By Allison Field Bell
Fall in the Wasatch—the trees are yellow and red and orange. Sky is a crisp pale blue and at night, a kaleidoscope of stars. Shimmering bodies casting light on the aspen trunks. I watched them for hours. He slept of course. He’s always sleeping. Zipped himself into our tent and snored. Morning by the time I crawled in, and morning still when I crawl out, trying unsuccessfully to do so with grace. He slumbers on, or maybe he pretends to.
I straighten out my spine, stretch. And there before me only twenty feet away is an animal, a creature at least twice my size. A silhouette cut from the aspens. His anatomy comes into focus: a dark furry body, four slender legs, the s-curved back, the rack of antlers. He looks at me: black liquid eyes. Then continues his slow deliberate movement across the campsite. I consider my lover in the tent: he said just the night before that the biggest wild animal he’s seen is a coyote.
Would it even make a difference though? The moose. The aspen trees. He says he likes camping but then he snores and sleeps and talks about the way alfalfa farmers are draining the Salt Lake. He means well, but sometimes I just want to look at a tree and feel happy about it.
I watch the moose make his way past our camping chairs. His steady-unsteady gait. Both elegant and a bit obscene. The way his muscles ripple. His narrow hooves.
I think about something my lover once said to me: “It’s not that you’re wrong,” he said. “It’s just that you focus on the wrong details.” We were fighting over the garden again. Powdery mildew and a thick forest of sunflowers that shaded the tomatoes. I liked the sunflowers for their messiness, their sun-stretched stalks and heavy yellow heads. I didn’t take issue with the mildew: plants will do what plants will do. He wanted—isn’t it obvious—control. Order.
The moose drags himself past our car, his hooves crunching gravel. I wait for a sound of curiosity from the tent, but it never comes. Just snoring. Just the early morning chill and the moose and the aspen trees and me caught up in the way things are.
Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry collection, ALL THAT BLUE, forthcoming 2026. She is also the author of two chapbooks, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY (Poetry, Finishing Line Press) and EDGE OF THE SEA (Creative Nonfiction, CutBank Books). Allison’s prose appears in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com
MoonPark Review 