Done
by Natalie DeVaull-Robichaud
When Jen’s husband said the farm had done nine lambs so there were enough hearts and lungs for haggis, she knew the lambs’ pale lashes above dark curious eyes, the woodshavings flecking knees, the tender nostrils breathing April. She swallowed and it was as if she swallowed a lamb’s raising head while her husband and their friends leaned round the long table under the dimming sky with little summer lights lit like Christmas. But once she’d touched a horse’s breathing nostrils as she led it back in the twilight of camp and knew one day her own rough hewn fence with the animal not yet born inside. So the rest of the dinner was mist. Later, he gazed at her from across their living room and they did not remember the same story because the lambs were like air, or words, or nothing.
Natalie DeVaull-Robichaud lives in CT where she volunteers at a farm animal sanctuary and works in communications at Yale. Prior to Yale, DeVaull-Robichaud taught writing and directed the writing program at Albertus Magnus College. Her writing – mostly flash fiction and prose poetry – has appeared in a number of journals, including Fiction Southeast, Unbroken Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Gramarye. She is the recipient of the Hopwood Award and the Wilda Hearne Flash Fiction Award, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.