How to Tear Deer Skin

When Elliot Holler was eight, he witnessed death for the first time, a deer, with its innocent flesh torn by the jaw of a predator. When Eliot Holler was eighteen, they hauled Valerie Kitteridge out of the Minerva Marsh. He used to call her Val. She was a month younger than he was. He liked how her hair was so black it looked blue in the right light, how green her eyes looked by the water, the strange music she listened to, how she spoke, and what she had to say. Elliot and Valerie were in love before her murder. Perhaps he loved her too much, and maybe that was why she was still everywhere, regardless of the reasoning behind the matter, Valerie was still dead. She lay silently in a casket beneath the Missouri dirt, yet the presence of her absence was so painfully loud. Elliot remembers the times they shared before death had done them part, and Valerie is once again alive within the confines of his memory. Through Valerie's eyes, death was something she would never have expected, yet she always suspected it was coming for her.