"Did you put this Band-Aid on her?"

I hadn't been paying attention. All I could think of was returning home to an otherworldly emptiness, both eternal and internal. Out there on the side of the highway, everything I'd had left was there. God saw it, sitting in the passenger seat, He shoved a doe from the edge of the forest, and hollowed out the wholeness in my life in order to build that foreign chasm.

"Did you put this on her?" the veterinarian asked again.

"What?" I met her patient gaze. "No, it fell off of my hand." After a moment's pause, I asked, "Can I have it back?"

Before she responded, I was at the vet's side, pulling the bandage from Raleigh's fur, plucking loose a few hairs from her hide in doing so.

"I need to keep this."

And so I left the clinic with a bandage and a bill, without Raleigh, and I sat in my car for some time before putting the key in the ignition and turning. Through my windshield, I watched a young couple take their dog, a golden Basenji puppy, from their car into the clinic. It was getting late; I hoped the puppy was okay.

But when I did somehow manage to drive away, I took the exit toward home and circled back around the other way in order to once again stop along the side of the highway were Raleigh had taken my breath away. Lo and behold, there she lingered.

Along the edge of the woody plain, the doe that caught the attention of my dog's wandering eye was chewing the grass blades that had grown tall and untended by the city.

As I parked my car and removed the keys from the ignition, my hazards kept on tick-ticking while my feet again carried me, this time gingerly toward the quiet fawn. While I considered myself an obvious threat to her, with the crunching of leaves below me and my stature and all, the doe remained; however, I watched her cease in feeding and instead let her dark, glossy eyes meet the curiosity of mine. I was eventually just ten feet or so from nature's breathing, from Earth's creation, from the harbinger of the light in my life.

Closer, and closer still, I inched toward her. And when I extended my arm, to my amazement, she moved the leathery tip of her snout toward my fingertips. Her cold, wet nose reminded me of Raleigh's. Our lives met.

My palm slid along her head toward the rounding of her skull, between her ears, smoothed over with the fine grains of spotted fur.

Bending over, I plucked some grass and presented it to her. She carefully fed from my hand, and her body seemed to be trembling. I wondered if she was terrified. I questioned if she felt she owed me something, like this moment. I doubted she even recognized what had happened earlier that night—if she had even registered it.

I felt so increasingly much. For a moment, I was at the Curtain of the Temple, separating the holiest places on earth, and together with the doe I rocked back and forth in the cradle of life. We understood one another without speaking, listened without hearing, and united without knowing.

The bandage I'd twice placed on my hand had once again found itself off of me, and, instead, along the nape of her neck. As it had fallen against the body of Raleigh while I carried her, the bandage had removed itself once more and found comfort in another animal. From new death to nimble quiet, this reparation felt fluid in its methods and aided my calming.

Once my restless feet took me to my home later that night, which had swiftly become the early morning, I was planted just outside the front door, alone. The tiles of the foyer would never click again with the pang of any paws. The leash in the closet no longer had any reason to hang there. I could empty Raleigh's bowl in the kitchen, throw out her bag of food, dispose of her chew toys. I felt that everything had to be removed—all of it.

But then I thought of what I had already gotten rid of and where it was. I reminded myself of the bandage—the color of my skin and now a blemish along the doe's neck. When I had run my hand along that neck, why had I not sought vengeance. No one would have known. With my bare hands, I could have removed the air from the lungs in the young doe—but another life? Some unfair retribution? The end of my sensibility?

I admit that for a moment, I had given thought to taking all that had been taken from me. I proposed to myself: it would only be fair.

But the man along the side of the highway, the onlooker from only hours ago, had reminded me to be fair. I didn't need to hear it in that moment, but I remembered it then, with the doe. And thieving away its breath was unwarranted. So I held a handful of grass. Later, the deer kept on feeding, and I went home and struggled to enter.

Behind me, the sun of Tuesday morning was a slow moving cannonball in the sky, and I waited and waited until it walloped the horizon with a fiery passion known only by its kind—when I could look up at the moon in the same sky and know I was less of a man than the nighttime fragments were of the universe. I turned around to watch it rise, pressed my back against the door, and slid down until I was planted on my porch. The sky of the world was volatile, and the likeness of the moon and the sun being cast against the same heavenly ocean had impressed me my entire life. I'd seen cascading sheets of autumnal shades in Arizona canyons, and I had laid eyes on the sea. I had also seen my body thrown akimbo by a fresh despondency, one I had never asked for or knew the possibility of discovering. These low spirits had been thrust down my throat, an unsavory medicine to free me of my acquired tastes.

Such a meandering of my mind and soul led me down a clearance—a void lined on either side by quartz which forever extended upward and onward and ahead of me to a celestial cliff overlooking a promenade of the public. There, I saw my mother and father twenty-two years ago, ice skating in Rockefeller Center under the tallest tree to have ever been brought to New York City. There she was, a Norway spruce at one hundred feet, staring at the city and its enterprise. I remember when my parents, Flora and Murray, came back home from the east coast. I was six years old, and they brought be home a souvenir: a snow globe. At the time, my parents were the only people in my family to have traveled. Both sets of my grandparents had been born in the Missouri Bootheel and raised their families there, and when my mother and father were married, young love carried the two of them north to St. Louis, where I was born. Half a dozen years later, my parents wanted to see more. So they left me with my father's mother three hours from home and flew nearly one thousand miles to what they were led to believe was the greatest city on Earth.

For them, it was true. They fell in love all over again. And before they passed, they fell in love with the city and its namely state. After I finished high school and headed to college, they shipped off to Poughkeepsie just to be closer to their new love of old.

One night they must have been walking down Broadway, in love with themselves and the idea of each other, and in love with the new city, when through a window they laid their eyes upon a snow globe encompassing the entirety of that wondrous place. They traversed back another thousand miles and gave me New York City and its snow, all contained in a twelve-dollar crystal ball. They knew I would love it.

But they didn't know I was spiritually at the edge of a cliff above the city, watching them dance under the tree and the iron forest of Manhattan and the brilliant moon. Neither did I know whether or not they had actually ever done this. Nor did it matter. It's what I believed lived on in the snow globe.

They knew not of what I knew, and I knew not of their life away from me and Martin. The stars had no knowledge of the the sun, which was unaware of its countenance reflecting off of the moon, and I had yet to gain anything from having lived.

For once in some long while, I felt as if I was looking upon my mother and my father the way they had so looked upon me in my youth: with great pride, overwrought with devotion. Though, I could not help but take on the mood that followed.

The growing sunlight weakened the vision of New York in my head, and with an untrimmed nail, I traced the discolored ring of skin, seemingly cemented upon my hand, trapped between a weak end finger and my exquisite parting words to her.

When would the color fade? When, again, would I blend? When would the sun stop shining?

Somewhere along the weight of the day, I had drifted up into my attic, yanked the chain hanging from the light above, and found the old cardboard box labeled "Remy's Things." It held the globe that still, in turn, had not loosened its grip on just one moment of a New York City winter, where snow drifted down in rotations over Rockefeller Center.

As I sat in bed with my back leaning against the headboard, I shook the souvenir. And snow fell on that bright autumn morning in St. Louis.