A leucistic moose, a pearled animal with starch-white fur and black eyes, dies to a kia soul going 79 on an upstate rural road. The kia soul dies too—one of the world’s biggest vegetarians shoved through its windshield like a headstone. I buy us brie and a bottle of skin-contact white wine on the way home. The moose is something I see in the paper. I learn about the difference between leucism and albinism on a walk from the trader joe’s to the bus. I learn of partial and complete incapacities. I adjust the thin canvas strap of your tote bag, which is applying thick weight to my clavicle. I’ve been buying the newspaper since your dad died. He used to buy you copies of the new york times in Connecticut and then mail it to you in Crown Heights, days after, useless and expired and sweet. I buy us papers now. I don’t do this in some effort to be your dad for you. More to be your dad for me.

We live together. I’m a “girl” and you’re a girl. We dated once, but only as a long joke. It was something we exercised mostly at parties in other people’s bedrooms/bathrooms or at home, after those same parties. We think it was pretty funny, really, and why would we double our rent just to not see an “ex” on the daily? You like brie, you do, but you like herbed goat cheese a lot better. This is something I don’t buy for you. I read about the moose again. I will be arriving home as a newly-minted biologist. I will explain the difference between albinism and leucism to you because I am in charge of the news now. I am walking and thinking of keeping this part of the paper, the big moose printed in color to show off its colorlessness; it’s bigger than my palm but smaller than the wheel of brie. I buy us sourdough. It’s a pinkening evening: every inane little Brooklyn storefront blooms with sudden intentionality. I want to go into places and buy you, buy us, clusters of ash-salt and nitrate waters and cubes, orbs, dollops of food that don’t feed. 

The joke of us “dating” lasted four months. A bull moose weighs between 840 and 1,500 pounds. You have to wonder if the leucistic moose was known in the area before it died, if it was tracked, loved, named. A kia soul weighs 2,888 pounds. You have to wonder if a designer, somewhere, loved that triple eight ringing on the end of that number. Pinkening it into dearness. You have to wonder if they took out some plastic or thickened up the seat “leather” to get it to that car to weigh that much, exactly. Once you’re close, why not arrive? 

What equipment would be needed to remove the totaled car and totaled moose? How would they get it there? Who would operate it and what would be taken from what? The titan pulled from glass: ship out of an already broken bottle. Would it begin to smell before they got everything right. I haven’t read deeper into the article to answer these questions. I want to have them to myself like bits of expensive, foreign salt. I do duck into a street level Brooklyn shop with gilded lettering on its windows. I get us something. Two bull moose, leucistic or not, could outweigh a kia soul.

I get us these jarred crushed tomatoes that cost more than I make in an hour. I’ll make them in your cast-iron when I get home. By “make,” I mostly just mean add heat to them. Char. Blacken. Exclaim. Give them some color. 

I think about waiting for the bus, and then I don’t. I’ve got like a 37-minute walk between me and you. At 79 mph, that distance would take me almost nothing. At my current speed, only slightly watered-down by a dull soreness in my knee and the weight of the nice-food I got us, it will take me longer and it won’t kill anything. I’ve gone all day, actually, moving only at non-killing speeds. No vehicles. No urgency. 

In preschool, I touched tongues with a girl named Ruby. Her older brother had a corn snake with albinism. He let us see it only twice. His bedroom: upstairs, dark green, and blessed with the mean sour air of teenage boyhood. Not far off from herbed goat cheese, actually. Things felt close to your face when you went in that room. Humid. Clothes shed on dark blue sheets. The tank in the corner. The glass looked frosted, but it wasn’t, it was just neglected. The cool living line in your hands: his albino corn snake the color of cow’s milk dappled with strawberry milk. He watched us while we held it, only allowing kids to be near him while we were afraid of something. The moment the snake became a harmless white animal, a fascination rather than a danger, he reached his hands out, wanting it back. I held it near to my face and watched its tongue flick out to take in bits of the world. I thought about Ruby’s tongue. I did not know then how to think about you. Sticking your tongue out makes your face go red, for some reason. You get embarrassed by almost nothing these days. You’re quick to blush and slow to pay me back on venmo.

I want to take you upstate, but where would we go and what would we hit on the way. You always speed and I hate to drive. Since your dad died, you’re more wary of me at parties. It takes you more drinks to dance with me. He was a little homophobic, your dad. Maybe you’re being honorific, I think, as you sit far from me on our couch while we watch a movie that’s mostly shot in blues. Maybe when he was alive, it was nice to fight with him by how you held me. Now with him over, there’s nothing more to hit, and you love him better, so we are gaining distance. 

I’m close to home now. I switch the bag from one shoulder to the other. I look up if moose’s “shed velvet” like deer do. They do. They get bloody at the antlers and sheaves of red come tumbling from them. They shed velvet when they have a surge of testosterone. Another thing I wish I could do at parties. More the shedding and the T than the blood, but it’s a package deal. I check the tote bag to make sure the white wine isn’t crushing the white cheese into some wet ruin. It’s not. We’re good. You just don’t hold me for movies anymore. A leucistic moose shedding velvet would look like cherry-filled vanilla cake crushed to gushing. Something for a wedding.

A moose’s shredded velvet. A snake’s translucent skin taken off. Your underwear, warm, in my hands from the back of the dryer, where you’d forgotten to reach. You’ve had the same pairs since high school. Some things last. Your dad isn’t one of them. But I am. I last, I come home, I keep coming home to you. And shouldn’t I be grateful for the warm closeness of women next to women. Of how far a friendship between girls can unspool and overlap. Where a snake stops. Which road death gets set up on for any given accident.

When I get home with food and the news, the living room is dim. I smell burning metal before I decide not to tell you about the paper or cheese or the lauded minerality of the wine. I tell you something that I know makes you go red inside the dark room. The difference between melanin and carotenoids. The difference between leucism and albinism. The difference between lesbianism and rent increases. The difference between loving and loving. I say things I know will make you go into your bedroom, alone, to be on white sheets with your red face. I do not know what vehicle they will bring to rip what body from what body, I just know that, in ruthlessly scattering all easy loveliness from our apartment, I get to feel sick and good at the same time, in the same mile. Charring, blackening, exclaiming myself whole. I make enough for both of us. It doesn’t matter if you eat it.