This isn't a bad read, but the bulk of the story is only vaguely related to the reveal, so at the end it feels like a mismatch. There needed to be more foreshadowing for it to have the intended punch. ( )

The Tortoise and the Flower Girl
Review of the Amazon Original Kindle eBook released simultaneously with the Audible Original audiobook (February 24 2022).

We people were the monsters crashing their party, weren’t we? The creosote bush scrub, the gypsum outcrops and alluvial fans, the bighorn sheep and kangaroo rats, the chuckwallas and the Gilas with their seething orange-and-pink backs, the twisted junipers and the woolly Joshuas, the burrowing owls and the raspy cactus wrens—this was their home, and we were trashing it. Intruding on an open marriage of species that had survived the Ice Age, but might not survive us. - excerpt from Stag

[3.5]
This was a bizarrely entertaining short story, but mostly not for the conflicts with wildlife and nature which are otherwise the supposed central theme of Amazon Originals' Trespass Collection. The protagonist is going through a midlife crisis and is on a gambling binge where he meets a woman who invites him to be her +1 at a divorce ceremony (are there really such things?). At the ceremony, all of the wedding rituals are re-enacted in reverse order. The couple are declared divorced and walk away from the altar separately, their rings are carried away by the original ring-bearer, their pet tortoise.

At the end, the tortoise crawls away from the afterparty in order to lay eggs on the seashore. She is observed and followed by our protagonist and the flower girl from the wedding / divorce. That's about it, but it certainly kept you reading and wondering what was going to happen next.

Stag is one of six Amazon Kindle eBooks released February 24, 2022 as part of their Amazon Original Trespass Collection of short stories which "Take a walk on the wild side. When nature gets up close and personal, it isn’t always pretty. A fallen tree sparks a poisonous feud between neighbors. A child searches the darkness for the gleam of a tiger’s teeth. A woman holds off a colony of oddly relentless prairie dogs. In unsettling stories that range from horror to magical realism, award-winning authors lay bare the secrets hidden in the land." ( )