UNTIL THE PAVEMENT / RILEY WINCHESTER

The road had always been unpaved. It ran east to west and was nothing but compacted dirt while the north-south road that it intersected was paved and busy with traffic. Then one morning the east-west road was paved.

The first morning it was paved, I stopped at the intersection like I did every day. I looked right: pavement. I looked left: pavement. I looked right again and left again: the road was paved. Strange, I thought, and I turned right as it was a faster route to work. I noticed the dew on the overgrown grass in the ditches on the sides of the road, noticed the houses I had never known stood; I had never once driven down the road despite passing it every day on my commute. The ride was smooth. My car seemed to glide along the black road.

I summited a hill and saw a thick brown tuft lying in the middle of the road. It was splayed and static—dead. I maneuvered my car toward the side of the road and looked at the brown mass as I drove by. A dead doe, fully-grown and mature.

I imagine how it went down: The doe wanted to cross over to the field on the other side of the road. She sauntered up to the ditch, unassuming; the world around her as quiet as it had always been. She picked up speed and readied herself. The doe ignored the new black sheen of the road reflecting off the rising September sun as she galloped across the ditch and primed the strength of her hind legs to leap and land and continue running. When she landed and leapt forward, she noticed the different feel of the road, the smoothness on her hooves. The doe froze. She saw the headlights rise over the hill. Then she felt the lights close in and smother her.

All her life she had lived and run freely between the fields surrounding the road, unburdened by rushing cars and coffee-slurping commuters. Until the pavement.

That morning, I made it to work earlier than usual. I assume many did. When I drove home later, the doe was gone, and the road was still paved and smooth.

RILEY WINCHESTER / DORR, MI

Riley Winchester is an internet hypochondriac; he thinks he has it all, and cursory Google searches help affirm this. When it gets bad and he thinks this is for sure the end, he turns to a nice shower cry. In these shower cries, he talks to his dad, who died when Riley was a teenager. But if you ask him, Riley has totally moved on and accepted his dad’s death (this would be more convincing if he stopped writing about death; speaking of which, he’s very concerned that he’s a one-trick pony with his writing; not all writing needs to be about death, he incessantly tells himself).