Ashley Krusen fiction short story Refuge
Detail from Anomalia by Nancy Panganiban, 28″ x 28″, Acrylic on birch panel, 2025
Refuge
We call it going to summer camp. It sounds nice—conjures images of evergreen trees and rope swings dangling over lily pad lakes. Little Jimmy’s first time out on his own, where a camp counselor will teach him how to swim and inadvertently become the archetype for his future romantic fixations. Happy memories for all. Of course, animals don’t go to summer camp—not in real life—but there’s a sort of divine commonality in saying that’s where they’re headed. After all, we all just want to go someplace nice in the end, don’t we?
I empty the tub of rabbits into the bin to join the three squirrels, a raccoon, and a Virginia opossum already in various stages of rigor mortis. Then I close the lid and turn on the gas for seven seconds. Five seconds is too short, and I have an aversion to even numbers. It’s almost eleven at night—a time of night you can feel, particularly in the basement of the refuge where the concrete floors and walls absorb the fluorescent lights. There’s a specimen in the freezer still waiting to be prepped before it’s sent in for testing. Another raccoon suspected of rabies. Technically, he should have been stored in the refrigerator, not the freezer, but Caroline is still learning, and what’s done is done, so I don’t bother getting worked up about it.
I rub my forehead with the back of my sleeve. It can wait until morning, but I said that last night too, and eventually, morning must come. The woman who brought the raccoon in has called three times already, erratically demanding to know the results of tests that—we have reiterated several times—we do not conduct here on site. She has ignored this piece of information in favor of loudly voicing her concerns over her toy poodle, who may or may not have drunk from the same water dish in the backyard.
I open the chest freezer and pull out the yellow bag containing the raccoon. The tape is wrapped so tight the body looks like an oddly shaped chicken nugget that’s been saved for later. Our friend is stiff, forever stuck mid-stride as though caught in the act of doing something he shouldn’t have. Large clumps of his fur are missing from where he had been tearing at chunks of his flesh. I can still hear it—snapping jaws biting through cartilage. Teeth on teeth, bright and cold as metal. I watched him for a while before we made the call. They asked me to, so that’s what I did. We needed to be sure we weren’t just dealing with the aftereffects of head trauma or some other form of impact injury. Our patients, unfortunately, present with very few details regarding what happened prior to their current state, so it’s primarily guesswork. Most medicine, animal-related or otherwise, is speculative anyway. Who knows what’s really going on—who knows why any of this happens at all?
I had watched our friend turn in circles all morning, pacing his enclosure, watching me in return. By the afternoon, his agitation had become more animated. He started rolling around, chasing himself, looking back to see his own hind and attacking it as though faced with a long-standing enemy. I made the call when he bit into his leg and tore out a plug of white, gummy fat, squishing it between his canines while the blood rolled off like oil over water. That was enough.
I part his fur and look at that wound on his rigid thigh—almost perfectly round the way the teeth sliced through. Since blood has long stopped circulating through the body, the site looks more like a pale faceless moon, pearly and luminescent under the lights. There is beauty in the ending of pain. I do believe that. And I remind myself of this as I grab the handsaw and begin removing the head.
♦ ♦ ♦
Jess calls again when I get home. The only person on the planet who may get less sleep than I do, though her reasoning is much more sound than mine—having a newborn will do that. I let it go to voicemail. I never reject her calls, I just let them ring out. The difference is important. The only reason we’re still friends is because she understands this.
She doesn’t always leave a message, but tonight she does. I set my keys in the baseball-patterned bowl beside the door, hang up my jacket, and grab a can of soda from the fridge. I actually hate soda—my stomach can’t handle the carbonation—so I counteract this by opening a can and letting it sit in the fridge until the next day, which is why there is such a can waiting for me. Sitting at the table with my flat Diet Coke I listen to Jess’s message.
Hey lady, just checking in again. Ryan found out he has a work thing this weekend, so it turns out I have an extra ticket to Moulin Rouge after all. The in-laws are watching Leo—thought it might be a good excuse for a girls’ night? Just like old times. Anyway, I’d love to see you. Please, just think about it, okay? I love you. Call me.
I delete the message and go to turn off my phone, but just before the screen goes black, a text appears. You’ll be hearing from the lawyers tomorrow. Do NOT block me again.
My mother-in-law has such a way with words. I sip my soda and block her number. Maryann has never been a huge fan of me. More accurately, she has never been a huge fan of my stance on remaining childless and supporting the pro-choice movement. But that has always been just an undercurrent of her disapproval. I have never been good enough for Jamie—she was very clear on that point from the moment I met her. The deep frown on her face when I dared rest my elbows on the table during dinner said it all. She didn’t smile once the entire night. She kept asking Jamie about school—kept probing about his pre-med classes and looking at me as if to flourish his intellectual superiority over my meager environmental studies degree. Intellectual superiority or not, he still died.
I heat up a microwavable pack of mac and cheese and eat it with a pile of ketchup like a child, finish my soda, and get ready for bed. I probably won’t sleep, but I’ll lie under the covers and watch reruns of 80s sitcoms until my head feels like it’s full of static and my eyes grow sore from the glare.
I always go to bed with my socks on, no matter what time of year it is. Jamie always said it was a weird thing to do, but whenever he’d get up in the middle of the night to take a piss and have to walk across the cold hardwood floor on his tiptoes, I was sure to remind him which of us was the true innovator.
After we got married, we watched this show, Supermarket Sweep, a lot. Jamie was still in med school, I worked at a non-profit, and we ate potato chips and mustard for dinner on a regular basis. We couldn’t afford cable, and we were stealing wifi from the tenants in the apartment above us—the connection of which frequently failed. Jamie was always going on about not taking any handouts from his parents. I didn’t mind. I liked eating chips and lounging on our Facebook Marketplace furniture in my underwear while he studied beneath a tiny battery-powered desk lamp whenever the electricity got shut off. Supermarket Sweep was one of the few shows that came through clearly on our twelve-dollar T.V. antenna. It started off as a joke—watching host David in one of his many avant-garde-patterned sweaters, passionately celebrating Barbara’s record-breaking time finding the Crisco. Somewhere between putting it on for background noise and “let’s watch one more episode,” we found ourselves utterly engrossed in the success of mother-of-four, Martha winning five thousand dollars’ worth of refrigerated deli meat. On our apartment floor, we cheered, on the edge of our seats as she ran past that finish line with less than a second to spare. The drama. The incredible existential joy of it all. Later, I’d put the show on in bed during those nights when the chemo hit him particularly hard, and for a while, it still made him smile.
♦ ♦ ♦
When I open my eyes there is daylight beyond the curtains. Reason says I must have slept at some point, but my body disagrees. I always feel heavy in the morning. I’ve lost weight since Jamie died—I also lost weight while he was dying, sympathy pains the doctor said—but I wake every morning now and feel as though I weigh a thousand pounds. Like my bones have grown in density, or maybe my gravitational pull has somehow increased. If Jamie were here, he would give me a thorough explanation as to why these things aren’t possible, and I’m not scientifically minded enough to imagine what he might say, so instead, there is a bloated silence where an explanation should be—but isn’t. I wiggle my toe around through the hole in my sock and get up to make coffee.
I arrive at the refuge an hour early. Although I’m usually the first one to work anyway, today I’m here before the crows even shake the dew from their feathers. I prepare the food for the raptors in the barn—skinned chicks and hunks of venison that I weigh and divy up equally. I sneak an extra ounce of meat into the breakfast of our barred owl, Baxter. He’s a favorite of mine. His brown eyes are deep and stoic—vacant globes that follow me as I perform my rounds. Baxter is blind, but he always knows where I am. I swear he can tell my footsteps from the rest of the staff. I don’t often like to think of myself as special, but there are times when Baxter’s head swivels and lingers in my direction that I feel othered in a way I can’t quite explain. To be seen by the unseeing is a very unusual sensation. I unlock the vestibule, step inside, and place the skinned chicks on the ledge. Baxter swoops down soundlessly, landing on his perch just inches away.
Jamie used to love to visit me at work. He said I looked so much more at ease with animals than I ever did around people—a point we always agreed on. He told me he thought I had the harder job—my patients couldn’t articulate their pain, often turned aggressive during treatment, and were thankless upon recovery. I reminded him that the same could be said about his work on occasion. We didn’t discuss it any further, but when I look back now, I wonder why I didn’t make the connection sooner—there is so little difference between us and animals in the end. The way Jamie roiled in pain in those later months, spit congealing around the corners of his mouth no matter how many times I’d wipe it away. How he hissed and spat and punched at the air. When one of those blows connected with my cheek one night, he cried like something feral—balled his hands up into fists and screamed his pain into vapor.
♦ ♦ ♦
The refuge is busy today. Most days in the spring are. Injured animals filter in through reception, the finders parroting the same stories over and over.
“My dog caught this bird.”
“I ran over this nest of baby rabbits with my lawnmower.”
I’m tending to just such a case when an unknown number appears on my phone—one of Maryann’s legal hounds sent to track me down, no doubt. It’s not that I’m avoiding them, despite how it might look. It’s just that I can’t live in that moment any longer than I already have. She thinks I killed him. He was strong, he was young, he was getting better, she said. He had just been accepted into a new medical trial. Only a week before his death, he’d attended his father’s birthday party, and everyone commented on how good he looked. It didn’t make any sense to find him cold one morning with ten times the prescribed amount of painkillers flooding his stagnant veins. It made no sense at all to anyone but me.
One of the rabbits wriggles on its side. I examine him under the light and find the blue blooms of internal bleeding on his belly. A young boy brought this litter into reception. He had carried them here in a shoe box lined with grass and twigs. Placed a chocolate chip cookie in the corner in case they got hungry. He handed the box over with big wet eyes and asked if they could be saved.
Though they often get overlooked, I think rabbits are evolutionary marvels. The way they have adapted to their status as prey animals is actually quite impressive. When caught by a predator, a rabbit’s skin will tear off in order to provide it ample time to escape. If that fails, a rabbit freezes, its heart rate accelerates, and it sends itself into a state akin to cardiac arrest. It will have a heart attack and die before a hawk can tear it apart to feed it to their young. In the face of certain death, a rabbit can effectively shut itself off and spare itself the pain of a long and agonizing end. The litter of rabbits I’m treating now are stuck in a sort of limbo. A deep gash grazes through to one’s spine. Another is missing an ear. I soak a cotton ball with isoflurane, cover them up, and send them to summer camp.
♦ ♦ ♦
I buried Jamie long before he actually died. It was a Tuesday night, about eight months before the end, and we had gone out on a walk after dinner. He had started talking a lot about his childhood, reminiscing about a time when he felt fearless because, like most children, he didn’t know any better. I held his hand all the time. His skin was becoming thin, his body imploding before my eyes. We walked to the lake around the corner from our house, sat on the bench beneath the willow tree, and looked out at a purple sky. “That’s your smile,” he said to me. He always worried about not having the right words, that he wasn’t romantic enough, so whenever he found something beautiful, he would tell me it was my smile. He said it was the only way he could describe how I made him feel.
I buried Jamie there, in that moment, underneath a tree where everything was made beautiful by the way he saw it.
When I pull into my driveway, Maryann is there waiting for me, standing on the front porch with her arms folded—all fangs and sharp angles. I’ve barely taken a step out of the car before she’s walking over, thrusting papers at my chest. She’s hired a private investigator to look into the case now. She’s assembled the best legal experts in the state to rain hell down upon my vile soul.
At the funeral, she all but attacked me as we left the cemetery. Jamie’s father, Paul, had to hold her back while she yelled foul obscenities at me from across the churned-up earth. How cowardly I had been to allow him to die. How downright evil I was to have let him go.
I hold the mess of papers to my heart while she fumes and hollers. A great big bonfire of a woman setting the whole world ablaze—burning it all down.
She is a wildfire, and I am a drought.
She turns toward the house, and when she looks back at me again, her eyes are wet with gasoline. A mother searching for her lost child. “You bitch! You despicable evil woman! I buried my son!”
I let the papers fall—a trail of ashes scattered upon the ground, and I wrap my arms around her. She freezes. Stiff hallowed bones left behind by the flames. “I miss him too.”
I often wonder, if Jamie was the best part of me, then what does that say about who I am now? What does it mean for all the broken parts of me he’s left behind?
I wish I could do anything other than love him.
I wish I were a rabbit.
When I let my arms down, Maryann stands there for a brief moment, then turns on her heels, gets in her car, and drives away. I sit down in the driveway for a while, lie on my back, and look up at the sky. Lilac-painted clouds part way for the soft face of the moon. There is beauty in the ending of pain.
I truly do believe that.
Ashley Krusen has been writing fiction and exploring the connective power of storytelling since she was ten. A nature-lover at heart, she currently works at a wildlife refuge in South Jersey and spends her spare time reading, puppet-making, and searching for the perfect tiny trinket to complete her curio shelf.
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