Feral – Bailey Snow

April 18, 2025

We fucked on the sodden banks of the Mokelumne, the river swollen from the rains that had scoured the hills the night before. Neither of us could host as we both lived with our parents and each sought to avoid meeting the other’s with our clothes on the floor. Despite this we attempted to delude ourselves that outdoor sex was the better way, that it was primal and raw and would reconcile any division from our origins. We found it animalistic in the sense that we were prey: constantly looking over our shoulders, fucking so quietly that the white noise of the riverflow masked any sounds we made, and silencing each other when we came. I clapped my hand over her mouth and pressed my face into the hollow of her neck while her nails carved into the meat of my shoulders.
        When it was done she said she had to piss or she’d get a UTI. She squatted by the bush that had hidden us and I stood sentinel, eyes on the overcast diffusion of the late morning sun. Then we switched places and I let my stream carve into the pocked earth where hers had pooled, mixing scent and salt for whatever beast might come sniffing in the night.
        After we finished we walked naked down the banks for about 100 feet. There in the water tangled among the branches of a fallen and waterlogged cottonwood lay the carcass of a dead boar beset by a putrid bloat, its flesh split where it had beaten against the rocks. I took a branch from the tree that held it and pried it loose, the body rolling sluggishly into the current, freed to follow the river’s dark procession. We watched it drift away then I stooped for stones and hurled them one after another at the departing pig and she reluctantly did the same.
        But I was a man, or so I thought at the time, and I wanted a goddamn explosion. I reached into my old Jansport from high school, the pinking cut of the two other wrapped condoms from the three pack lightly scratching against the back of my hand. In my palm I felt the polymer frame of my Glock 10mm which I carried for defense against both bears and tweakers.
        I pulled it out and racked the slide, dropping a round into the chamber with a metallic thud which muffled her confused pleading. Closing my left eye, I raised the gun and took a plumb center shot at the boar, becoming acutely aware that neither of us were wearing earplugs as soon as I squeezed the trigger. The bullet entered its abdomen and the belly ruptured in a wet noisome burst, the beast’s rotten viscera an accursed fallout splashing into the river which bore them off like the tithes of some ancient and indifferent god.
        Putting her hands to her ears reminiscent of Munch, she screamed “what the fuck?” at which point I realized the gravitas of my mistake. If the cops weren’t already on their way because of reports of two horny 19 year olds fucking on a river bank, they would definitely respond to a shot fired, the crack echoing through the hills. We dressed in haste, the both of us fumbling with buttons and zippers as the threat encroached, and made for the car. The engine coughed to life and we drove out of that place without a backward glance, the weight of silence hanging heavy between us.
        We dressed in a hurry and ran for the car and got the hell out of there. A few weeks later she left me. Saw her profile on Facebook not long ago. She’s in a handful of tinnitus support groups. Can’t say I don’t feel some guilt over the possibility that I had a hand in it, the guilt following like a shadow where the light of memory shines.