Remember Why You Fear Me by Robert Shearman

gave the windscreen a cursory inspection, and from inside the car he gave her a hopeful thumbs up. She gave him a thumbs up back, but she hadn’t looked, not really, there could be shards of glass all round for all she cared. And then she turned and walked back down the hard shoulder to look for a body.
    It wasn’t rain, not really, just a bit of wetness in the air, and it was refreshing. She liked it out here in the black, on her own, and she wondered how long she could get away with it, with not returning to the car, returning to him—pretending instead to look for whatever it is they might have hit, she’d never find it now. And then she saw it, maybe about two hundred yards behind the car, a little mound that had been knocked into the middle lane. She stood parallel to it, but couldn’t make out what it was. She thought it might be moving. She waved back, indicating he should reverse the car. For a moment nothing happened and she thought she’d have to walk all the way back and tell him what to do, “fuck,” she said, and then, slowly, surely, the car began to back down the hard shoulder towards her, he’d got the message.
    “It’s just there,” she told him, as he wound down the window. “Try to angle the car a bit, so we can see what it is in the headlamps.”
    “What is it?” he asked her.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Try to angle the car. You know. So we can see what it is in the lamps.”
    He did his best. She still couldn’t identify it, it was sprawled in such an odd position, she couldn’t even see if it had a head. But there had to be a head, because it was definitely alive, whatever it was it was twitching, you couldn’t twitch without a head, could you? “Probably a bird,” he said, and she jumped, she hadn’t heard him get out of the car, “you saw the way it flew at me, probably a bird.” And he sniffed. But it looked a bit large for a bird, and besides, surely that was fur? “We should go and get it,” she suggested, and he looked horrified. “It’s in the motorway,” he said, “we can’t walk out into the motorway.” But there were no cars coming, no headlights in the distance, and the creature twitched again, for God’s sake it was
twitching
. “It’s not as if we’ll be able to help,” he said, and she gave him a look, said a “Sod it” under her breath, and then ran out into the road.
    Up she scooped it into her arms, and she made to dash back, but as she did so she felt that the creature had been stuck down on to the tarmac, she fancied there was resistance as she pulled it up, and she was suddenly terrified that she’d left bits of the body behind, that she’d make it back to the safety of the hard shoulder with only half an animal and the rest of it trailing after her. “Are you all right?” he asked, and his arms were out wide, and for a moment she thought absurdly that he wanted to
hug
her, after all that had happened, and she thought, no, he wants to take the animal from me, he wants to
share
this—but not even that, now his arms had dropped uselessly to his sides, he was doing nothing to help, nothing. And as she reached him she had a sick urge to drop the creature to the ground, but what would be the point of that, why bother rescuing it in the first place? And though she suddenly felt such revulsion to it, she kept it in her arms those few seconds longer, she knelt down and laid it out gently on the hard shoulder. And she realized at last that it
was
fur, matted fur, and she wondered whether it was matted with blood or with rainfall. “There,” she said, as she pulled away from it at last, “there you go,” and, stupidly, “you’ll be all right now.” And it did have a head she saw, thank God, and it turned that head and fixed her with its eyes.
    “It’s a rabbit,” she said.
    “Yes,” he said. “Or a hare. I always get the two muddled up. Aren’t hares supposed to have longer ears? Or is that the other way round?” He thought for a