinding rectangle of light.

“Hey,” he called out from the doorway, forcing her to turn and face him. “Can I ask you something? What do people do around here? Besides the shops and restaurants and all that.” 

“Same thing they do most places, I guess,” she said. “It’s really up to you. If you’re into hiking, there’s some decent trails nearby.”

Nadia went into the house through the back door, picked up her dog-eared copy of Bad Behavior, and grabbed a Modelo from the fridge. She made herself drink it very slowly as she read so that the feeling of inebriation crept up on her like a cat circling her ankles before settling gently into her lap.

Nadia suddenly noticed the sun was going down; she could tell by the angle and intensity of the golden rays slipping through the gap in her curtains. She put aside the book and went out to the front porch. The mountains were glowing purple beneath a bruised and darkening sky. With irritation, she noted that Daniel’s car was still there. She had hoped he would have gone into town by now, that she wouldn’t have to see him for the rest of the night. 

She went back inside and opened her laptop to check the news and her social media accounts. What do people do around here? Same thing they do most places. She never knew whether to be grateful or resentful that she had decent Wi-Fi on the property. The guests liked it, anyway. They said they wanted to get away, but they didn’t, not really. It was an outdated notion, there was no “away” anymore. 

As she scanned her inbox, she saw a name that made her mouth go dry. It had been years since she heard from Annie. Something curdled inside her as she read the message. Thought you’d want to know. She clicked on the link, which directed her to the website of a funeral home in Austin. Victor James Reinhardt was called home into the arms of our Lord on August 29.

When she reached the bottom of the page, she scrolled back to the top. She read through it again, taking note of all the messages of condolence. Can’t believe he’s gone. I’ll miss you every day. Finally she made herself close the laptop and put it away. In the kitchen, she poured a shot of mezcal and drank it down in one gulp. The dusky contours of the room began to grow soft and indistinct. A memory was pressing down on her, the smell of agave-laced sweat and Victor’s hand over her mouth. The way he said afterward, It was going to happen anyway. Yes, they’d been drinking, and yes, they’d been flirting. They were friends, but there was something else between them, a giddy, exhilarating tension that was impossible to ignore. Maybe Victor was right, maybe in time, it really would have happened anyway. But not like that, with his weight pinning her down.

The bottle of mezcal was slightly less than half full. Nadia picked it up and carried it outside with her. When he answered the door, Daniel was shirtless and looked as though he had been asleep.

“Hi,” she said. “Did I wake you?”

“It’s okay, I needed to get up anyway.” He threw his head back and yawned, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his white throat. His chest was sculpted and conspicuously hairless. “Didn’t mean to sleep so long. That drive really took it out of me.” 

“I thought maybe you could use some company.” She held up the bottle. “I brought booze.”

“Wow, what a gracious host. Five stars.” He took a step back to let her in.

She walked past him into the cool darkness of the casita. With the heavy blackout curtains drawn, the space felt subterranean. “I hope you like mezcal,” she said as she pulled two rocks glasses from the kitchen cabinet.

“Definitely.” He grabbed his shirt from where it lay crumpled on the bed, turning away from her to pull it on. “It’s nice of you to share.” 

“I didn’t feel like drinking alone.” She pushed the glass over to him, and he raised it in the air.

“Salud,” he said. 

She clinked her glass against his and tapped it on the counter before bringing it to her lips. “So,” she said, the warmth of the liquor radiating through her chest. “First time in West Texas?”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “How’d you know?” 

“First-timers always ask what there is to do out here,” she said. “If you’d been here before, you’d know there’s not much.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, chuckling. “This trip was my girlfriend’s idea.”

“What did she want to come out here for?”

“I don’t know.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Art galleries. Sunset yoga. Something called a sound bath.”  

“Sounds about right. My dad used to say the desert attracts three kinds of people—hippies, drifters, and nutjobs.”

“You’re from here?”

“Not exactly.” Nadia looked down at her empty glass. “It’s a long story.”  

“So give me the short version. Or the long version. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.” 

She picked up the bottle and refilled both their glasses. “Well, this was my dad’s place. He built it himself. Not this . . .” She gestured to indicate their surroundings. “This was all me. But he built the main house. He’d been living out here for years, doing god knows what. He sort of disappeared when I was a kid. For a long time, we didn’t really talk. But then he got sick. And he was a stubborn old bastard, wouldn’t move. He needed someone to take care of him.”

“So you just picked up and moved out here, to the middle of nowhere? And you weren’t even close with him?”

“Somebody had to do it.”

“Sure, but that’s a pretty big sacrifice.”

Nadia shrugged, remembering all the nights on the rickety futon. The days of drudgery, cleaning up after her father and fixing his meals. Changing his bedpan toward the end, giving him sponge baths while trying to avert her eyes. “I guess I was ready for a change,” she said. “Anyway, that was . . . five years ago? When he died, he left everything to me. So I had this place built, slapped it up on Airbnb, and here we are.”

“You didn’t want to go back?”

“I always thought I would, sooner or later. But when the time came, I couldn’t imagine going back to my old life. It seemed easier to just stick around.” 

“Wow. I think that’s really brave.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “Sometimes I dream about doing what you did. Just leaving and starting over somewhere new. But honestly, I don’t think I have the guts.”

“To run away?” She scoffed. “It’s not like it’s hard. It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

“Maybe. But what if it feels easy because it’s exactly what you’re supposed to do? What if it’s easy because that’s what you need?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly good at knowing what I need.”

Daniel reached out and took hold of her hand. She stood very still, watching his thumb go back and forth across her wrist, over the delicate bones and blue veins so vulnerable and close to the surface. 

“I feel like this is the part where I’m supposed to kiss you,” he said. 

Nadia looked at this man in front of her, his full lips and flared nostrils, his laughing, watchful eyes. She had known desire that was warm and tender, and desire like an icy hand on her throat. Desire as familiar and comfortable as a dog at her feet, and desire that broke her down, chewed her up, spit out an entirely new being. She had known them all and grown weary of them all, and she’d seen how desire could be twisted into a weapon. But she would let him kiss her. It seemed inevitable, the conclusion toward which they had both been angling. What else had she come here for?

He pulled her to him and pressed his mouth against hers. The kiss was a good one, administered by someone confident both in his technique and in how it would be received. She wanted to keep pretending to be cool and unflustered, uninvested either way, but here was her mouth opening wider, her tongue moving forward to meet his, a small cry issuing from her throat. Their bodies collided, and he pushed her back against the kitchen counter. She could feel the urgency of his body straining toward her, too heavy and powerful to resist. A jolt of panic as her body remembered. How tiny and helpless she had felt. 

“Do you think you can drive?” she asked when she pulled away from him. 

His eyebrows shot up, his eyes flashing with confusion. “What, right now? I wasn’t really planning on it anytime soon.” 

As he reached up to touch her cheek, the back of his hand grazed her breast. This brief contact triggered a burst of sensation, a little constellation of pleasure. His face lunged toward her, and she turned so that he kissed the corner of her mouth.

“It’s just, I feel like dancing,” she said. “There’s a place we could go. In town. It’s not far.”

His lips twitched, but then he broke into a smile, the kind you give a small child who’s said something funny but doesn’t understand why. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s go dancing.”

As the car barreled down the highway in the moonless blue twilight, Nadia began to regret forcing them down this path. The bar she was thinking of wasn’t for tourists. Some of the men from town would be there drinking, and every moment she was there with Daniel, she would be aware of them watching, aware of their eyes on her. They would know something about her, or think that they did. She had gone to great lengths to keep her life private—no easy feat in a place like this, where everyone knew everyone and everyone talked. One stupid decision, and that would all be ruined. It would have been easier to go ahead and fuck him. He would expect her to anyway, whenever they got back. Even now, his hand was on her thigh, inching higher as they rounded a curve in the road. She felt a familiar tension rising. Soon she knew he would ease his fingers into the gap between her legs, and she would have to decide what it was worth to her to try and make him stop. She didn’t know him well enough to know how he would react. She would have to keep it light and playful. Above all, she had to avoid making him angry. When you make a man angry, anything can happen. 

They were rounding another curve, picking up speed as they came down a steep hill, when a flash of grey and brown fur reared up in their headlights. Daniel withdrew his hand and returned it to the wheel, jerking the car to the right, but not fast enough. The car shuddered and lurched as something passed beneath its wheels. She felt as much as heard the crunch and thud of previously intact flesh and bone.

“Fuck,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “What was that?”

“Turn around.”

“Seriously? Whatever it was, it wasn’t big.”

“Just turn around,” she said. “Please.”

When Nadia was a child, before her father left, they had lived on a busy street. The way she remembered it, nearly every day there were little bodies in the road. She had to watch them get hit over and over again, until they were unrecognizable, until they became part of the pavement. Cats, mostly, but also squirrels and possums, occasionally even raccoons. She used to burst into tears when she saw them, hide her face in her hands and refuse to look. One day, her father decided he’d had enough. Six or seven, she must have been. They had just pulled into the driveway. He cut the engine, came around to her side of the car, and yanked her out of it. Grabbing her by the arm, he marched her up to the carcass and pulled her hands away from her eyes. 

It was one of the neighborhood strays, a little tabby she called Charlie. It used to come around their porch mewing and looking for food; she asked if they could keep it, but her parents said no. Now its soft grey fur was marred with blood and viscera. It had been a creature with its own wants and needs, capable of thought in some rudimentary sense, of feeling pleasure and pain. And now it was only this, a collection of splattered organs from a textbook. “Come on, Nadia. Enough of this foolishness,” her father said when she squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s just a cat. They don’t feel things the way we do. Go on, look.” She shook her head, but he refused to let her move until she gave in. She opened her eyes and stared until she felt nothing at all, like she had learned to look without seeing.

Daniel hit the brakes, cursing, and made a U-turn. There it was, bathed in the bug-flecked glow of their headlights: a jackrabbit, still twitching. Its entrails were splayed across the asphalt, dark and smeary as an oil spill. 

“Pull over,” she said, and he did.

Nadia got out of the car and walked up to the body. As she stood there looking, she wondered what it would take to end this creature’s suffering, whether she was capable of plunging her hands into the fuzzy gore and twisting its neck until it snapped. Then the twitching stopped, and the rabbit lay still. Daniel reached out and touched her arm. 

“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

“Give me your shirt.” 

Daniel looked down at the thin, well-worn pearl snap he had thrown on back at the casita. “What for?”

“We can’t just leave it here.”

“What? You’re joking.”

“We have to move it out of the road.”

“Come on,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry. But it’s just a rabbit. I know it’s sad, but . . . it’s dead. It doesn’t matter now.” 

She glared at him until he shrugged the shirt off and handed it over with a sigh. She bent down and started scooping up as much of the mess as she could. When she was satisfied, she crossed to the other side of the highway and placed the bundle beneath the spindly branches of a creosote bush. She folded the arms of the shirt carefully, doing her best to cover the shattered body. The darkness was coming on quick now; she could see the bright gauze of the Milky Way overhead. Somewhere off in the distance, a whip-poor-will began to sing its lonely, plaintive song. 

As Nadia made her way back to the car, the tears that had been biting at the edges of her eyes threatened to overflow. When she reached up to wipe them away, she felt something warm and sticky on her fingers. She lowered her hand and let the tears stream down her cheeks, cold and clarifying in the brisk night air. 

“Jesus,” Daniel said when he saw her. “You okay?” He tried to touch her shoulder, but she jerked away. “Seriously, it’s just a rabbit.”

Who cared about this little life, its small, useless feelings? She thought of all the men who had taken things from her—all the times she had gone along with their stories, forgetting her own. Don’t make this into something it’s not, Victor had told her. You wanted it. It’s not a big deal. And she had let herself believe it. It was easier that way, just as it would be easier to get back in the car and keep driving. She could see how the night would play out. They’d go to the bar, put some quarters in the jukebox. Daniel would twirl her dizzy, and she’d drink until she felt nothing, until he could have been anyone. Until she didn’t care what came after. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t even remember. 

She turned away and got back in the car. Daniel followed a moment later, slamming the door behind him with an ominous thud. 

“This was a mistake,” she said. “I’m sorry. I want to go home.”

A moment passed, and then another. She could hear the shallow rasp of his breath, like waves breaking against some faraway shore. When you make a man angry, anything can happen. He turned the key in the ignition and brought his hands to the wheel.

Published June 9th, 2024