CW: Animal hunting, guns

This may be eavesdropping—but the men have got a gun, and forgotten their commandments.

The forest shivers. The man in the mud isn’t aware that any move he makes in the undergrowth bristles the whole woods with knowing, it ripples down the taut plucked strings of every spider’s web. The second man, laying his rifle out between them, pinches the mud man at the back of the neck. He’s batted away with a muttered fuck off, and the mud man fretfully gathers his anorak under his belly.

The gunman gusts, “You almost scared off the buck, Jack.” The mud man must be Jack.

Jack never says the gunman’s name, no matter how many times he looks at him. He wipes a wintery dribble from under his nose. “It didn—”

The gunman already hushes with a finger on Jack’s lips. He takes any excuse to put a hand on Jack, whether it’s gentle or it leaves a hard pink imprint in Jack’s skin. Jack’s voice is low, so it can hide under a breeze in ruffled ferns, as he leans over the gunman’s shoulder with breathy talk into his ear. “It didn’t notice. Too busy havin’ its last meal.”

I bow to the undergrowth to tongue worms from under soft wet moss. The forest floor is ripe with last meals.

With the rifle propped on a little mound of killing earth, the gunman steadies and lowers his chin until he’s bearded by the ground. Jack watches every muddy beat of the gunman’s flushed pulse, every hair’s breadth that his hot cheeks press into the cool dark green dirt. The gunman lets early mist sink through him like blood pools in a dead body. The three of us, and the birds, the trees, the sleeping foxes, the spiders dancing on the men’s legs and the worms thriving beneath them, I would like to think we enjoy each other, for now.

The gunman speaks so unexpectedly that the forest floor feels Jack’s heart leap.

“Remember when your dad showed us to shoot pigeons?”

Jack’s throat clicks loud. He goes doe-eyed. He keeps his gaze fixed on the shift of my pelt and my branching velvet bones, he’s simply concerned about not alerting me, he wants them both to drift asleep on full bellies of stewed meat, he couldn’t care less if the gunman hears hesitation in his throat.

“Yeah.”

“You were better at it than me.”

“Yeah.”

“On some sniper shit, you are.”

The men fall silent, and let me lap water from a clear disc of rainfall gathered in spiraling tree roots. Jack will not take his eyes from the line of fire. The gunman will not take his eyes from Jack.

“Bet hunters’re better shots than snipers,” Jack professes softly.

“How’s that?”

“Like, a soldier could shoot four, five times, doesn’t matter. But you gotta try not spoil the meat, no? Not scare the forest.”

Jack mimes pulling the trigger, firing dream bullets in silence. He dreams of devouring me, intact. As his gun-shaped hands trail off he brushes fingers with the gunman, the thought dissolving in his hands. The gunman passes his rifle. “Hold it like—”

“Yeah?”

“No, your elb—”

“Like this?”

“Jack.”

Edging closer, the gunman mounts behind Jack’s leg so his knee presses into the soft dirt between Jack’s thighs and his breast leans in between Jack’s shoulder blades. To the larks above, their bodies are like estuaries, river tributaries merging at the waist. To the looming oaks they are just another tree, four roots rising to one steel-barrel top. The gunman whispers into Jack’s ear. Their hips shift together. His heart beats into Jack’s back. Jack’s heart beats into the dirt. The forest exhales gently. Jack pulls the tri