Yellow light slips beyond the tops of the mountains like butter falling out of a tipped pan. Yellow leaves clot the glade where my father aims his rifle, its barrel grazing the branches, the flat bodies of the leaves flapping to and fro in the autumn wind around him. Yellow eyes—my father’s—reflect the fading shades of evening, the whites of his eyes waxing from cotton to dandelion as he winks at me, turns his head, and fixes his gaze through the optical sights.
The flash of fire is yellow. The puffs of wheat grass are yellow, their shucked bodies filtering through the air as the 6-point buck rumples to the ground. My father lowers the gun from his shoulder, steps over to me, and pinches the yellow ends of my pigtails between his fingers as he says “we did it, Lissy, we did it!”
When really it was him, he did it.
Placing the gun back inside its case, my father tugs the material together, the metallic zipper-teeth shining golden. He opens the back hatch of the truck, puts the gun away and removes a leather pouch marked with yellowed masking tape: “CARVING KNIVES”. There’s a softness in my father’s amber-colored eyes when he says “sweetheart, you don’t have to watch if you don’t want to.”
Yellow are the daisy flowers growing on the creek bank a quarter mile down, their little faces bobbing as I brush the petals with my fingertips and wait for my father to finish his bloody business. Yellow flowers won’t last long here, with the world tilting towards winter, the season soon to meet its cool grave. Yellow labels will be placed on the plastic-wrapped pieces of venison my father will package late tonight, slicing through the wee hours at the kitchen counter as he slices through piles of meat. Grocery bags with yellow smiley faces will be filled with the meat cuts, and we’ll take them to the farmer’s market with our portable cooler, each piece priced by the pound. My father will let me handle the customer’s cash because I like to place the coins and bills in neat stacks and piles inside our citron tender box. On yellow legal pads, my father will keep track of the meat sales, carrying the ones, adding up the cash, and we’ll now have enough for my school fees. Yellow stoplights will cushion our way home, and my father will obey them, slowing to a standstill as the colors shift to red, the light of it bathing him in crimson wrinkles. Yellowing pages, this is my father’s life, the book of him crinkling with the use of thumbs and time, even as my pages are white with new-bound glue and fresh-pressed ink. I wonder if I will have a child someday, their hair honey-colored like mine, their eyes amber like their grandfather’s, and I wonder what I will kill and gut and package so that they might have a good life, too.
My father calls “I’m done with the gutting!”
Yellow bile rises in my throat as I get to my feet, brush off my knees, and walk up the creek by the golden glow of my flashlight, sick with the knowledge that my father will never need me the way that I need him. I cannot pay him back. I can only pay it forward.
Mikayla “Mik” Johnson is the winner of the 2024 Utah Original Writing Competition Short Story Collection. Her work has been published in The Colorado Review, Door is a Jar, Segullah, and others. Find her on Instagram @mikjohnsonwrites
Art by Franz Marc (1880–1916).
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