[05/01/2026][FICTION]Bloaties
by Henry Luzzatto
Whenever there was a new dead deer, which was often, Mom would announce to the house: “New bloaty by the side of the road!”
Bloaty on account of the gaseous swelling that happened when corpses were left out in the sun. My mom is a weird lady.
At night, deer would gather into the half-space between the woods, the house, and the highway, standing uselessly where the grass used to be. Things were usually peaceful, but once every six weeks or so, the quiet sounds of nature were interrupted by the screech of tires, a loud thump, then several minutes of cursing from the side of the road.
Drivers usually wouldn’t tell us when they hit a deer. I guess that felt somewhat impolite, waking us up for all that, and besides, it’s not like the deer were our property or anything. We just happened to be the scene of the accident. Instead, as the rest of the pack dispersed in startled mourning, illuminated by flashing hazard lights, the drivers would quietly drag the cooling corpse from the middle of the road to our side of the street, where it would pose less of a threat.
Deer bloat up after they die, especially when they’ve been wadded and moved by clumsy human hands.
Mom and I were the first ones awake most mornings, so she could take me to baseball practice before class. We were the first to see the bodies in the morning, swollen and putrified towards bursting, but she never complained. She just made coffee while I got my cleats, and didn’t call animal control until she finished her first cup.
The first time she called, animal control explained that they were only responsible for cleaning up corpses that ended up on city property, like the roads and sidewalks and medians.
“We can’t pick them up if they’re on your land,” the officer said.
“What?” Mom responded, a little bit of frustration in her voice.
The voice on the other side repeated, measured, “No, listen: we can’t pick them up if they’re on your land.”
Mom didn’t say anything back. Just realized, nodded, and hung up. Silent, she walked out to the corpse which had been thoughtfully dragged onto our property, and dragged it back to the middle of the road—the state route bypass—to the exact point where the bloody impact still stained the pavement.
“There,” she said. “Not on our land.”
Animal control was faster and more professional than the police, which was nice, because we saw them often. After a while, Mom got familiar enough to dispense with the formalities. Instead, she would just call and announce, “We got another Bloaty out front,” before hanging up suddenly. They didn’t mind. She occasionally provided post-corpse-removal lemon squares.
One summer, when the deer population really exploded, she numbered them like Star Trek films on the phone with the officers: “I think we’ve got Bloaty 3: Wrath of Khan. Or maybe it’s Bloaty IV: The Search for Spock. I forget which.”
“Ma’am, we’ll be right out,” they said.
The county eventually put a DEER XING sign in front of the curve leading to our house, hoping to stymie the flow of swollen bodies. It struck me as a bit pointless to start with the drivers and not the deer, which continued to gather inexplicably in the middle of the road.
We moved out as soon as we could. The house had weird cardboard ceilings and a burst septic tank out back. When Route 460 rerouted most of the traffic southeast, the casualty levels dropped off. I wonder if the deer noticed, or if they still hang around, haunted by some unconscious primordial memory of a convenient place to die.
HENRY LUZZATTO is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and musician. Originally from Suffolk, Virginia, his work is featured in The Baffler, Slate, body fluids, and more.