(disclaimer: depressing, negative, and possibly offensive)

The Stag (from the Bitter Tales of Angst collection)
--------
I was driving south down Moon road early one night in the winter. It
was early, but was fairly dark nonetheless.  A station wagon was
stopped in the middle of the road with no emergency flashers on and
the driver's door open. I wished I had my gun on me since I fully
expect people to fake an accident to rip me off or do worse. Of
course, I could have just backed up and taken a different route,
but my curiosity got the better of me since there were several
small children playing in the snow around the car, throwing snow
on each other, with no adult to be seen.

I walked up to the driver's door and there was a woman leaning
over the passenger seat changing a baby. She looked like any other
typical piece of white trash, with a modified mousy feathered
hair style circa 1979, dumpy, zit-faced, and sharp as a box of
socks. I yelled, 'Is anyone injured here, ma'am?' which made her
jump since this was her first clue of my presence. I realized how
easy it would have been to bean her cranium with the hammer from my
toolbox and was amazed at how much I really wanted to do so. 'I'm
just changing the baby', she said absently.  I said, 'Are you aware
that your car is blocking the entire road and has no flashers on?'
'Oh my God, I guess I got distracted when we hit the deer'.

Sure enough, at the front of the car was a young dead buck with
four points. I wondered how short someone's attention span could
possibly be as to think that a diaper change in the middle of the
road would be a good course of action.  The woman yelled at the
two kids to get back in the car, which they ignored, proceeding to
whip handfuls of snow in each other's face, having picked up gravel
in the process. Yet another kid sat in the back seat, quietly
watching everything. This was the ugliest kid I have ever seen;
his eyes were not tracking quite right, so I assumed he had suffered
too much brain damage from being beaten up by the other kids.

I said, 'We need to get your car off the road, can you start it?'
She said, 'Could you give me a minute?', as if I was being somewhat
unreasonable.  In total disgust, I was thinking, 'No not really,
you're fucking blocking the entire fucking road, you fucking
dipshit.' Then, I realized that she was probably in shock and was
just on auto-pilot, doing the simple moronic things that she was
accustomed to and confident with, like ineffectually ragging on her
kids and changing the baby. I would have liked to tie her to a tree
and let her freeze to death, but I checked out the damage instead.

The radiator was completely caved in, so there was no way it was
going to start. Man, that stag was beautiful and I found myself
face to face with the shitty final effect of urban sprawl and hating
it and everything around me, especially this insensate cow and her
litter.  Why should it be that a fine stag gets plowed down in the
prime of life by some stupid bitch in an ancient piece of shit wagon?
How is it fair that this fine stag should die and this stupid woman
and her burgeoning bratty brood should live? Why do stupid people
have to breed like rats in Berlin? I thanked god that the stag was
completely dead and not suffering, since that would have been an
even greater drag.

I asked the woman, 'Do you have anyone that you can call to get
you a ride back home?' Got the expected answer: 'No, ma'am'.
Yeah, you can always find guys to inseminate eggs, but never
for anything useful.

I called Doug at the tri-county on the cellphone. 'I have one
dead stag fit for processing and someone that needs a tow off
the road'. Doug asked if anyone was hurt, being a better man than
I am. 'Nope' (unfortunately, I thought). 'I'll be right there'.
So Doug came with his truck and got The Amazing Reproducing Pod-
Head Woman off the road.  'That is a fine buck' he said, and I
could see a tear in his eye when he looked at it, 'it will make
a fine stew. I'll call you after it hangs in the garage for a few
weeks'. Doug is a good man and even gave these people a ride home,
while I secretly hoped that with any luck, perhaps at least the
two kids that were playing in the snow would catch pneumonia and die.

That night, I dreamed of a great white buck sporting in the snowy
woods and felt happy again. When I woke up, I realized that those
woods were plowed down to make the whispering pines housing complex,
which of course has no whispering pines or stags, white, brown, or
otherwise.