She’d come across the dead skunk an hour ago. She’d been meandering along Sassafras Avenue, looking for names to add to her collection. It was an old part of the boneyard, people with eighteenth and nineteenth-century surnames: Barnabus, Mutterer, Winthrop, Cornelius. Lots of “Beloved Wife of” tombstones. Lots of unnamed babies with just the number of days they’d been alive here on this Earth.

There was no obvious injury to the body. It must have glanced off a moving automobile. A quick thin rocket of rage rose from her belly. Had the driver stopped or even slowed down?

A sharp freezing wind ruffled the pointy tufts of soft fur. Pulling her hat down over her ears she knelt, grateful the face lay hidden, curved under the body. She asked the black and white roundness what had happened. Told it how sorry she was. Considered whether to move it, whether she might find a way to bury it. Unsure of herself, she left it there where the macadam met the grass. One of the workers who traversed the cemetery most days would certainly find it. Would they incinerate the body? Toss it into a Dumpster?

She thought of the country trappers who’d skin the animal of its winter-thickened pelt given the chance. As she rose to her feet she caught the faintest whiff of its earthly scent. It hadn’t been dead so very long.

Once, as a young woman half asleep in a friend’s mountain yard tracing the stars, she’d been approached by a skunk in the dark, watched in stillness as it floated across the grass to sniff at her sleeping bag, to nose her hair. Just as the thrill of its whiskers brushing her cheek lit up her spine three people ran out from the house naked and shouting. Someone had seen something outlandish in the sky. Reluctantly she rose, fixing her gaze where they pointed. The skunk danced away silently, its wide hips sashaying.

For decades she’d wondered what else might have transpired; what miracle of interspecies communion was thwarted by that other magic, those orbs of light swinging madly in the treetops at the edge of the woods? Something unseen before or since. As rare as the unguarded approach of a wild creature.

Now she wondered whether that curious skunk, with its poor vision, had seen the balls of light on that long ago night, whether this dead creature here at her feet would stay with her like the one who’d danced away under the stars, whether they’d knit together into one memory as she moved into her dotage.

Regina Rae Weiss’s recent fiction appears in The Saturday Evening Post, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Idle Ink, and the Green Magic anthology. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Huffington Post and is forthcoming from White Wall Review. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature From Stony Brook University. Her formative experiences were spending time alone in the woods as a child and, after dropping out of school at 13, hitchhiking alone around the U.S.