Page 12 of What Rough Beast

“You haven’t even been gone for eight hours,” she chides me.

“You never leave,” I shoot back.

“Yeah, it’s kind of like Hotel California that way,” she says, then makes a guttural sound in her throat that might be laughter when I stare at her blankly. “C’mon, since you’re here. We’ve got an abscess to pop.”

In the office, I dig through the glove bin, looking for a matching pair and ignoring the pain when the elastic band snaps against the puncture wounds on my wrist. Widow pulls a possum out of his cage, a bulge sticking up between his shoulder blades.

“You wanna do the holding or the squeezing?” she asks me.

I opt for the squeezing, which pretty much ruins the one matching pair of gloves I’d managed to find. I strip them off when we’re done, glancing at the incubator.

“Did you wash the egg off?” I ask, peering closer. “The blood’s gone.”

“No,” Widow says. “But it needs to be turned.”

I open the incubator, cradle it in my hand; it feels a touch heavier than yesterday, meatier.

“I read about soft eggs last night,” I tell Widow as I lay it back down on the towel. “Apparently dinosaurs were born from soft eggs.”

“If it’s a dinosaur I bet I get a lot more funding,” she says, heading for the door as the old, corded phone on the desk rings.

“Restoration Acres Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, this is Ava,” I answer.

“Yeah,” a woman says. “I need you guys to come out here and get a baby deer.”

“We’re all ladies over here, ma’am,” I say. “In most cases, it’s best to leave young wildlife alone, unless it’s clearly injured or orphaned,” I read aloud from the Post-it note Widow has taped next to the phone. “And we can’t take deer; it’s illegal to harbor them.”

“Oh hell, it just took a shit on my lawn,” she says.

“That’s a pretty good indication that it’s eaten in the past few hours, so it’s probably not an orphan,” I say.

“How ’bout kittens? You ladies handle them?”

“Kittens aren’t wildlife, ma’am,” I tell her. “I can give you the number for the Humane Society—”

But there’s a click in my ear as she hangs up. In the doorway, Widow nods toward the phone.

“If she calls back, tell her we’ll take the kittens.”

“We will?” I ask, surprised.

“Take them to the vet and put them under, yeah,” Widow says.

“What?” I shriek, dropping the receiver. “Are you serious?”

“Completely.” Widow nods. “Cats are an invasive species with a rapid reproduction rate, responsible for the extinction of over sixty species. I’m not putting them in a sack and throwing them in the river, like she might. It’s humane and Doc Brewster does it for free because I’m keeping down the feral population. Don’t take it personal; there are about seventy-five million more of them out there.”

“And there are eight billion people in the world, but we still care when one of them dies,” I shoot back.

“Do we?” Widow asks, one eyebrow going up.

I can’t argue with her; I’d casually scrolled the news this morning, read about another mass shooting, a wave of flu deaths, and a plane crash. I’d forgotten about them on my drive here, my brain clearing the way for the next batch of bad news that will hit tomorrow. There’s a low, throbbing noise from the road, and Widow rolls her eyes toward the ceiling.

“I’ve got to feed that kestrel that came in yesterday,” she tells me. “Just stall him for a second.”

Darryl is a guy with a white beard and a Harley who keeps fortuitously finding wildlife to save as an excuse to show up at Restoration Acres and chat up Widow. This time, he’s got a massive snapping turtle strapped to his handlebars, claiming he found it on the interstate after it got clipped by a car. I’m wondering how to safely detach the turtle from the motorcycle when Widow comes around the corner from the aviary, a malnourished kestrel hanging upside down on her arm.

“Oh, hey,” Darryl says, not achieving the level of casual he was trying for. “I was just telling Ava how I found this snapper—”