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51 Mercy She spends the night with a man who once hunted deer, who keeps squirrel meat stacked in his deep freezer, the white ice rising over red cubes as if the animals’ fur had returned. Cold night, she rolls closer to fit the curve of his quiltslurred spine. She remembers the patches’ outlines: scattered houses snipped from dead women’s linen, those thin A-frames. Better to snap the neck of a shot deer than to wait for it to slowly bleed. He believes this. A sleepwalker, he often wakes with a different woman’s head between his knees. He holds her vertebrae in place as one hand cups the jugular, the other seizes the skull. He wakes to the dull warmth of limbs kicking the sheets, to the scream of a deer becoming a woman. ...

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