My date is burly and gruff, a lumberjack squeezed into a French blue polo and wing-tips. He fumbles through the menu with giant hands. A white scar cuts from his left nostril down to his upper lip. He notices me notice and taps it with a bulbous finger.
“This? Got it on a fishing trip when I was twelve,” he smiles wide and the scar bunches like a thread. I picture him flopping on a hook, the line slackening and snapping tight under his cartoonish size. “One of those father/son things.”
I already know this from his dating profile. A fun fact. I turn my gaze to the menu and gather up my options: house salad, side of cornbread. He’s an outdoorsy guy, my date. Hunting, fishing, climbing. It doesn’t bother me the way it bothers some girls, the picture with the fish on the dating profile. That’s how you get a glimpse of the little-kid behind all the scruff and waders and camo-print trucker hats.
I open my mouth to ask the things I’ve been practicing for tonight:
Were you close with your father?
Are you still?
How did you really get that scar?
And the questions I will resist wondering aloud, like: What does it feel like to hold a walleye by the slick cartilage under its throat, feel it throb against your hand until you say when, if you say when but the server stops at our table so instead I say, “I’ll take the house salad, please.”
My date eyes me, then turns to face the server. The chair creaks beneath his weight. With a senator’s voice, he orders the venison and the rabbit stew to start.
The server flits away and my date leans in, envelops my hands in his. I stare down at them and my stomach twists at their roughness, their size. The absurd way they eclipse my own.
“C’mon sweetheart. You don’t have to order a salad on the first date with me. I like a girl who can eat.”
“Oh, I know,” I say, still staring at our hands. They could be from different species. My pulse flutters in my palm. “I’m vegetarian.”
He drops my hands and their fall rattles the glassware.
“No way,” he smiles again, that scar puckering. “You did— you do know I hunt and stuff, right?”
“It seems like a pretty big part of your life.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
I shrug. It does and it doesn’t. “First dates are for getting to know someone.”
“Well,” he crosses his arms and his biceps strain against his sleeves. “I don’t know why you’re a vegetarian, but I know a lot of y’all do it for the environment. But what we hunters do is important for the environment, too. Not only is hunting one of the most humane ways to harvest meat, but it keeps rampant deer populations in check, supporting the whole ecosystem. It might not be cute thinkin’ about killing Bambi, but it’s a lesser evil, sweetheart.”
He leans back in his chair, generous and dilated.
I smear the condensation on my water glass. “That’s fascinating,” I say, even though I already know all of this, I do.
But I can’t help but fantasize about a world with deer populations run amok, the prey overwhelming the predators. A world with goldfish the size of killer whales; gilded fleshy guppies swelling infinitely with no tank to limit their size. I imagine silken bunnies afraid of nothing, their sharp teeth biting clean through ill-intentioned fingers like they would carrot sticks. I picture all of the order of the natural world inverting into something soft and wild, unbridled and self-willed.
I shrug off my jacket and let my bare shoulders prickle in the chill of the air conditioned dining room. The server delivers my date’s rabbit stew and my salad at the same time. His white scar quivers like a cottontail as he sucks down the broth. He doesn’t take his eyes off the curve of my shoulders. I pause, fork poised above the limp greens. I will take him home, I already know, where he’ll twitch the sheets into a bundle. I will make him throb against my hand until I say when, if I say when but now I shiver sweetly and snap a julienned carrot in my teeth.
Emma Johnson Tarp is a writer from Virginia. Her work appears in Rejection Letters, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, and Right Hand Pointing. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two precocious cats.
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