On TV, they were killing a horse. The network wasn’t showing it. The talking head was beautiful and drawing attention to literally anything else. You had to look closely to catch what was going on. Top left corner of the screen, halfway up the backstretch, you could see a tarp. The thing that was happening, the death of the horse, it was happening behind the tarp. Nobody noticed it except for Brianna, who I guess was famous for noticing things like that. We laughed at her uncomfortably, or I did anyway. The room felt empty. Even though it was supposed to be a party.

“I heard this happens a lot,” she said. “I bet the camera operator is doing it on purpose.”

“Doing what?” I said.

“Keeping the tarp in the shot.”

“He’ll probably get fired for that, huh?”

“Never know. Maybe the director’s in on it, too.”

I looked at her. I turned my face to the screen. Now there was a woman on horseback handing roses to the winner. The tarp was nowhere to be found. I asked Brianna if she’d ever had to do anything like that. Kill a horse. Put down a pet. Administering mortality to something small and under your control.

She said, “My friend Bennie used to try and hit opossums. Backroads, these little bridges over sloughs and ponds by the river. Her family had like six kids, and she drove this big old Aerostar van, and she hit them ‘with regularity,’ she told me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We clipped one once, but I don’t think it died. It could’ve been we hit a rock or a pothole. I couldn’t see anything behind us, but, then again, it was dark. The van rode high. Opossums are small, but their eyes glow, and I tell myself I would’ve seen something if there’d been anything there to see.”

“You see it all,” I said.

She made a noise I can’t describe, and then she knelt in front of the TV.

“I don’t see anything anymore,” she said.

We were back to the main shot. The beautiful talking head. A desk with four other panelists. Some kind of analysis was going on. They were about to shift into a replay, but Brianna was right. The tarp was no longer there. 

“Holy shit,” I said. “They clean up fucking fast.”

She nodded. She put her forehead against the screen. Footsteps came down the stairs, and somebody started making a drink in the kitchen. You could hear ice dropping into a glass. Everything smelled like mint, and I wondered how much a horse weighed. How many people would it take to move it? She must have been reading my mind because she told me it was a practiced human skill, this shuffling off with a load of daily detritus.