Everything According to Plan in the Peaceable Kingdom by Kate Gehan

Everything According to Plan in the Peaceable Kingdom

by Kate Gehan

Tam was in the cereal aisle when it began–wild yelling from the front of the store, a clattering of carts. A deer accelerated around the corner, smashing right into her, knocking granola bars out of her hand, stomping her salmon, skittering over the shopping basket. Her head thunked to the linoleum as the wine can decorated with the shape of a house her daughter might’ve drawn when she was five spun and fizzed in circles. And then the creature was gone, leaving Tam on her back gazing up at towers of cereal boxes extending to the ceiling, re-considering the evening years ago her ex-husband had hit a deer on their way to his parent’s house.

Back then if Tam was sometimes bad, being good felt even better, and she mistook sarcasm for play. She taunted her then-boyfriend on the drive, telling him she’d messaged a dashing, famous trick pilot on social media to say she was a big fan. Tam repeated the pilot’s boastful tagline, reading from her phone, “With the diamond tip of his plane he could tear the world in half.”

Before Tam, her boyfriend had dated a photographer known for a series of nude self-portraits taken in front of famous paintings in museums. She was praised by critics for making important statements about permission, the art canon, and the social gaze. Tam was also envious of the photographer’s gutsiness and waist to hip ratio. Her boyfriend claimed not to care about any of it anymore–the photographer’s body was unimportant to him now–but Tam wanted a revenge she couldn’t articulate.

“We could meet the pilot together when he comes for the local air show” she teased, as if such an adventure might happen, loop-de-loop tricks, a cobalt sky. She sought adrenalin, the excitement of being alive reflected back to her.

Her boyfriend violently swerved the car and insisted he had not just hit the deer in the road. “It was already wounded!”

They got out to look.

There was so much blood. In the expansion of dusk, insects flit against the headlights, and Tam threw a fuzzy blanket from the trunk over the askew appendages. She wanted to press against her man, luxuriate in the odd cinematic scene to which her jealousy had possibly contributed, but he returned to the car. She had no one to lean on and her foot folded awkwardly in his absence, and then she was on the ground too, a few feet from a smear of blood.

Her boyfriend didn’t want to hear about meetups with trick pilots or stop for wounded wildlife. He wanted to sit at the dining room table and eat his mother’s pork chops and mashed potatoes, and wash it all down with a beer. Later Tam would be good and hold a napkin tightly across her lap and answer questions about how long her graduate program would take and what she would do for work given the state of the market.

With tall firs standing guard, moths and gnats swarmed the dying doe and Tam wondered how long her boyfriend would let her stay in the middle of the road while the asphalt’s residual heat baked through her jeans. She closed her eyes and imagined the photographer-ex posing with the trick pilot in front of Rousseau’s A Peaceable Kingdom, discordant beasts in harmony, Tam and her boyfriend standing on the periphery, not in the photo at all. How quickly the reality of what happened diverged from the truth.

Suddenly the deer jolted up and weirdly leapt past Tam and through the open passenger door, kicking Tam’s boyfriend in the head before it collapsed on the backseat.

“Now what?” he screamed, holding his temple.

“Does anyone near your parents do wildlife rehab?”

“No one is rehabbing this doe.”

“It is very much alive,” she insisted.

“It is very much bleeding all over my car,” he said.

“I’ll find someone.”

Using her phone, Tam guided them for thirty minutes out to an old woman with a barn. She helped take the finally-truly-dead doe out of the sedan and kindly offered to handle its disposal as Tam cried.

The pair were two hours late to dinner with his parents, and while they ate reheated plates, his father posited his son had not hit the doe, but instead the doe had trouble during a birthing and had collapsed on the road from blood loss.

“Could be a fawn somewhere out there now.”

“It’ll starve or the coyotes will take care of it,” her boyfriend said, satisfied with the natural order of things.

In the grocery store shoppers shouted, “It’s by the dairy case!” and tap dancing sounds faded in the distance. The manager announced over the speakers, “Remain calm. The police have been notified.”

Tam pulled the slashed salmon package towards her, pink flesh oozing through the hoof-pierced plastic and she smeared it with her fingers, inhaled the smell of the ocean, and rubbed it across her cheeks until she felt cool and revived. Tam’s weekends without her daughter had become goopy, fastslow, and she did not miss her ex, and she loved her animal self. She sat up and opened the wine can properly and took a few sips before making her way up from the mess of cereal boxes. When she activated the automatic doors to the parking lot the deer rushed past her, as if she had been waiting for Tam all along, and Tam tipped her baseball cap and said, “After you, Ma’am.” Later in the summer she would take her daughter to the forest to hike–a return to a place where they could roam softer ground, enveloped by the canopy.

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Kate Gehan’s short story collection, The Girl and The Fox Pirate, was published by Mojave River Press in 2018. In 2023 her fiction was included in the anthology Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away published by (Alan Squire Publishing) and in 2024 appeared in Best Microfiction 2024 (Pelekinesis). Her writing has also appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Moon City Review, McSweeny’s Internet Tendency, Split Lip Magazine, People Holding, Literary Mama, Bending Genres, Bluestem Review and Cheap Pop, among others. She is nonfiction editor at Pithead Chapel. Find her work at kategehan.com.