MOOSH

Lee Tristan had never felt more vibrant, more in possession of herself, more in love with the potential of her future than she did as she pulled out of the busy lot at the Daley Jacobson Academy in Greenwood, New Hampshire with a job offer in hand that not only doubled her salary but also provided for her children’s futures. Energy coursed through her body, vital and electric, and she shivered with goosebumps. She had to fight not to shout or pump her fists or put her foot to the floor and burn rubber as she set out on the hour-long drive home.

On the road, Lee called her mother to share the news but got her voicemail. She thought about leaving a message, but she knew her mother would call back.  

Then she called her father, who answered his phone. 

“That’s great, Lee-Lee,” he said. “You going to move up there?” 

“Of course. I mean it’s about an hour away.”

“It’s not a good time to buy a house,” he said.

“But it’s a good time to sell,” Lee argued.

“Don’t do anything rash,” he said.

“They gave me a day,” Lee said.

“Good. Take your time.” 

“Listen, Dad. I’ve got to go, I’m driving,” she said, which she knew would tick him off as much as his lukewarm reaction had ticked her off.

“Aw Christ. You shouldn’t call from the car,” he said. 

“Love you too, Dad.”

“Yeah. Love you, Lee-Lee. Be careful, okay?”

She cranked up her music and sang along with Bruno Mars. 

The call she would have really liked to make was to Alex. She could tell him how much money she would be making, rub it in, tell him about one of the teachers in the department who was checking her out. She’d tell him the guy was hot and smart because Alex was always sensitive about not being smart enough. “So, I’m just calling to say we don’t need you, you big piece of…” 

Then the music cut out and Lee flinched. She had been feeding her mood with a little “24K Magic” as she wended her way down the sparsely populated street; now Emma’s ringtone blasted over the speakers: Emma memma fo-femma, Emma. 

Lee had wanted to give Emma the news in person. She was nine.

“Hey, Kiddo!” 

“Hey, Mom, how di…. go?” 

“It’s a great school. I could reach a lot of kids there.” 

“What ab… me?” Emma said. 

The call was breaking up, and Lee’s navigation system cut in. In one quarter mile, turn left onto Westford Road.She shut off the navigation. She was more than a half hour from home on a narrow two-lane highway and apparently out of reach of reliable cell towers. 

“Did you know…” Lee said, teasing, enticing her daughter. 

“What?” 

“Did you know they have one of the best choral departments in the state?”

“Really?” 

“Starting in sixth grade. If you can wait a few years. Free tuition for you and Richie, too.” 

“What?” Emma said. 

“Once he’s old enough,” Lee said. Richie was four and just becoming a person. 

Then Emma let Lee know the real reason for her call. “Hey, Mom. You said if… babysitter….. well, her…. boyfriend…. you said to…” 

Lee heard a male voice in the background, broken up, but distinctly the voice of a teenaged boy. 

“Is everything okay?” Lee said. 

She heard more static than content now, fractions of words, snippets of intent. “…not the…. don’t like…. Richie’s in…. nothing, but… “ 

It was an effort, but Lee stayed upbeat and kept her voice bright. 

“We’ll go out for supper, okay? Get Richie dressed and tell Jill to call me.” 

“What?” Emma said. 

Lee had used the girl once before, a neighbor’s kid who was convenient. Jill had a nice rapport with Emma—they were both interested in horses—but at 16, she was just open and vivacious enough to get into trouble if it came looking for her.

“Tell Jill to call me,” Lee said now, louder, as if she could override the shoddy connection and shout all the way to Newhope Falls. 

“What?” 

“Tell Jill to call me now!” 

The call cut out, Bruno Mars volumed back up, and Lee turned left onto Westford Road.

“Babysitters,” she said. 

About a tenth of a mile up, she approached a fork in the road. The route she was on veered right, while another, smaller road cut sharply to the left. She punched up the navigation screen on her dashboard, which wouldn’t give her full access while she was driving, so she pulled over. 

The highlighted route would take another 29 minutes, while the road to the left, a squiggly gray shadow of a line—Old County Road—promised to be ten minutes faster. She steered her RAV4 back onto the road and followed the gray line to the left, which immediately turned blue. 

You are now on the fastest route, her dashboard re-assured her in an all-knowing female voice, you should arrive at your destination by 5:32.

Bruno Mars lost his flavor in the exchange with Emma, and Lee punched up Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, which she liked to drive to when she was in a certain mood and needed a little pick-me-up. The call had dropped her into one of those moods. 

She wasn’t too concerned when the asphalt ended and her RAV4’s tires crackle-popped along gravel during the quiet opening of Grieg’s incidental music. She and the kids lived on a dirt road that starts paved, then becomes gravel for miles before turning back to pavement.

It grew dark quickly as the tree-cover closed in, and Lee turned on her headlights. 

A red, oxidized pickup truck facing out toward the road stood vigil in a short driveway under a turquoise fiberglass awning attached to a corrugated aluminum trailer. The truck looked like it had grown there. It was the first structure she had seen in a while. Another mile or so in, she noticed the power lines had disappeared. 

She navigated a sharp corner and a long straightaway appeared in front of her. On either side of the road, mixed in with the hemlocks and fir trees were established white birches, some standing tall, others dying in place, ghosts in the twilight leaning in, watching. Lee gunned it. 

At the end of the straightaway, the road cut sharply to the right and narrowed. She crossed a trickle of a stream that cut across the road, which she followed to the left, to the right, then left again. She could see a sign ahead and she turned on her high beams as she rolled up to it. 

CLASS 6 ROAD. NOT A TOWN MAINTAINED ROAD. 

“Come on, seriously?”

Her navigation put her just nine minutes from home. Something inside her knew it had to be wrong, but she trusted her GPS more than her own instincts and she drove on until the road turned into what was essentially a creek bed, and she clearly could not continue forward. It was 5:21 according to her dashboard.

The front tires of her RAV4 sank into the brush off the side of the road as she turned around and the vehicle complained but shimmied out of trouble, and Lee was retracing her tracks when the Grieg cut out and a generic ringtone—a ringing telephone—cut in. 

“Jill?”

“I can explain,” the babysitter said. 

“No boys. It’s that simple.” 

“I told him… just came over…” 

“Have the kids ready. I’ll be home soon. I got turned around.” 

“What?” 

Lee turned a corner and was back to her straightaway. 

“Get the kids ready. We’ll talk when I get home.” 

“Hello?” the babysitter said. 

Lee put her foot to the floor and flew along the open road. 

“Get Richie dressed,” she said, but the phone cut out, the Grieg volumed up, and a moose loped out of the woods directly into the path of Lee’s RAV4. 

The huge animal changed direction when it saw the vehicle, and Lee cut her steering wheel and slammed on her brakes, but it was too late. 

The instantaneous blow of the collision was lost on Lee. The ripping plastic, crunching metal, shattering glass, the explosion of the airbag and the direct blow it delivered to her face, the fall of the dashboard that crushed Lee’s legs as the moose collapsed onto the hood and windshield of her small SUV, all disappeared in the momentary amnesic anesthesia that accompanied the sudden, unexpected injury. She was keenly aware of the ensuing sigh of silence—a great deafening whoosh. The last thing she heard was the ticking, clicking, conking out of her vehicle before her world went black. 

The whine of a sad dog brought Lee back.

She felt as if she had scrubbed her face with sandpaper and rubbed her eyes with sawdust. Liquid drained from her nose, and she recognized the taste of her own blood. The dog’s lament came again, full volume and close, as if it were on Lee’s lap seeking comfort. She forced her eyes open. Everything was blurry. Her face was pressed against the steering wheel and the powdery, flaccid fabric of its spent airbag. She only then realized she was in her RAV4. She blinked her eyes hard, trying to sharpen her vision, then blinked them again. The simple act of opening and closing her eyes sent lasers of pain to her neck, her cheeks, the back of her head, and down her spine. She groaned. She might have spoken words.

The whine sounded again, above her. She tilted her head up, lifted her eyes, and saw, in the resulting burst of pain, the great black eye of the moose cow, which was pressed against the windshield, not a foot away from Lee’s face. She gasped and snapped her head back. 

The sudden reaction made her feel as if she were sinking, as if she were falling off a cliff, losing consciousness, but the moose whined again, a soft, mournful lament, and the cry pulled Lee back.

“Okay,” she said weakly, instinctually. “It’s okay. I’m sorry.” 

The moose cow’s breath fogged the windshield, which was cracked and buckled low over the passenger’s seat where the animal’s neck and upper body lay, but mostly intact under its head where its left eye looked in on Lee. Low moonlight penetrated the darkness and the animal’s eye sparkled. Lee’s breath mirrored that of the moose, and she took brief, meditative comfort in the act of trying to sync their breathing.

Her phone vibrated and rang. 

It was the ringing telephone ringtone. The sound came from the passenger’s side of the vehicle. She turned her head slowly, deliberately, and located the phone. It was in the far corner of the floor, under the glove box, face up. The screen was visible to her, but barely. On it, she could make out the number. It was the babysitter. 

Lee could see that the entire dashboard had collapsed over the floor, the center console, and her legs, which she saw now as she turned her head back in tiny increments. She couldn’t feel her legs, but the sight of them made her sick. Her jaw quivered. She fought tears and the welling urge to vomit. 

She reached for her keys, but the quick intent of movement sent shivers of pain through her body again and she realized her hand had risen only a fraction of an inch, if that. Her right arm felt as dead to her as her legs. She focused on the pain: pain in her neck, her back, her head, her shoulders, and her left arm, which she was relieved to find moved at her command.

She reached her left hand down into the pocket on her door and came back with a handful of receipts and gum wrappers, reached in again and came back with an escape tool, a little plastic hammer with weighted metal tips Alex had bought for her years earlier for emergencies. It also had a knife built into its handle to cut through a seatbelt. 

The cutter, as she examined it closely, looked like nothing more than a rusty razor blade. She hooked it onto her seatbelt and pulled and sawed, but the motions brought pain, and although her left arm was functioning it had little strength—she had little strength—and the blade didn’t leave so much as an indent in the seatbelt. She put the tool between her legs, thinking she might try it again. If that’s all she had, she thought, she would have to find a way to make it work.

She then reached into the side pocket once again and found a little portable umbrella.

It was a ridiculously frilly red umbrella with a wooden handle Lee had bought for Emma that Lee had stashed in the door pocket months earlier after grabbing it from the mudroom before making a mad dash from the house to her SUV in a driving rainstorm. She’d forgotten it was there, but now she saw it as a potential lifesaver. 

There was no escaping the weight of the moose, Lee knew, but if she could get to her phone—if she could get the phone to her—she might at least be able to summon help. 

The umbrella’s canopy was snugly secured with an attached Velcro strap so she could extend it in the car like a pointer without it opening wide, and then she could use it to drag the phone back closer to where she might be able to pick it up. 

She found the open/close button on the umbrella’s handle, depressed it, and it popped open, louder and faster than she had expected, barely clearing her chin, and the hard plastic tip slammed into the windshield just under the moose’s eye. 

The moose bellowed, lifted its neck, the car groaned under the animal’s shifting weight, and Lee faded.

She awoke to Emma’s ringtone. 

She squinted, brought the phone’s screen into focus. It was 7:13. She was losing time. She was also losing blood, she guessed. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but she could feel nothing below her waist. She was either crushed and bleeding internally or she was torn up and bleeding out, but she couldn’t tell. 

She took stock. Her injuries were not minor, but she realized that even if she knew more about her condition, there was nothing she could do about it. She could be bleeding out, or in, or all-over, but what she knew about the nature of her injuries didn’t amount to anything. 

What did matter was that her right arm was no longer numb: It hurt like hell. She tried to lift it, but even the slightest movement felt as if she were opening a wound, like she imagined it might feel to stab herself and then, instead of removing the knife, jerking it, slicing along the bone in her arm, like a chef with a dull knife deboning a roast. 

The thought made her groan, startling the moose cow, which lifted its head, and Lee reached up with her left hand hoping to soothe it. “Sh, sh, sh, sh, sh,” she gentled, scared to death it would reposition itself again. “It’s okay, Mama. It’s okay.”

The moose’s breathing slowed. She appeared to like the sound of Lee’s voice. In the early evening moonlight Lee could see the animal’s deep black eye and the gunk beneath it clinging to her fur—dried tears, Lee imagined. She considered herself lucky for not having hit a bull moose. If she had hit a bull moose, she would be dead. 

“Do you have babies, Mama?” 

The animal seemed to stop breathing. 

“Baby moose. Baby meese,” she said, and she laughed for a brief, painful second. “Moose. Moosh.”

That was the Algonquin name for moose, Lee knew. Or at least she thought so. It’s the name she remembered. She knew a few things about moose, a dozen or so things she had learned several years earlier when she prepared to teach a lesson to fourth graders. She’d skimmed information, gleaned what she could and had found a bunch of different names, different origin stories. 

“I once taught about you,” she said now. “As if I knew all about you, you know? Moosh. Moosu. It’s Innu. Algonquin. Different words. Moz. Mos. The natives called you Moosh before we ever saw you, Mama. There were a bunch of names. As if they were obligated to name you. As if we have the right to call you anything other than magnificent. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” 

The moose lifted its head again, and Lee reached up again and talked it down. “No, no, no, no, no,” she said, “sh, sh, sh, sh, sh.” 

As she brought her hand back it brushed the umbrella which lay across the steering column and her left thigh. She had forgotten all about it. She watched the moose, watched it watching her, as she eased the umbrella away from the windshield, clear of the steering wheel. She gripped the handle and leaned as far to the right as her seatbelt would allow and as far forward as possible, which bought her a few inches. She was able to reach the other side of her phone with the extended umbrella. 

“Yes,” she said, the tiniest of celebrations.

But she had little strength and at that angle, little purchase. 

If she could somehow move her hand up further for leverage as she dragged the extended umbrella back toward her… but there was no way. She tried again and again, dragging the umbrella over the phone. 

It reminded her of the claw games in the lobby at Walmart where if you don’t close the shiny metal claw entirely around a toy, it just drags over the whole lot of unattainable prizes. She felt like she had less strength than those claws. 

She dragged the umbrella over the screen again and again and again until the repeated motion lulled her to sleep. 

She woke to the ding of a text message from Emma. She could make out the time on the screen. It was 8:01. She had six text messages. 

She looked up at the moose. Its eyes were closed. It seemed to have stopped breathing. 

“Moosh? Moosh, are you still with me?” 

The animal didn’t respond. 

“Moosh,” she said, louder now. She didn’t want to be alone. “Moosh? Moosh. Don’t leave me, Mama.” 

She remembered the umbrella, which lay across the center console now, just out of reach of her good hand—her good, weak left hand. She would have to rise above the pain. She took a deep, agonizing breath, then another, deeper. And another.

The image of a butcher cutting meat off a bone arose again, but she pushed it down as she reached across her body with her left hand, reached under her right arm and lifted it up, willed it to work for a brief second, to grasp the umbrella just long enough to transfer it to her left hand. 

The transfer succeeded, she cried out in pain, and the moose opened its eyes and lifted its head ever so slightly. 

“There you are, Mama. Don’t go away, okay? Stay with me, Moosh.” 

She scraped at the phone as she had earlier, trying to move it toward her. She took another deep breath, willed herself to press down harder, and on one determined pass, she put enough pressure on the top of the screen to slide it about a half inch closer. On the next reach, she moved the phone another inch. 

The closer it got, the more she got a feel for it, the easier it became, and in mere minutes she was able drag the phone as close to her as possible, tucking it into the closest corner near the console. 

“Okay, Moosh. Here we go.” 

Big breaths, in through her nose, out through her mouth, she engaged her right arm with her left and leaned as far across the center console as possible, allowing her shattered right arm to drop down to the phone on the floor. She could see a portion of the phone and her hand lying atop it. She focused on that hand and only on that hand, then cried out like an Olympic weightlifter, focusing all her attention on the tips of her fingers as she squeezed the phone by its edges and slid it up along the edge of the rug, to the side of the console, but she lost the grip and the phone slid back down. 

“Focus,” she admonished herself.

The moose looked on, breathing steadily.

Lee had lost the grip on the phone when it caught between the edge of the carpet floormat and the plastic console. She resolved to go full claw, to grip the phone as tightly as possible, lift it up, and transfer it to her left hand as she had the umbrella, which, with its round handle had been a little easier to grasp. Mind over matter.

She dropped her hand again, gripped the phone by its edges, her thumb on one side, her pinkie and ring fingers on the other, and raised it up. When she had brought the phone all the way up to the edge of the passenger seat, she loosened the grip of her good left hand, slid it down her right arm toward her right hand and the phone, which she grabbed—success!—but as she pulled it back toward her, her right hand, its job done, gave over to gravity and knocked the phone out of Lee’s hand and it clunked down, first against the console, then against the seat, and it slid between the two as cleanly and deftly as a coin dropped into a slot machine. 

Lee sank into her seat and wept. 

Even with two good hands, a functional body, and access to four doors and a backseat, getting a phone out from under a seat was not an easy job. As she was, it was lost. 

She was lost. 

Whatever adrenaline had been pumping through Lee’s mostly numb body as she attempted to retrieve her phone was still present enough to keep her awake, which was good, she thought. The next time she dozed, she feared, would be the last. 

She thought of the emergency tool she had stashed between her legs earlier, retrieved it, put the razor slot over her seatbelt again, tugged at it once, twice. It was as if she were trying to cut shoe leather with dull safety scissors—with half a pair of safety scissors. She looked over the tool, the rusty, slotted blade, and the pointed metal hammer. The temperature was dropping, but the little hammer felt good in her hand, and she tapped at her side window once, twice, then gave it a good whack and it shattered and broke into a thousand little irregular shards and flopped out like a frozen wet blanket. She dropped the escape tool back into the slot on her door and looked up at the moose who was still awake, still engaged, and she cried. 

It was over.

“Where are your people, Moosh?” she said as she settled in, willing herself to relax, to rise above pain, to put aside sorrow, to engage, to take in the unimaginable.  

“Shouldn’t they be looking for you? Where’s your guy? Probably in a pool in Florida about now. A hot tub. With her. It’s so cliché, you know? I don’t know what drives them? Do you?” 

The moose’s breath fogged the windshield, which remained remarkably intact between them, as if the powers-that-be had seen to it they had a window on one another. Moosh’s head would eventually be in Lee’s lap, she knew. Their situation was precarious. 

“I don’t even miss him. Truth. I miss the convenience. Like now. He’d be convenient now. This babysitter, Moosh. She’s probably a good kid, right? But how do you know? She did exactly what I told her not to do. It’s all hormones, right? The whole world. All flesh and blood. My dick husband, my babysitter, her horny boyfriend. We’re all animals, Moosh. Flesh and blood.” 

Her pain welled momentarily, surprising her. But as quickly as it arose, it faded. She was losing touch with her body. 

“Will we ascend together, Moosh? Will our souls rise together? What do you think? Do you have a soul? I read somewhere that animals don’t have souls. One of those soul books. Some hormonally driven, soulless guy said you don’t have a soul. It bothered me, Moosh. People have so many answers that are just made up, you know?” 

Lee pushed a patch of broken glass out of her window, knocked more away from the edges, and let the cool air wash over her. 

Her phone went off. It was the Emma ringtone. She couldn’t see it anymore, of course. 

“Emma memma fo femma, Emma,” she sang along with the ringing, vibrating phone. 

“Will I miss them where I’m going, Moosh? Will I know to miss them?” 

She could feel herself fading, the numbness that earlier had made her feel as if she were sinking now gave her the sensation that she was floating. She could feel the tug of unconsciousness coercing her to give in, to give up. She was so tired. So very close to done. 

Richie appeared before her then.

He was just outside her window in his T-Rex pajamas, smiling at her, holding two wooden numbers from a puzzle he’d been attached to as a toddler. He still carried them around from time to time, a green number five and a purple nine. Hi Mommy, he said, and he just smiled and looked at her and he held out the little green number five for her to see. He’d been drawn to these particular puzzle pieces and had carried them around like they were the best toys. She’d asked him why, but he couldn’t say.  He wouldn’t say. 

This is what green sounds like, he said now. Listen. 

Lee listened to the silence around her. It was too early for peepers, the crickets were quiet, she could hear scampering on leaves, though, and Moosh’s breath. And her own.

Green sounds like everything, Mommy, Richie said. Then he held up the purple nine. Purple? Purple sounds like nothing. But there’s no such thing as everything and nothing. Isn’t that funny? There’s always something. 

Tears filled Lee’s eyes and Richie melted, liquified, became a fuzzy edged aura in search of a body and Lee’s chest felt as if it were about to explode. 

“I don’t know who Richie is, Moosh!” she cried. 

A different kind of tears overtook her now. 

“Emma will be okay. She knows what she wants. She’s nine. She wants to sing. Even if she never does anything with that, it will always define her. She’ll always be a singer.” 

She looked up at Moosh who was paying attention, it seemed—listening intently. 

“I wanted to write poetry when I was eight,” she said, sobbing now, fighting to stay. “I haven’t written a poem since college, but I’m a poet, Moosh. But Richie. He’s four. What does he know? He’s nothing. But he’s everything.” 

Her tears subsided enough that she could see again outside her window. A thin white birch leaned in toward and nearly over her SUV. A breeze carried chill air and the scent of decaying leaves, her own dried blood, and the rich, fetid warmth of the musky Moosh. 

“He won’t remember me, Moosh. He won’t remember me, Mama, just the idea of me. Mommy. He won’t remember me, and I won’t know what defines him and I won’t be there to help him find it, Moosh. I won’t know what he loves.” 

Lee’s phone rang again. Your mother is calling, the ringtone said, her mother returning her call from a lifetime ago. Call from your mother. Your mother is calling. 

“I need to know who my baby is, Mama.” 

Under the seat, the phone vibrated and rang—your mother is calling—and Moosh suddenly, finally raised her head. The car groaned. Lee gasped. Wide-eyed, she watched the moose scrabble up onto its gangly legs. It stood. Wavered.

The great beast bellowed, then moaned and grunted. Lee sensed movement near the side of the road and, in her periphery, could make out the shape of a smaller moose, a calf. Before going to her baby, Moosh took two hesitant, lumbering steps toward Lee, lowered her head to the window, and grunted softly. The grunt sounded like a purr to Lee who reached out and touched Moosh.

The animal’s muzzle was wet with blood. Or tears. Sweat. Or dew. 

Lee watched the magnificent Moosh limp off toward her calf and disappear into the woods.

Her eyes fell closed.

A pulse of blue light brightened her eyelids as she fell into a deep, deep sleep.

What does blue sound like? She would have to ask Richie.

THE END