Author: Kristen Henderson

Her right hand was so chewed up by the churning machine at the mill that she was left with little choice. Little choice but to have a dowdy female surgeon attach a claw-like contraption to what straggly shattered pieces were left behind. If only she’d been left handed, but she was so right.
She wished she could blame someone else for her plight, but really she should have paid closer attention to the machine’s mechanisms.
Knowing she had no hope for normalcy — the mill had been everything — all she’d ever known — she found a yurt, advertised as a left-handed one, whatever that meant, and moved in with a cot, a hot plate, and three wool blankets. It does get frigid in North Dakota.
A docile deer she was able to stab with her clunky, yet graceful, artificial claw made for ample fare.

*

After two months, she thought about going back, back to people, but the deer, the ones she let live, where her kin now. Along with the squirrels and robins and the occasional eagle … and they never stared.