THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 59
The man’s the tallest she’s seen, the
skinniest. His bone-colored coat is
blood-splashed.
I’m sorry to intrude. His growl’s
bearlike. But I knocked, and you didn’t
answer. I used my skeleton key.
He sits, holding Mihos, on the op-
posite couch.
The dog’s at his feet.
This cat, the man remarks, may make
a good mouser. He strokes his beard.
Maybe a vet appointment—it looks
mangy. But perhaps this is your cat. Is
it yours?
He leans across the coffee table.
His eyes widen.
Gretyl blushes. She realizes she
smells. But there’s nothing she can do.
She admits that she’s been feeding
the cat but can’t keep it.
Take it, she says. His name is Mihos,
she adds imperiously. He’s a lion-headed
deity.
Aha, the man says. Thank you. I’ll
give this prince a good home.
His voice deepens.
Your parents left, the man says.
Where’d they go?
Gretyl understands that the man’s
been watching her house.
I’ll be honest, he adds. You look
terrible.
She tries to move. She’s energized.
Perhaps it’s seeing her cat. She recog-
nizes the man.
She says, Well, you have blood all
over you.
The man glances down.
Aha, yes. I shot a buck! He adds
gracefully, Perhaps these are your par-
ents’ woods!
She nods.
His hands extend, palms up. I’ve
trespassed, he says. Forgive me. But,
tell me, were your parents going to eat
all those deer?
She whispers, No.
He says, My family comes from Pal-
estine. But I grew up in Kazakhstan.
Cold and beautiful, like here. In Ka-
zakhstan, if you see a buck, you shoot.
But, I admit, I didn’t just shoot a buck.
I also found a sleek fat doe, and I shot
her in the face. He watches the girl se-
riously. She’ll taste delicious, he says,
and I’ll eat her all up.
The girl blinks.
He saw fawns, the man offers, which
he let go.
He asks, Want a granola bar?
The girl says she can’t; she hasn’t
eaten in nine days.
Aha. He speaks casually. But he’s
a hunter. The child, he sees—saw
the moment he looked in the win-
dow—lies beside death. He sees death
reclining beside her, clutching her
curiously, ready to breathe into her
mouth.
Well, I’m hungry. The man stands,
stretches. I think I’ll use your phone
to order a snack.
He pads into the kitchen. His voice
rumbles. She hears him yell, Hurry up!
Bring it fast!
The man returns with tuna fish,
which he puts by the cat. The cat eats.
The man sits.
The girl whispers that he should
leave. Her parents will call the police.
Is that so?
The girl nods.
He leans forward. They won’t,
he says softly, because they’re God-
fearing people. And that means, he
says, they fear me. Because today I’m
God.
He’s scratching the cat’s ruff when
they hear sirens. First faint. Then
loud, close. The hunter holds the front
door open for the emergency-medi-
cal technicians who carry the stretcher
inside.Seven surgeons cut the girl open.
They test and culture. They pull all herintestines from her body, to clean the
putrefaction.
This is not possible, they declare. It’s
not!
Her appendix ruptured seven days
ago. All their textbooks agree. Perito-
nitis, septic shock. Massive heart at-
tack, heart failure. They’ve seen corpses,
not miracles. Surgeons excise rotted
sections of bowel. None of them will
forget this child, with her oval face,violet eyes, Roman nose, and neatly
plucked eyebrows, who’s alive when she
should be dead.- She’s in the hospital thirty-three days.
For weeks she needs feeding tubes, venti-
lators, respirators. Upon the hunter’s moon,
she turns fifteen. School friends deliver
notes from class. Her parents bring roses.
What a terrible case of malpractice,
they tell the surgeons. No one could have
known she had appendicitis. How could
we have?
But they pity Dr. Blood, who made
an honest mistake.
The girl’s scar is blood-red, rat-size.
Later, her parents pay for its surgical re-
moval. Gretyl’s grateful for their love. Her
father sits in her hospital room for an
hour every day and reads spy novels—
and he dislikes books! The mother braids
the girl’s hair. Hansa flies cross-country.
She’s cordial. A simple case of malprac-
tice, she says. The father agrees to con-
struct a sunroom for his wife.
A
fter years of study, Gretyl becomes
an anesthesiologist. She chooses the
underfunded, Oakland. She works through
recessions, protests, and pandemics.
She marries a tall Persian-Ameri-
can with a black beard, who works as
a federal prosecutor, has a bachelor’s
degree in forestry, and likes playing
Dungeons & Dragons.
They’re happy. But, despite their
efforts, surgeries to remove scar tissue
from her uterus and abdomen, and all
their prayers, they don’t conceive a child.
Gretyl lavishes her family with love,
and she pays for her parents’ house clean-
ers, landscapers, vacations. But when—
not often—she sleeps in her childhood
bed she sometimes hears a cat yowl
in distant woods. When she asks her
husband, What was that? he says, I didn’t
hear anything.
In the fall, when wind breaks and snaps
the tree branches, she dreams that she
hears the crack, crack, crack of a rifle. The
sound fills her with joy and expectation,
for several reasons, some of which she
can’t access. Primarily, she understands
that someday, in some universe, she’ll
meet Mihos and the hunter again. NEWYORKER.COM
Rebecca Curtis on fantasy and reality.