"Motherfucker" was a word that Delia had not heard in a very long time, and in not many contexts. She knew it was a word for when you spill boiling water on yourself, startled by your daughter and her mouthful of bugs. It was also the name for the tractor when three days of maintenance were still, somehow, not enough to make it operate under its own power.

It was also, she discovered, an appropriate word for careening off the paved road and into a soybean field with the world's largest hood ornament convulsing in your entire field of vision. In fact, based on the volume and confidence of Samuel's voice, "motherfucker" was a _perfect_ word for that circumstance, perhaps the best choice to reach for in their hour of need.

It didn't take long for the soybeans to bring the car to a stop - it just _felt_ long. Sam didn't dare turn the car off for lack of light, and so they watched as the deer struggled, and kicked, and stopped. He whistled low under his breath, said "Jesus H. Christ" as a nearly-inaudible mutter made loud by the abrupt silence, and hit his fist against the wheel. Delia was gripping the center console and her window lever, nerves strung tight, but transfixed by the sight of the corpse on the windshield.

After a long moment, the engine still quietly purring away, Samuel said the obvious, as if to get it out of the way: "We hit a deer."

"Huh. I thought..." Delia started, lost in thought.

He looked at her, suddenly coming to grips with himself. "Oh my god, are you hurt, Del? Are you okay?"

She looked at him. "It's venison, right?"

He stared back. "What?"

"I don't always know the right words for things. But when a deer is dead, you call it venison and you eat it. I thought. So... we hit a venison."

Sam kept staring for a moment, and then - almost against his will - he started laughing. "A venison?"

Delia shrank into her seat with embarrassment. "Is that not what it's called?"

He unbuckled his seatbelt, laughing hysterically. "You're a step too quick, ma'am. It's a deer until you cut it up into portions, _then_ it's venison."

She brightened. "Well then I was almost right! That's not bad at all."

He leaned over, unbuckling her belt and leaning up for a kiss. "Well maybe next time I'll mount a pack of ginsu knives to the grill, and you'll be all the way right."

She kissed him lightly. "Well, will it cook on the hood? I'm a proper woman, Sam, I don't eat raw meat anymore."

He grinned like a little devil. "What about the last time we set up the camping tent?"

She slapped his arm, laughing. "I didn't think you'd offer it roasted!"

He mock-stiffened. "I don't plan to!" Even in faux-protest, he couldn't stop grinning. "Well, Miss Delia, how about we postpone any threats of weenie roasts and take a look at the damage?"

She pushed gingerly on the door. "Not a bad idea. Though you'll have to excuse me, this'll take a minute."

"No need to strain those hollow arms of yours. Come out my side." He was so proud to be gallant and chivalrous, and he wore it bare on his face. "It'll be easy."

She relented and climbed over the center console. The way she moved, it was hard to believe she wasn't a human woman. He gently gathered her under her armpits when she was fully spread across the center, and mercifully pulled her out and upright. She dusted herself, part grateful and part indignant.

The noise of the engine was somehow louder outside the car, as it always was, but so were the sounds of night. Insects buzzing, full of juice and flavor, but equally ready to make pests of themselves. There was a frog out there _somewhere,_ that much was for sure. At _least_ one. The night air was cold and clarifying and made Delia's soft hairs stand up more visibly than usual. She wasn't sure she liked that, but at least she was in safe company.

Samuel didn't remark on the texture of the place, as he was too busy tromping down the soybean bushes and looking at their manslaughter victim from multiple angles. He said "hmm," and a moment later a "huh," carrying on like this for a few minutes until he had hmm'd and huh'd to his own inscrutable satisfaction. And at the end of it he said, "Welp. We'll need rope, and we'll need towels. We're takin' it."

"Taking it?"

"No point leaving it. It'll do you good, being with child and all that. With children, really." He considered for a second. "From what you've said, they might like venison."

"I'm sure they'd love it, Sam, but will it keep?" She twirled her hair nervously.

Samuel scratched his chin. "How long you reckon it has to?"

Delia scrunched up her face in thought. "Ma never really said. But a few weeks, I think, which is a lot to ask when you can't refrigerate it." She looked at him apologetically. "They won't do so well in the cold."

"I'm sure I wouldn't either! But would it work to start 'em out? An early nursery?"

She considered this carefully. "I expect it would. Especially if we kept most of it in an ice chest. We could thaw a piece at a time out for them." The wind tugged at the hem of her cotton dress. "We'd have to buy an ice chest, but it'd do."

He hugged her close, and whispered in her ear, "Then we'll buy an ice chest." Delia relaxed against the warmth of his torso. Safe men weren't easy to find, and in moments like this, she felt truly lucky.

She looked up in his eyes. "Rope and towels, then?"

He brushed her face gently with his hand. "Yes, ma'am."

"Let's get to work, honey."

It took a bit more tromping plants to get the back hatch open, and some moving stuff around to get to the rope, which is always packed underneath everything else when you really need it. It was easy to steal a towel from its role as padding between two stacks of vinyl records, which was a mercy. With everything re-packed into the car, the night felt alive with progress.

Neither of them quite knew what they were doing, but they managed to use quite a bit of rope on the deer, and soon enough it was at least... well-entangled. The pair stopped to breathe, and Delia finally asked, "it's going on the roof, right?"

"Yep. And towels to clean the windshield."

"I see. And how do we get it on the roof?"

"You know... I find myself wondering the same thing."

She stared at the deer for a minute. "Well I could haul it up on there. I'd just need help for the last part."

He placed a hand on her arm. "How do you plan to do that?"

"Well it ain't hard for me to scamper onto the roof, and I don't weigh much, so all I have to do is hang off the back of the car..." (here, she made illustrative hand motions, like a rock climber) "and then you pull the rope dangling below me, and with both our bodies, she'll hoist right up."

"She?"

"No horns, country boy!" She winked so hard he could swear he heard it out loud.

"You got me. Still not sure how you plan to _get_ up there."

She grabbed the edge of the roof and looked back. "I'm light, Sam! And a climber at heart, remember?" She gave it a try, then relaxed back to the ground. "A little rusty though, I'll admit. I'll have to resort to something here."

"Me pushing you up?" Sam asked, hopefully.

Delia was already unbinding her arms, suddenly three to a side. As she let the illusion unclench, it became clear that her hands were really three pedipalps of two fingers each, just _acting_ as hands most of the time. They gripped the metal effortlessly, and she pulled herself onto the roof like she'd been born to do it.

"Woman, have you lost your mind? We're 10 yards from the road!"

"Sam-u-el Hobbes!" she reproached him back, binding her arms back together. "There's nobody for miles in either direction, and it's nothin' _you_ ain't seen before! Now throw me up that rope while the carcass is still worth eating."

He obeyed, a little startled. "Never seen you fired up like that."

She tugged at the rope, just to test it. "Well I don't take charge often, just when it needs taking." She walked to the back of the car and hung by the rope, dangling it behind her, her body weight doing nothing to shift the deer on the windshield. "Well, Sam? You gonna help me raise my children, or just make 'em?"

He snickered. "Happy to oblige, miss." He grabbed the rope and pulled down, and the deer lifted up and over the spiderwebbed glass. Delia fell into his arms, and he barely caught her, but by god he caught her. She looked up at him again, and they kissed in the moonlight - the reckless kind of kissing, both of them drenched in deer blood after tens of minutes tying knots around the corpse.

The towels couldn't help much. The laminated glass of the windshield was a modern marvel, and had stopped the deer from falling into their laps at 40 miles per hour. It had even stopped glass shards from falling into the cabin, at least for the most part. But even with the viscera wiped off, it was _shattered._ Samuel grumbled as they got back on the road, "You might as well be looking in a broken mirror."

"Sam, I could drive. My night vision is good in my other eyes." Delia was quiet, but feeling a little bolder now. Samuel had that effect on her, and she liked it.

"Del, it wouldn't make a difference. The only way to see is to poke my head out my window, and I'm only doing that for signs, because I'm frankly terrified some driver with no lights will come by and take my head with him."

"I hadn't thought of that. Never drove with other people on the road before." She leaned back in her seat, at least as far as she could with the pile of records behind her, cooking the problem down in her mind. "We can't drive very far like this, it's not practical. We'll need to find somewhere to stop."

Samuel looked down at the dash. All that idling with the lights on had _not_ been kind to the gas tank (after pushing too far on this tank already), and he pointed at it in dismay. "I'll second that. And who knows when the next town will come along?"

His copilot shrunk into her seat. "Not a fan of towns, myself."

Sam sighed, grimacing through the broken glass. "No. I know that. But they'll have a shop that can fix this, and fill our tank. Can you stomach that?"

She nodded mutely, and dug into the glove compartment, pulling out a map. After a long moment, she admitted, "I can't read this."

"You can't read a map?"

"I can't read anything." Her voice was deflated. "No school."

"Shit. That's right. Well, we just passed a sign for Penford. Supposedly it's 31 miles out. Long way to go at this speed."

"We could camp. If we could find a spot..." The fields felt endless, out here. So much property, all of it somebody else's. Delia winced, remembering all the times she'd heard the words NO TRESPASSING punctuated by rifle shots.

"Now there's the ticket," Sam said, slowing down and turning right onto a gravel road that Delia hadn't even noticed, lost in her thoughts. "Olson Farm, it says."

"We'll get in trouble!" Delia hissed urgently.

"We'll ask permission. Just a knock on the door, make our case, camp on the lawn. Nothing to it, you'll see."

"You have a lot of faith in your charisma, Sam." Delia crossed her arms as if to say, _I do not have a lot of faith in your charisma._

He reached out his hand for hers, but kept his eyes firmly on the road this time, through the funhouse windshield. "Well, if I didn't believe in it, I wouldn't have much charisma at all, now would I?" And it was hard not to trust in his wide, boyish smile. Delia had to admit that.

The road to Olson Farm was very, very, very, very long.

- [01 - The Road](/writing/brood/01)
- [All chapters of Brood](/writing/brood/)
- [Other stuff I've written](/writing)
- [03 - Jim](/writing/brood/03)