From the driver's seat of her mother’s 2004 Pontiac GTO, Alicia cruised past street signs and houses familiar to her as the back of her palm gripped the steering wheel. She felt miniscule in the cushy driver’s seat. The last bits of sunlight beamed into the car and onto Alicia’s face through the windshield, warming her skin and highlighting her auburn hair, but leaving gaping spots in her vision. Her sneakered foot on the gas pedal pressed down, she could feel her frustration growing. The car released a low growl response that broke the angsty tune on the stereo’s rhythm and vibrated Alicia’s teeth unpleasantly.
The guardrails separating them from Joann’s creek flashed by in Alicia’s peripheral leaving stripes in it, the town faded off into the horizon behind her in the rearview mirror. Alicia’s face was getting hot with each added sensation that came to her. The woman next to her spoke up with a huff.
“Pull the visor down, hun,” Alise, instructed softly, amused at the sight of her daughter squinting to see through the sun's last striking beams. She reached up and pulled the visor down, adjusting it to the eye level of the flustered girl clutching the sleek leather steering wheel. Alicia adjusted her grip as her vision cleared. The redness faded to remain only on the high points of her face. Nodding with gratitude, and flipping the station to a brighter tune. The mother and daughter relaxed in the peaceful atmosphere, their hometown passing by them in flashes of green, blue, and brown.
They’d taken drives like this ever since Alicia could remember. Her mind wandered away from the driver's seat, allowing muscle memory to comfortably take over her steering.
Grown to the height of seeing over the dash and reaching the pedals, now sixteen. Alicia’s mother allowed her to take the wheel on the occasional dragging Monday evening like this one when the reality was simply too much for the pair. They “raced” for the keys dangling from their hook in the kitchen, the younger of the two turning up as the victor, to no one’s surprise.
Alicia and her mother’s way of excusing themselves from the real world was imagining the two as a racing pair. The coupe, a Nascar-level racecar, and the bumping backroad’s pavement riddled with imperfections, their beloved track.
A scene of a young girl with sticky auburn hair strapped into a Minnie mouse car seat, nodding off as the car’s engine hummed her a low lullaby, formed in Alicia’s mind. She smiled at the happy, soothing memory. Her mother’s voice closed the curtain of the scene abruptly whisking her away from her thoughts, “Dear, you have to focus,” she chided.
Alicia inched the wheel leftwards, narrowly avoiding dipping in a cratering pot-hole occupying a large majority of the right-hand side of the road. The first of many.
“They sure do need to repave these roads, huh?” She shot her mother a sheepish grin, her mind returning to the task at hand.
Her foot weighed heavy as a boulder on the gas, eliciting more dragged exclamations from the V8 cylinders turning in the hot engine. They whipped past rows of cornfields that stretched for miles back towards town in a comfortable silence as the radio sang out one of its three alternating tunes.
“Let's see what this ol’ girl can do,” Alicia jokingly drawled out, patting the steering wheel as they neared their destination. “And just who are you calling’ old, young lady?” Alise matched her daughter's playful tone in response. The vehicle was only two years older than the girl in the driver's seat and in top-notch condition, the mother silently chuckled at the fact. She ran a gentle hand over the dash wiping away specs of nonexistent dust.
Alise leaned back into her seat harder, so as to not whip her head back when her daughter eased on the car’s neglected brake. A light squeal and release of air could be heard. Glancing at the smiling girl, she set her focus back to their fake reality. The wheels veered left and they reached their racetrack, the sign read Frog Hollow Dr. 

2

Just off the edge of Joann’s creek nearing the bend where it turned to follow the road, the small deer thrashed into the clearing secluded in the trees, tripping over a fallen branch and crumbling to the ground in a mess of tan, scrawny limbs.
Moments ago, she bounded through the forest alongside her herd when the delectable scent of cool, dewy grass and a much-needed rest wafted ino her nostrils and subdued the mammal's instincts without a second thought.
Thrusting her cloven hooves into the dirt as she raised herself on trembling, knobby knees, she paused smack dab in the center of the open area. She recognized none of what her black beady eyes took in as she observed. She panted softly. Her ears perked up at the rhythmic pounding of her herd's hooves fading into the forest ambiance, leaving her to her solitude. Her heart matched the fleeting rhythm. She’d never been this alone before, she thought. She walked gingerly along the perimeter of her new-found green haven. A strange structure with a rectangular opening resided in the tree to her left, only half disguised by the foliage. She’d never seen anything like it and had no particular interest in finding its source.
The deer bowed her head to the ground. Pushing the feeling of eyes on her back to the corner of her mind, she ripped the greenery from the roots up with clenched strong teeth rapidly, as if the grass would get up and run if given the slightest opportunity.
The meek animal feasted on the pasture unsparingly. Ignoring the structure. She nipped at a clump of blackberries that hung high in the mess of briars that grew along the tree line, almost out of her reach. Her long neck stretched out fully in length. The not-yet-ripe berries filled her mouth with sour nectar, scrunching her snout in distaste and spitting the seeds from the wretched plant back into the mess of briars. Filling her stomach, the deer’s muscles relaxed in the chilly evening air, soothing her. What else could I do? Certainly, my herd will notice my absence before too long, she hopingly thought.
The snap of plastic hitting together was the last thing to grace her pointed ears and a firm deafening click. Her neck whipped at lightning speed to meet eyes with her end. A human with a bright orange cap atop his head, stood inside the structure, pointing a strange stick in her direction. She made a single step to bound into the tree line..
The round entered her body, knocking the animal back harshly. Ripping through her abdomen and organs, painting the grass with a spray of red, the deer lay in pieces in the center of what was her sanctuary, and now her grave.
3
“Oh my God,” a cry escaped the girl’s mouth, once smiling, now contorted into a mangled scream. The Pontiac’s breaks failed first, blazing forward despite the sneakered foot slammed to the floorboard. Before them, Illuminated by the high beams, on the slick concrete stood an army of unmoving deer. Alise’s hand reached over, swerving the wheel right, off the road.
Alicia’s head bounced backward with a toe-curling crunch onto the headrest of her seat as they thumped in and out of the ditch, slamming face-first into the steering wheel of the car, the car’s horn responded to her cracking skull. The front end of the car crumpled in on itself with a hiss and a horrific snarl of wrenching metal. Smashing into an uneasy, towering spruce. With a flat thump and a squish, her hands dropped from the wheel as blood poured.
The spruce ominously swayed twice, the trunk cracked an ugly crunch that straightened the spines of the since unmoving deer, their black beady eyes observing the tragedy. A symphony of clicks came with their retreat and met the woman’s ringing ears, the horn was still going.
Alise wasn’t sure if the crack had come from the tree or teeth shattering with the force her face bounced off the vinyl dash. Her vision spun and twisted. She tasted the iron filling her
mouth, overwhelming her senses, completely blind to the gruesome cost of her actions in the seat next to her.
The airbags inflated, pointless, and delayed, pinning her back to watch her end at a wide view. Alise’s eyes widened in horror. Her daughter’s limp body, slumped against the steering wheel, disgustingly still. Her once auburn hair now stained a dark red from her forehead, that was dented into the curvature of the steering wheel. A thousand words swam in her head, but none could reach her mouth, drowning in her blood, and only a gurgled sob escaped as she struggled against the airbag’s pressure.
A second booming crack from the tree’s trunk was followed by a disgusting crunch of metal, bones, and wood. It was all over.