I’ve never been very smart, so I don’t have any words for when I hit the deer on the highway. I’ve pulled over and I’m standing over the body and my hands are in my shorts pockets, sweat beading on my neck underneath my hair. I watch the last few spasms from the animal before it finally dies. I don’t know why I pulled over to watch the pathetic thing die. I get back in my car and drive away. 

I don’t have any words when my mother suddenly dies a week later. A heart attack, I guess. I pick up the phone and it’s my brother, and he tells me Mom just died. It was crazy. She was spasming on the floor and then she was dead, just like my deer. I don’t have any words. I just grunt into the telephone and hang it back on the wall. 

I’ve always wanted to be smart. I don’t know many people who are real happy to be dumb. Ignorant, sure. But I’ve always wanted to be smart. A real thinker, an intellectual, maybe even a philosopher who comes up with crazy new ideas that are hard to understand and college students drop out of classes over. I read books people on the Internet say are good, with complicated titles and weird covers and author’s names I can’t pronounce. I never really know what any of them mean, but a good YouTube essay usually leaves me with a general idea of the novel. I use the word “novel” the way pretentious twenty-somethings call movies films. 

I have one of those novels in my bag as I take the bus three towns over to my mother’s funeral. I take the bus because I can’t afford the gas. I pull it out and try to read a few a words but I’m sitting by the window so I start to feel a little sick, but I want these people on the bus to think I’m smart, so I keep the book open in front of me and move my eyes back and forth like something is going on in my head.

I’m wearing the darkest clothing I own, a maroon shirt and a dark-wash jean skirt. I feel bad I don’t have black clothes because my mom was all about appearances, but I guess she’s dead now so it doesn’t matter. It’s also way too hot to be wearing black. Funeral services are outdoors, per my mother’s request, but I don’t think she was expecting to drop dead middle of August. She always told us about her ideal death, surrounded by her family (my brother and I holding the urn with our father’s ashes) in the hospital, with graceful final words before she expelled her last breath. It would be December, January, when the temperature would sometimes drop to a generous seventy degrees and an outdoor funeral would be bearable. I don’t know if I feel bad about it or not.

At the funeral, staring at my mother’s urn (cremated and to be placed next to my father on the mantle, per her request). My brother is standing next to me in his uniform. He’s in the Marines. My mom hated him for it. She wanted him to do something cushy, like be a CEO. She once told me my head was so full of rocks I’d be lucky if the Marines wanted me for target practice. I bag groceries now, and I’m pretty good at it, other than sometimes I give the wrong change. 

“How are you feeling?” my brother asks me. 

I ponder his question for a second, and then I say, “I had a book to read on the way here but I got sick so I couldn’t read it. On the bus.” I get upset that I said book instead of novel. 

My brother only stares at me, then turns his attention to the urn and blown-up photograph of my mother. “Okay.”

When the funeral is over, I stay with my brother at his house. I took a flower from the bouquet that sat underneath the picture of my mother. My brother said it’s an orchid but I think it’s an iris. 

My brother sits on the back patio and smokes cigarette after cigarette, still in his uniform. If I were an intellectual, I would know what that means. But I don’t. I just watch him smoke cigarette after cigarette on the back patio in his uniform. I wonder what an iris looks like. 

Eventually I join him, standing with my hands on my hips because my brother is in the only dingy plastic lawn chair, and say, “It’s so hot out here.”

My brother puts out his cigarette and doesn’t light another one. He folds his hands in front of him. He has the little white gloves on and everything. 

“I don’t know how you can stand wearing that silly outfit,” I say, looking at my brother’s gloves, his hat.

“It’s not a silly outfit,” he says, and sits up a little straighter. “It’s a uniform.”

I stand next to him for a little while longer as the sun sets. It doesn’t get any cooler. A mosquito bites the back of my knee. “I’m going to go read my book.”

My brother makes a noise that sounds like he’s laughing at me. 

I take my book out of my bag. It’s a nice bag made of recycled canvas. A flower that looks like the one I took from my mother’s bouquet – the orchid-iris – is printed on the front. Usually I like it, but it kind of makes me frown tonight but I don’t have the words for why.

I’m reading this book where I don’t really know what is going on but the characters are doing lots of drugs. I find it interesting just to scan the page and see the names of drugs and brands and expensive cities I’ll probably never visit. They’re college students but they never go to class and they have so much money it doesn’t matter. After fifteen pages of drugs and brands and cities I close the novel, sticking a gas station receipt in between the pages because it makes me feel more chic than if I just used a regular old bookmark. The receipt is for five dollars and sixty-two cents I spent on a twenty-ounce soda and a pack of shark-shaped gummies. I dipped the sharks in the soda and pretended they were swimming before eating them. I did all that in the driver’s seat of my car, in the gas station parking lot. At the time, the receipt was just crumpled up in my cupholder before I started thinking about weird books. I take out my headphones – wired, that I had salvaged from my old high-school things because I thought they made me look more interesting – and listen to a band I don’t really like or understand but I see smart people listening to them. 

My mother died a week ago and I had no words for it. I think about that while I turn my novel over and over in my hands and listen to my whiny music on poor-quality headphones and stare at my brother out the back door, who is smoking again. I flip through the pages in my novel. I get a spoiler.

I think about that deer dying in front of me, its labored breaths, its kicking limbs, my mother dying the exact same way. What did that mean? What did my wordless grunt on the phone to my brother mean? What do my receipt bookmark and wired headphones mean? I wring my hands and look at my jean skirt. What does that mean?

My brother comes inside and takes off his hat and his gloves. He looks at me sitting on the edge of his couch staring at my hands staring at a blank TV staring at the white gloves hanging from his loose grip. Staring at things that are just things and a person who is just a person. Thinking about the dead person who only elicited a wordless grunt on the phone from me.

“I think I’m going to sleep,” we say at the same time. 

We stare at each other, blink. My brother’s eyes are red and puffy. I think he was crying over our mother. Maybe I shouldn’t have called his uniform silly. I haven’t cried at all. I read a book like that and now I think I get it a little bit. 

I pick my novel up off the cushion where I placed it next to me and hold it up, showing it off. I think the cover is ugly. “I’m going to read this.”

My brother studies the book in my hand. “Okay,” he says. “Turn this light off when you’re done.”

I nod, and my brother goes into his room. I don’t read the book but I think about it a lot and I don’t turn off the light when I’m done.