Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey. --Malcolm de Chazal

CHAPTER 1

Of the Spine in General

Later, when Duncan teases apart the moments before the accident, splits the seconds with atomic precision, he'll take some satisfaction in telling Lily that his instincts were good. First, a gearing-down to slow the vehicle without jamming up the brakes. Second,a swerve toward the ditch but not into the ditch. And while there was no way to avoid the blow-- the thing had launched itself from the bush--he'd done his best to clip it with the driver's side rather than take it head-on.

What they won't talk about is the way Lily's arm shunted across his chest in an attempt to grab the wheel. To steer their destiny in the space before impact. He'll later recall this moment as something stretched and precipitous over which he was suspended, eggbeater legs and arms akimbo. Where life didn't so much flash before the eyes as shear away to reveal the truth; the reality of the peculiar, three-handed tangle on the steering wheel.

Once the car bucks and rears and comes to a stop, Duncan and Lily look at each other without speaking. This is his cue to take action. Lift his hands and respond to the shape of her face in the darkness, adjust her glasses, assure her they're alive. Of course they're alive, how could they be otherwise? Dying now, barely in their thirties, would just be indulgent. And if there's one thing they've been able to avoid this past handful of years together it's indulgence. Instead Duncan turns away from his wife to look at the intact airbag panels and tells himself that there's nothing he could have done differently. It was an act of animal terror. This thing that charged from the shrubs--and remains lodged under the bumper--came at the vehicle with a suicide will.
Next to him Lily moves. She cracks the passenger door open and the car fills with dim light and a pinging sound. Duncan blinks, knows he has to open his own door, get out there and see exactly what it is that's crushed under the hood. In the snapshot of headlight he'd seen something the ap­proximate size and shape of a snowblower. Only, with a shagged hide. And tusks. His thoughts move to Jurassic possibilities, to woolly and prehistoric museum pieces. It could still be alive. If it survived the ice age, isn't there a chance the thing is still alive? An even better chance that it's angry?
He engages his tongue to say to Lily, Stay in the car, the way a husband should. But as he unlaces himself from the belt and turns he finds her seat empty. The passenger door wide open. His pulse starts to natter away in his head like a little hand drum. A shape moves in front of the vehicle. Duncan leans against the wheel, his chest tender from the lash of the belt.

Lily is out there in front of the car, her hand held up to shield against the headlights, her nostrils curled in disgust.

Drive enough highway road and you begin to divide the animal kingdom into new phylum, organizing creatures by the amount of carnage rup­tured and splayed as you pass over them. Duncan remembers road trips as a child where his father could identify any beast by the strum it made against the transmission. That was a blacktail prairie dog, he'd say as they felt the knuckling against the Ford's muffler. Born last spring, third in the litter, a tick infestation in the right ear. In the backseat Duncan would rise to his haunches to verify the receding mounds.

It was his father who would later teach him to drive the stretch of I-94 outside St. Paul....

NANCY MAURO lives in New York City. She has worked as an advertising creative director and copywriter in Canada and the United States.

From the Hardcover...