The Deer Ghost — Part I

The first thing I notice is the light.

It spreads across everything at once, flattening distance. The road, the air, the edge of the trees all rush toward me, too near, already touching.

This seems excessive.

Then the sound arrives: heavy and moving forward, a sound that does not hesitate because it has already made up its mind.

I lift my head, and the truck is there.

Too close. Unhelpfully close.

My legs tense and search for ground that isn’t gone. The command to move fires through me, sharp and useless. My hooves scrape. There is nowhere to place them. The space I need has already been taken.

This is happening.

The thought is immediate and enormous. It fills my chest faster than breath ever did, and everything collapses inward.

The smell of grass bursts up around me, wet and green and sweet. The air tastes like metal. My muscles pull hard against themselves, desperate and confused, alive in a way that feels almost unbearable.

I am in my body completely.

There is no room for anything else. No room for strategy, anyway.

The truck keeps coming.

Grief moves through me so quickly it barely has time to become recognizable: grief for movement, for running, for the ordinary continuation of things. I want one more step with a force that surprises me.

I am not asking for much. Only one.

The impact feels like the world closing its fist.

Pressure slams through me. My body is lifted, folded, interrupted. For a fraction of a moment, everything inside me scrambles toward pain, urgently forming a committee.

Then there is nothing for the pain to land on.

I brace myself and wait.

Nothing arrives.

I try to breathe. The habit begins, but the body does not follow. Something in me reaches automatically for ribs, lungs, throat, and finds only the memory of where they should be.

This is shock, I think. Shock is a thing bodies do.

I command my legs to move. The command travels nowhere and returns untouched. I try again, harder, because I have never known another way to move than wanting movement and having the body obey.

When I understand anything again, I am beside the road.

I think I am standing.

No ground presses into my hooves.

I shift my weight, but nothing shifts with me. There is no scrape of gravel, no bend in the legs, no answering pressure from the earth.

I look down.

I cannot find where I begin.

Then I see a deer lying across the painted line.

Something in me tightens, though I no longer seem to have anything that can tighten.

The deer is badly hurt.

Its neck has turned too far. One leg lies uselessly beneath it. Its eye is open.

I move closer.

The coat is familiar.

So are the white hairs beneath the jaw. The small tear in one ear. The dark mark above the foreleg where a branch caught me last winter.

I know that body.

The knowledge arrives before I am willing to understand it.

That is me.

I wait for the body to get up.

It does not.

This seems like an important failure.

I decide I must have been thrown clear. Pain has separated me from myself temporarily. Once the world settles, I will be back inside the correct deer.

I try to step closer.

There is no step. The distance simply gives up.

I am beside the body.

This is not how distance is supposed to work.

I lower my head toward its ribs and listen.

Nothing.

I listen again. Breathing repeats itself. Perhaps I have arrived in the space between breaths.

Still nothing.

A thought enters me.

Dead.

I reject it immediately.

Once, after rain, I ate several of the small red growths beneath the beech trees and spent an afternoon hiding from a fern that appeared to know where I was.

The world has behaved incorrectly before.

This may be temporary.

The body is there. I am here. Clearly the world has made an error and will correct it once whatever is happening wears off.

I wait.

The deer does not breathe.

I move closer and lower my nose to its shoulder.

Get up.

The thought comes with the old urgency.

Get up. We have to move.

I try to nudge it.

My head passes through the body.

No fur brushes my nose. No warmth meets me. There is nothing to push against.

I pull back.

Dead, the thought says again.

No.

I look into the open eye.

It does not turn toward me.

I have only just been alive.

Surely there is a period in between.

Then I hear footsteps.

For a moment, I do not understand them.

The truck stands nearby, ticking to itself.

I had forgotten that the large moving things contain men.

One of them is coming toward us.

Danger returns so quickly that my thoughts become simple again.

I move between him and the body.

Go away.

The words have no sound, so I throw them harder.

Go away. It is mine.

The man keeps coming.

He looks down at the deer in the road.

At me.

No. At the body.

I lower my head and stand over it.

Whatever has happened to me, this body is still mine.

It was mine when my legs first shook beneath me and refused to agree on where the ground was. It was mine when I followed my mother through wet grass, placing my hooves where hers had been. It was mine the first time I ran without thinking about each leg separately and discovered that the whole body knew what to do.

It carried me through cold mornings, hunger, rain, flies, thorns, and the long ordinary work of staying alive.

It carried me here.

That does not make it his.

The man reaches us.

I imagine the knife before I see one.

I see the body opened. Hands entering where no hands have ever been.

I imagine my head taken.

My legs separated.

My body reduced to portions small enough to belong to anyone.

Fear moves through me, sharp and immediate.

There is no heart to race, but something races anyway.

No.

He cannot have it.

I place myself more firmly between him and the body, though firmness has become mostly a matter of intention.

The man steps forward.

He walks through me.

There is no impact. No warmth. He does not pause.

For one impossible moment, we occupy the same place.

Then he is kneeling beside my body.

My body.

The thought becomes a kind of panic.

It cannot already belong to whoever arrives with a knife.

The man reaches for the body.

I throw myself at his hands.

Nothing.

My anger passes through his wrists, his fingers, the place where he touches my neck.

His hands are careful.

This is unexpected and, frankly, confusing.

Care belongs to living things.

Care is how a doe cleans blood from a newborn. Care is how the herd waits when one of us hears danger. Care is standing close enough that another body does not have to be afraid alone.

Care is not supposed to look like a stranger deciding how to lift you.

He slides one arm beneath the shoulders and another beneath the legs.

The broken neck shifts.

I follow it helplessly.

Be careful.

The thought escapes before I can stop it.

He is careful.

He gathers the body against him without pulling at the ruined leg. He supports the head. He covers the open eye.

He does not produce a knife.

He does not divide me into portions.

He lifts me whole.

Relief passes through me with such force that, for a moment, I expect a heart to answer it.

I had been very sure about the knives.

The man carries the body toward the truck.

I stay close beside him, guarding what he is already holding.

Perhaps he understands.

Perhaps the covering is respect.

Perhaps careful hands mean there are rules even here.

For a brief and fragile stretch of time, I allow myself to believe that I have been spared. That careful hands mean mercy. That there are rules. That I am being taken somewhere quiet where the body can finish being mine.

The head rocks with every turn.

I try to steady it.

My thoughts pass through the antlers, the skull, the broken neck. Nothing answers.

I stay close anyway.

It is still mine.

Time loosens after that. It becomes soft and unstructured. Clearly no longer my responsibility.

The rooms come without transitions.

A concrete floor. White walls. A metal table. Hooks.

Men speak above my body.

I cannot stop them.

“Good coat.”

“Clean antlers.”

“The damage can be hidden.”

Hidden?

The word settles inside me.

Then the knife appears.

For one impossible second, I think it must be for something else.

I had believed the careful hands. I had believed the covering.

I had made a whole mercy out of manners.

The shame of that reaches me before the fear.

Then I am back on the road.

The same certainty. The same impossible nearness.

No.

I throw myself over the body.

Move.

Get up.

Run.

Every command I have ever trusted fires at once.

No legs answer.

I lower antlers I no longer have. I kick with hooves that are still on the table. I try to make a sound large enough to fill the room.

Nothing moves but the man’s hand.

The blade touches my throat.

Panic tears through me, searching for a heart, lungs, muscles—anything it can use.

It finds only me.

The first cut opens the body from the throat downward.

I had been right about the knives.

Rage comes with the thought.

Rage at the man.

Rage at the careful hands.

Rage at the stupid relief that passed through me when he carried the body whole.

Stop.

The word has no sound.

Stop.

His hands enter the opening.

Heat rises from the body.

He reaches inside me.

Stop.

Organs are lifted out in shining handfuls, each one still shaped by the work it had done.

The heart that carried fear through me.

The lungs that opened for every run.

The dark, folded weight of the liver.

Private things.

Things no one had ever seen while I lived.

Stop.

They are placed aside.

Named.

Judged.

I hurl myself at him again.

Nothing in the room acknowledges me.

The blade continues. His hands continue. Even my rage leaves no mark.

He does not pause.

Then they begin to pull the hide away.

The skin separates from the muscle with wet reluctance.

It clings at the shoulders.

At the legs.

Along the neck.

For a moment, I think the body is resisting.

I love it for trying.

Then it comes free.

My coat folds back pale-side outward.

The shape that carried me through winter loosens from the flesh beneath it.

Stop.

I am screaming now.

I know I am screaming because there is nothing else left in me.

The men hear nothing.

They work carefully.

Carefully, they take me apart.

I think this is the end of it.

I am wrong again.

They keep the skin.

At first, I do not understand why.

The flesh is carried away. The organs disappear. The bones stop mattering.

My coat remains.

They wash it.

Scrape it.

Stretch it flat.

I stay beside it, looking at the pale inside of myself.

Then they bring in another body.

Foam. Wire. Wood.

It has never breathed. Nothing in it has known rain, hunger, fear, or the need to run.

They begin to dress it in me.

No.

My skin is drawn across the false ribs. My legs are fixed around legs that have never carried anything. My face is pressed into a shape that has never looked through trees.

Stop.

That is mine.

They pull the hide tighter.

They stitch the opening closed.

They place glass where my eyes were.

One man turns them with his thumb until I seem to be looking where he wants.

They raise my head.

Lift my ears.

Straighten the legs beneath me.

I begin to understand.

They are not preparing me to be eaten.

They are preparing me to remain.

The thought is worse.

Hunger would have ended with the body.

This will not end.

I will not rot.

I will not sink into the ground.

No grass will rise from me.

I will stand here instead.

Alert forever.

Ready forever.

Unable to leave.

They have removed everything that might sag, tremble, decay, or change. Everything that might make the body difficult. Everything that proved I had once existed inside the skin.

What remains is graceful, calm, and obedient: a deer with no will left to inconvenience anyone.

One of the men steps back.

He studies the lifted head, the straight legs, the bright unseeing eyes.

Then he touches my neck.

“Beautiful,” he says.

He means this version.

The version that cannot flinch.

The version that cannot run.

The version that cannot object.

For the first time, I wish they had eaten me.

When they are finished, they talk for a while longer. Their voices soften as they move away. A door closes. Then another.

At last, the room is quiet.

I remain beside the body, furious.

I hate the neatness of it. I hate how completely they have removed the road, the wound, the fear. They have left no sign that anything happened except the fact that I am no longer inside.

I stay.

I do not know how long.

Time no longer passes in a way I can measure. My anger moves through me in circles, striking the same places again and again.

Eventually, I look at the body.

Properly look.

Beneath the glass and wire, beneath the posture they chose for it, the hide is still mine. I know the small tear in the ear. The darker line along the shoulder. The places where the fur thickened in winter.

The sight of them changes something.

Affection returns slowly, and with considerable bad judgment.

I know this hide from the inside. I remember where it tightened when I ran, where rain gathered along the spine, where winter fur came in first. I remember the branch and the bright surprise of pain.

They have made the body strange, but they have not made it unfamiliar. I know it too well for that.

It did not fail me.

It was taken.

Even now, emptied and corrected into stillness, it is the nearest thing I have to home.

I move closer.

The anger is still there, but it has changed direction.

I am still here.

That complicates matters considerably.

I had assumed death would carry me farther than this. Instead, I seem to have remained where they left my body, which is inconvenient and, after some consideration, possibly useful.

I remember stories then, half-heard things passed between animals at night, the kind sensible creatures dismiss because sensible creatures are often just creatures who have not yet been given contrary evidence: ghosts that lingered near trees, followed bones, or needed something solid to keep them close to the world.

In retrospect, I may have dismissed these stories too quickly.

I look again at the body.

They wanted my shape without my will.

They wanted something beautiful, silent, and unable to object.

That was their mistake.

The body is empty.

I am not.

For the first time since the road, I know what I want.

If they insist on keeping me, they can keep all of me.

So I step back in.