Unmerciful rays of sunlight, filter through the tall pine trees along the highway, and a woman wearing leather sling-backs, and a black gabardine wool suit, struggles along the pitted highway surface. She passes another field of corn; stalks as high as a young child, feathery corn silks fluttering in the heated breeze that swirls up a bit of dust and subsides. A row of crows sits high up on the electrical lines, she counts five, she swears, and looks down at her cell-phone, still no signal, no reception, nothing. Her E320 Mercedes Benz, a sliver bullet of a car, sits back a mile, the deer she hits lies in a field of cotton, dying; the rattle of dry cotton bolls rustling in the breeze, eerily in time with the rattle in the deer’s throat.

The hood and windshield crushed – a trail of blood meanders from her forehead, down her face and into her neck, coloring her pearls pink.

“God-damn it.” Three deer rush out of the corn field, fly across the road, and jump over a ditch that is filled with spiky cattails and blooming milkweed, white tails bobbing in the air, disappearing down the hill. Feeling close to breaking down, Laura stops and checks her phone again, nothing. She bites her lip to stop tears, she managed to get through the funeral without shedding one, she watched the deer lie on its side in the field, mangled and bleeding without breaking down, now is not the time. She’d just left Kinston, an hour ago, when she took an exit off of 70 looking for a gas station, Kenneth said he’d fill her car, and he hadn’t – she curses her brother, his consistent negligence, his consistent let downs. They had buried their father; sixty-nine, divorced, disbarred, and depressed; one bullet in the temple and he was a free man. They’d buried him in a cemetery located in Pender County outside of Kinston, a grassy knoll with Mimosa trees flowering and dropping pink silk cockaded blossoms around their feet as they gathered under the green tent – Pritcher & Phillips – lettered in white – advertisement for death. The grave-diggers have laid out green plastic turf, two modest rows of folding chairs facing the closed casket, cascades of flowers dripping from its surface. Laura had sat like stone, and listened to Reverend Jameson eulogize her father as he read from Ecclesiastes 3 –

To every thing there is a season, and time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die…

Kenneth sobs into a baby-blue handkerchief, his seersucker suit barely respectable for a funeral but fashionable in the heat. Laura wears a black suit – a Dior suit; Kenneth is impressed – his thing for clothes was the first indication of an “alternative” lifestyle.

Laura knows there is no one else sitting behind them in the folding chairs, she knows her father is neither loved or cherished by his community. The smell of hydrangeas and Day Lilies – the arrangement covering her father’s body – begins to smell sweet and fermented in the heat, sickly sweet and Laura has trouble breathing – one breeze, one breeze that’s all she asks. Nothing. After the funeral she hugged Kenneth and peeled out of the graveyard, barely containing her need to be far away from Pender County and her father’s dead body. The estate would be settled by Kenneth, a lawyer himself. Laura’s done well for herself, a child psychologist in Durham, she has a recently renovated loft apartment in the Tobacco District – she does not need her father’s money, and she is not expecting any. What she expects is that she and Kenneth will be paying bills. “Call me.” She tells Kenneth and washes her hands of clearing out her father’s home in Kinston – its a modest ranch style house, neat and bare – no antiques for his children to fight over, cheap furniture and copied prints on the walls – no need to stay.

The shock, the heat, the exercise, the discomfort.

Laura sits on a falling tree on the side of the road, not one vehicle has passed her, it’s mid-day Sunday afternoon – and this road seems deserted.

She sits to compose herself, her feet are in more pain than her scratched face and neck; blisters rising from her skin to taunt her for wearing three-inch stiletto Manolo Blahnik sling-backs.

The sky is clear, the sun is at its highest point – the fields are covered in soybeans, cotton, corn – the trees along the road, oaks, pines, an elm – mainly Sumac covers there shapes, birds are quiet in the heat of the day, crickets in the corn buzz – she sits and considers her options and gets back up, brushing bark from her skirt – her only option is to keep moving.

By mid-afternoon, Laura’s dehydrated and hungry, the road continues from fields to a swamp, dark and cool as she walks along the side of its mosquito infested edges, large old cypress trees, with twisted roots, sit calmly in dank water. No houses, no cars, no cellphone signal.

Laura is above all, a woman of composure, she sits in her office all day long, guiding and listening to children as young as four who have traumatic stories, who tell her things that used to make her have nightmares, she spends one day a week at Duke where she roams the pediatrics ward, and sits on a bed, or a chair, and listens to a child dying of leukemia, another one recovering from a hot iron being pressed on his flat back, or a little girl who’s been gang raped by her older brother and his friends; Laura listens to the stories and she does not flinch, she does not judge,but she has trouble sleeping, and she’s been drinking more and more; alone in her lofty apartment, looking out to see the old Lucky Strike water tower and the lights from the Bull’s Stadium.

Laura has finally taken off the sling-backs, and is walking in stocking feet across the asphalt, at first the rocks, and uneven surface, the heat, the texture of the road, causes her to flinch, but she forgets those small discomforts and walks in longer more determined strides, and the more she walks barefooted into the day, her childhood coming back in a hazy way; playing outside until dark, putting on shoes only when they went to town or Sunday School – her mother, dead, her father always gone, only a housekeep to keep Kenneth from trying on Laura’s Sunday finest, and Laura from slugging every kid in the neighborhood that makes fun of her shy and dandified brother.

He saw her before she saw him; a tall auburn woman, wearing black, walking barefoot, swinging shoes in her hand like she’d just been to a Sunday picnic and eaten fried chicken, collards, potato salad and banana pudding.

He leans over to his buddy, sleeping on the passenger seat of an old green Ford truck — they’re on the side of the road, waiting for a sighting of a buck they saw hightail it through the swamp, they’ve been sitting since noon, drinking one Coors after the other, and at first Reggie thinks she’s a mirage, a beer induced mirage.

“Jimmi! Jimmi, here comes a woman.”

And that’s how it happened that Reggie and Jimmi got a woman in their truck and in a drunken haze, wouldn’t let her out, how the shotgun in Reggie’s lap pressed against her stomach, and how they drove her up to the Cliffs of the Neuse and how they got out of the truck, and had a discussion about the woman once they’d tied her hands and legs together with a roll of baling twine that’d been rolling around the bed of the truck for years.

How Laura found her legs untied, on her knees in the shale and gravel from the cliff, with Reggie holding a gun to her back, and Jimmie forcing himself in her mouth – how Laura, lost her unflappable composure and bit Jimmie so hard, she nearly severed his cock, and how Reggie so shocked by Jimmie lying face down in the tan shale whimpering like a baby, that he dropped the gun, and Laura got up, took the shotgun and shot them both, point blank like they were rattle-snakes she had to destroy before they struck, how Laura pushed their body’s over the side of the rainbow colored cliff, layers of sand, clay and seashells, 90 feet above the Neuse River, erosion etching out the rainbow — erosion the only witness.

And that’s how it happened that Laura gathered at the River, and walked away, her hands washed in blood, but her body saved from eternal fire.