His working apron waited, hanging on a hook in back, so covered in gore it was impossible to wear out front.

He’d scare the customers.

“You gotta let me go! I won the lottery!”

Ray considered this, silent as he helped the younger man pull trays, lining them up on the counter behind them. Luke had won the bear lottery once before—back when the kid was just thirteen, Ray remembered. He’d shot himself a big black monster that year, a little over three-hundred pounds. Now he’d gone and won again at the ripe old age of twenty-three and was fixing to get himself another.

The only thing preventing him from taking down a bear this year was his employer, and Ray took some sadistic pleasure in this fact.

It wasn’t the killing for meat he objected to—it was the assassins, baiting with corn and shooting their kill like fish in a barrel, letting the meat spoil before dragging them in, hundreds of pounds of the stuff going to waste so they could have a bear rug on their two-thousand square foot log cabin floors or a moose rack hung over their head-high fireplaces.

His disdain for out-of-state trophy hunters was known far and wide. An irony that didn’t escape anyone, considering how much of his work involved processing their game meat during hunting season.

They came from out of town.

Weren’t part of the community.

Just swept in and took whatever they wanted.

But the truth, if he could admit it, was that Ray kind of liked Luke. He wasn’t a big game hunter like most. At his philanthropist father’s prompting, the kid had donated the bear he’d shot at thirteen to a museum down-state for display, and the meat to a local shelter. Luke was just an adrenaline junkie—he liked the thrill of stalking his prey. That, Ray could understand.

What really bothered him were the odds.

Winning the lottery twice in a decade, with thirty to forty thousand applicants and maybe five thousand tags up for grabs in any given year? What were the chances of that?

Ray opened another sliding door on one of the display cases, pulling a long tray of ground sirloin. It was starting to take on a blanched, pale hue his mother, in her rough vernacular, had called “meat rot”. It was time to run it through the grinder again. “Bring up the blood,” she’d say.

It wasn’t blood, and there was nothing wrong with the meat itself really. Over time, all the juice collected at the bottom of the container—that’s why they used absorbent padding underneath. Many people mistakenly believed the stuff to be blood, but blood was darker, sticky, and it coagulated. This was what they called “purge”—all the myoglobin, a liquid protein—that sank to the bottom over time and made the meat lose its color.

His customers didn’t like that.

Omnivores or not, most humans liked meat, and they liked it fresh, red and juicy.

All but alive.

“I got four deer back there need processing,” Ray reminded his young employee as he slid the tray of sirloin next to the one full of sausage. Luke shifted from foot to foot like a three-year-old who needed to pee. “And you’re not the only one who got lucky in the bear tag lottery, you know. I expect Bud’s wife’ll be in with a bear any day now.”

Ray glanced up, expecting the thought alone to make her appear at the front door.

Bud’s wife.

He still couldn’t say her name, even in his own damned head.

“Some bastards have all the luck,” Luke said, starting to cover trays with thick pieces of foil like he’d been taught.

Ray just stared at him. “Tell me about it.”

“So can I go?” The younger man didn’t look up from his job but Ray could tell he was pretty much holding his breath.

“Yeah, yeah, fine.” Ray nudged the kid aside, tearing off another long sheet of foil. His body did this work every night without prompting. “Be in by eleven.”

Luke pushed his boundaries like a teenager.

“Okay, noon at the latest. You need me to help you finish closing up tonight?”

Ray ripped another piece of foil down the metal teeth.

“I suppose you got the Burnham girl waiting on you?”

Luke just shrugged but his face said everything his mouth didn’t.

Ray remembered her as a pretty young thing, not too skinny like some of them.

Curvy in all the right places.

She reminded him a little of...

Bud’s wife.

Ray turned his attention elsewhere, pulling on a pair of gloves and grabbing a fistful of ground sirloin. He stuffed it into the grinder and turned the handle—it was the old-fashioned kind, like most everything in the shop his mother had left him—coaxing the grayed, pallid flesh back to life, red rivers flowing onto a new Styrofoam tray.

Reprocessed, refreshed, and repackaged, it would be ready for sale again tomorrow, like the regurgitations of a mother bird.

He couldn’t express how much he hated it, the fetid smell of meat. Even fresh, it had a pungent, rank odor that clung to him night and day. But it was all he knew, all he’d ever known. He wasn’t like Luke...or Bud.

He never got lucky.

He never won anything.

He never got the girl.

But he could pinpoint the moment his life had merged onto this particular path, could see it shimmering behind him like a distant mirage he was traveling away from instead of toward.

There was a time when love had made everything so fine. The girl was an angel, hair like corn silk and skin like sweet cream. She was heaven in his arms and when she wrapped her long, satin limbs around him that first time during their sophomore year in high school and whispered his name again and again, he was both lost and found.

That summer glittered in his past like a distant star.

She had been his entire universe.

They had made all the usual proclamations of young love—forevers and stolen kisses in the back of Ray’s pickup, the light of a harvest moon turning the red truck bed to quicksilver.

She had given herself to him, had promised with more than her lips, with far more than words. He could still feel her in his arms, arching, sleek as a cat, a smile curling the corners of her irresistibly kissable mouth.

He wanted her, maybe more today than he had then, knowing now what he had lost. His hunger burned. Whenever he saw her now, everything in him went still, as if any movement might provoke the pure appetite coiled in his belly to spring.

The truth was simple—he was a coward. He had been too afraid to claim her then and he lacked the courage of his convictions to do it now.

Time had eroded the space between them.

The distance was unbridgeable.

Besides, he had thought she was his.

Had believed the lies her heart had told.

He’d never gotten down on one knee, hadn’t approached her formidable father for her hand, but he had asked for her heart. On a bed of soft pine needles with chipmunks amassing a stockpile of nuts for winter around them and egrets sailing from tree to tree, he had given her his grandmother’s ring—not an engagement ring exactly, but the promise of something more. It was too big but he’d slipped it on her finger anyway and asked, “Will you?”

She had wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him, murmuring, “I love you, Ray,” against his lips before they came together in the deep, dusky greens and browns of the forest and she called out his name and clung to him, the fierce cry in her throat rivaling the wild eagle overhead.

He didn’t realize until later that she hadn’t really answered his question.

She wore the ring around her neck for him, but he’d noticed it was conspicuously absent in her engagement photo in the Ontonagon Herald.

He’d never asked for the ring back.

Wondered if she still had it.

Did she look at it sometimes and think of him, of that time in their lives?

He couldn’t tell, even though during hunting season he saw her nearly every week.