from Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes

Riley McGettigan, nineteen, wondering at the brevity of life, swooned with an arrow in his neck.

The Pelkys helped him into the back seat of their old sedan, Mrs. Pelky stuffing a bed pillow that still smelled of her night hair under his shoulder. Mr. Pelky, his driving confused by a sense of emergency, squealed onto the highway and sped for the hospital. The trees were in heavy bud, the wet road under the maples covered with their fallen blossom, as dark red as coagulated pools of blood. The car whirred past sloping maple, soft buff and genital-flesh blur, and below this purpled arc a line of popple flashed, then past veins of birch, then the curving line of the ridge and through the branches the puzzled sky, and they were past the roaring arms of the pines and the swamp filled with stalks, coming to the first fields and scratchy lines of red osier, bramble hoops, and all of it strung together with birdcalls and apprehension.