dear deer

She stares out into the darkness of the night across the road, into the swaying fields of tall corn and wild grasses, waiting for something. Someone. The fields stare back, and she waves absently. Inexplicably, she knows she’s in Nebraska, and there is blood dried to her face, cheeks, fingers, and beneath her nails, and, for some reason, there is a Hail Mary on her tongue, repeating over in fragments in her mind. Behind her, the electric lights of the gas station sign and the small store behind her buzz with a high-pitched whine.

She reaches into her pocket to pull out the knife she is folded there. The blade of the knife pops open easily, and she uses it to start to pick out the red dried under the tips of her chipped-blue nails, stepping towards one of the pumps to better be illuminated.

            No cars are fueling, but a small truck is parked up by the store, the owner probably the single worker inside. A warm wind rushes by, rattling through the grass, and she grimaces, deciding her nails clean enough and refolding the knife into her pocket. Once the knife is away, she spits in her hands and wipes at her face, doing her best to at least scrub away some of the blood, knowing it probably smears more than anything; she’ll have to wash off in the bathroom if there is one. Or buy a bottle of water and do the best she can in a window reflection. She starts to pat down her pockets to get a sense of self and she’s abruptly reminded of some shooter game she doesn’t really remember playing herself but must’ve done with a friend, huddled together on the couch late at night, eyes affixed to the TV. The game details are irrelevant, but she knows the friend’s face, short black hair, round brown eyes, a scar at the corner of his lips. His favorite song was something by Queen, and they had been eating buttered popcorn together, greasy fingers making the two controllers filthy.

            She wants to puke, and her mouth tastes like iron. Identity, pockets. She finds a dead, cracked iPhone she hopes just needs to charge, a ring of several keys, her knife again, a plastic red rosary, and a wallet with—thankfully—some bills in it. The wallet has an ID in it, the photo beaming up, and the date of birth claims twenty-one in the past January, and though she doubts the legitimacy of it, the name reads ‘Hattie” and she holds that close. Hattie, her name? Hattie, like bedtime stories and places where everything is grand? Her shins are aching and bruised yellow-green, her Vans beat-up and covered in dirt, and across the road farther into the fields or woods or river is her friend probably lying dead with a bitter cry still left on his tongue; Hattie did not kill him, she thinks. Hattie hopes, at least. Her bottom lip is so dry they might bleed, and she bites down on it, unconsciously pulling the skin between her teeth and ripping.

            Above the sky is impeccably clear, and every star looks down at her with a baleful light. Hattie doesn’t live in Nebraska.

            She doesn’t live in Nebraska, and if she walks deep into the fields across the road, she will find a deer dead, split throat to belly, no heart in its feeble chest. Her stomach lurches, and she breathes deeply, trying to settle it. From a short distance behind her, she hears the convenience door swing open with a quiet chime. Another breath, tasting bile in her throat.

            “You gonna come in from the cold, miss?” someone calls.

            She turns around and wonders what she must look like, in oversized layers and a pair of old denim shorts, blood staining her face. The man just out the door laughs— but not in shock.

            “Ah, you’re back. Without your car?”

            Hattie shrugs.

            “I didn’t feel like driving anymore,” she rasps. It might be true. Her stomach stirs again, and she licks her lip to wet them, tongue coming away with a bitter tang.

            “Well, you certainly look worse for the wear for it.”

            Hattie tries to laugh but ends up coughing. The dry blood splits where her face creases in the attempt at expression, falling away in little flakes. She’s shivering away in the warmth, unconscious of what else she should do; at the edge of her mind is a great omnipresent weight, pressing down, and she fears if she stops to think, it will come crashing in. An ant and a person, a mortal and a god old as the dirt they walk atop but still younger than most stars; knowledge she has but doesn’t, but won’t allow to get any clearer. Martin. Martin Martin Martin. The flannel-lined denim jacket she’s wearing is his, and the same can be said for the small hoop earrings through her lobes and the old cut-up band tank top and the heart stick n’ poke still irritated on the side of her thumb. Hattie knows few things, but she knows that she is nothing holy and that she still thinks of the folklore of the Midwest quite often— of the crawling creatures of bone and blood and sweet-smelling earth like a mushroom’s rot. Of the stink of saltwater streams with fish dying within— black bears watching quietly across the river, contemplative and still. Hattie has always wanted claws like them, teeth too.

            “Where have you been?” the man calls, and she remembers he’s there, suddenly. Remembers his gold canine and three thick rings and great white beard grayed with cigarette smog. She had been here, earlier tonight, earlier— Blood, mouth, teeth, bone. Whiplash as her car hit something heavy: small-eyed and innocent. People’s eyes don’t shine like that, she knows, but it’s little comfort.

            “Not sure.” Knowledge at the edge of her mind, intention in ligaments, joints, bone. She crunched a rat skull between her teeth earlier that night, perhaps, felt like an owl with endless visibility. Momentary until the bone melted like candy against the acid of her tongue.

            “You wanna use the bathroom to get washed up, missie? You got a little uh, something on your face there.”

            In her, around her, she can smell it harshly.

            “You’re not gonna ask about…” she gestures vaguely, and the man shrugs, big shoulders rolling back. He must be around fifty, sturdily built like a farmer with a roaring laugh, and he wears worn jeans and a flannel with an old baseball cap atop his head. There are tattoos on his knuckles, dark ink visible even from where Hattie stands.

            “That’s deer blood, ain’t it? Seemed a little personal. Besides.” His eyes shine in the light, reflecting. Tapetum lucidum: tissue in the eyes of some vertebrates that allowed higher light reception and, subsequently, superior night vision. “I feel like ole’ me isn’t one to ask.”

            “You said you saw me earlier.”

            Blood, face, eyes. The man shrugs.

            “You came in, half out of it, bought a pack of cigs and a drink. Said something about being on the road searching.”

            “Martin. I was searching for my friend Martin.” She’s staring down at her shoes. The white parts of the pattern are stained dark. The electric lights buzz loudly in her ears. Memories hang in her peripheral, taunting her to turn her head and see. “You know, when we were younger, we used to love arguing about whatever qualifies as ‘urban legends’ this far out in the country. He got all these weird stories from his cousins or the internet or whatever, and he clung to them with all his might. They made living around here seem special, worth it— that's what he used to say, at least.”

            “Come wash your face.” The man is at the door, holding it open. “And if you tell me what you’ve been doing, I’ll give you a smoke and a drink, all on me.”

            Hattie walks halfway forward to read his knuckles. Across them spells: ‘DEAR DEER.’ She laughs, thin and shaky, and then she slips past him into the buzzing store.

Hattie and Martin were born within a week of each other at the very same hospital, lived but five blocks away from each other their whole lives, but they didn’t meet until they were twelve. Which was surprising because in their little town everyone knows everyone, but the inciting incident of their relationship was somehow seventh grade, with one bright coming out and one cold outing: leaving the ‘fucking queers’ to band together or die at the hands of brutal twelve-year-olds and looming adults. Even then though, they weren’t all that similar; Hattie had always been somewhat solitary, her previous close friendship shattered after the girl outed her with an air of self-righteousness, while Martin was a bright-eyed rebel from the start. He bit and swore and shone and ran wild at any opportunity, Hattie trailing at his side with her polite smile her mother had given her and the good sense for lying that her father had. Hattie didn’t strive to be contrary, but she grew a fondness for the way Martin did, the way he box-dyed his hair green freshman year, pierced his own lip, vaped and drank with her, and was loud about all of it.

There was nothing to do out in rural South Dakota, gay or not, so they spent their teenage nights in the basement of Martin’s house, binge-watching movies or doing homework. Often, they would walk to the gas station about ten minutes away to pick up snacks, junk food: Hattie always getting the same order, Martin attempting to discover a new combo.

“You’re a creature of filthy habit.”

She laughed at him; they were seventeen, just stepping into the hot air of July nights. The gas station door swung close slowly behind them. As usual, Hattie had her plastic bottle of coke and bag of sour gummy worms.

“And you aren’t?”

He watched her carefully light her rare cigarette before shoving her, both going tumbling down against the asphalt with a scream.

Martin and Hattie kissed once, the night their sophomore year ended, then laughed about it. Everything felt a little easier in the moment: halfway through high school, Hattie with a license, unfamiliar freedom licking like fire at their heels. His mouth had tasted like flavored nicotine, and she laughed about that too.

“I’m going to make it out,” she swore to him. They were still giggling on the floor. “I’m going to get into that college somewhere else and we’re both going to get the fuck out of here, you hear me?”

He laughed, and everything felt hot and bright that night, didn’t it— saturation turned high and almost psychedelic: euphoric. They were going to make it out. Of course they would; Hattie had declared it so.

The night he vanished, Hattie felt sick with a low, full-body type of nausea that made her stumble when she tried to walk, overcome with vertigo. It’d been the same night a party was planned at some high school student’s house, one of those last summer celebrations for many of the other kids in the town preparing to run off to college, and she wanted to beg Martin not to go because he would’ve listened to her silly forebodings. He would’ve stayed there with her until the feeling passed and later they could go to a different party or head to the convenience store yet again, loitering in the 24-hour lit parking lot.

Oh, you’re just bone sick, her mother would jokingly call the random bouts of nausea when she was much younger, when they still spoke to each other in that quiet secret way, you might just be the next family prophet. Like bones used for scrying, finding paths through the dark—into it. Her mother and her didn’t speak that way anymore, but omens still came like a sickness to her and she could never tell them apart from simple illness. Didn’t even want to most of the time, just took the sick day curled up in her bed or on the couch in Martin’s basement, watching the light play out in different ways across the ceiling.

The last time she saw him that night, he’d had glitter smeared across his eyelids and had stolen one of her cropped tank tops. It’d been a rare occasion to be at Hattie’s house in any circumstances, but she hadn’t wanted to leave her bed from the moment she got home, and he’d wanted to see her before heading out.

“I’ll be back by one,” he promised, “even if I have to climb in your stupid ‘jammed’ window.”

Hattie had glared half-heartedly at him; it was eight-thirty or so and she was already drifting off.

“It’ll be unlocked,” she mumbled as he moved towards her door. “Don’t do anything stupid that I wouldn’t!”

He laughed and waved goodbye at her. Her eyes were already sliding closed.

“See you later, Hattie! I might even pick up a coke if I’m feeling generous.”

From her spot beneath too many blankets for a July night, she flipped him off.

She awoke sometime later to a dark room. On her side table, her alarm clock read 3:17 AM, and her big armchair, where Martin usually would pass out in whenever he visited, was empty and cold-looking.

His mother was the one who broke the news when she came to check on him the following afternoon, Hattie having given him time to possibly come home, run back from whatever boy he’d snuck out with or trouble he’d gotten into without her.

“Oh, Martie’s ran off missing,” his mother told her, leaning against the doorway. “He went out to that party and said he was going out with a close friend after, but he probably went a little wild. You know how he likes to go off and adventure.”

            His mother made it clear they had no intention to call the police, there was nothing for them to be called for. Hattie didn’t believe her. Queer boys didn’t just ‘run off missing’ in their little South Dakotan town, no matter what type of queer they were talking about. They didn’t vanish, they didn’t risk their luck like that. When she told her as much, his mother’s face had turned unpleasant, sour.

            “I don’t want you projecting all of your own...issues onto my son. He’s being a perfectly normal teenage boy.”

            His mother sat two pews over from her in church; she carried a thin black rosary she would proudly claim was a direct inheritance from a French Catholic queen many centuries dead—a great treasure she kept only for sentimentality and family honor. Martin had told Hattie some years ago that it was actually bought from a pawn shop some time when he was younger; he’d watched her pay four-ninety-five for it. Martin, her only son— one without an issue to be seen in her eyes; his parents accepted him and his bisexuality, tenuously, but actively ignored it with this silent seeming prayer that he would make the ‘right choice’ one day and not leave their family to shame. 

            Hattie held Martin one night when he was teary-eyed and babbling— hugged him as tight as she could and didn’t complain of the mucus or dampness growing against her shoulder. She was taller than him by a bit, his neck strained to find a comfortable position, and she could feel every violent shake as he sobbed. She always thought him like Prince Rupert’s Drops:  glass near impossible to shatter unless you broke the tail with a little pressure, which would make it all explode into thousands of irreparable bits. And his parents, despite their insistence they’d let Martin do whatever he wanted in his teens, knew exactly what to snap.

Hattie’s gums felt raw, and she’d run her tongue over them, tasted sour rage. Then she spat at the woman’s feet and turned away, walking quickly back down the street. The sun had burned her neck, and when the mother let out a long wailing shriek after her, she picked up her pace, sprinting down the gleaming asphalt, praying—praying— that Martin’s father would not emerge.

The same day, she packed her small bag and left, driving aimless south into the night. A deer on the road, staring at her. A deer in the dark night, just at the edge of the asphalt, eyes reflecting like stars. Country roads of Nebraska: narrow and impossible.

“I just meet some animals and I'm convinced they’re not just animals. Like there’s something more to them that’s entirely unexplainable. Kinda holy.”

Martin’s hair flopped over his eyes and he blew it back into place with an irritated huff. Hattie really should offer to cut it at this point, maybe more towards a mullet so at least it’d stop falling in front of his eyes; she was sick of his complaining. This was all some time in that same last July when they were eighteen, and they were spending yet another night in his parent’s basement.

“I don't know if I really get you. Animals are animals, they live and die like us.”

“They're not just animals. Never. They're something...more.”

She let her head fall back then slump forward, wincing at the ache of her spine, and took a sip of lukewarm beer. He reached out an asking hand, and she tossed him the vape half stuck beneath the cushions, watching as he caught it easily then blew out a bubble-gum scented cloud, smoke obscuring then dispersing fast; she was glad she’d cracked the high wall window earlier. Her skin buzzed, and she took another sip. It was bitter.

“What kinda animals are you even talkin’ about?”

He lifted his head from the floor, eyes half-lidded and lazy but not unfocused. The buzzing intensified as he smiled, more teeth than anything. His voice was little more than a rasp, barely audible even though the movie they’d put on was long muted in the background.

“You ever met a wild deer, Hattie?”

He would’ve gone down screaming, bitter and brave, teeth and claws. In the dark of night, he would’ve been brilliant. In the dark of the night, the deer’s eyes reflected her headlights in bright circles, and her eyes burned hot, and, with a quick jerk of the steering wheel, she swerved and slammed straight into the deer, letting out a single screech herself on impact. But the deer did not scream.

“I think,” she says to the man when she emerges from the store, blood washed away and a coke in one hand. “That I killed a deer tonight.”

“Deer?”

“Deer.”

The man lets out a long whistle and pops down his truck’s tailgate before hopping up. She joins him, accepting the cigarette he offers without comment before digging in her pockets for a light. One is already lit between his lips, and he leaves it hanging to do the sign of the cross, kissing his knuckles at the end and lifting his hand to the dark sky briefly.

“May its soul rest,” he whispers. He’s smiling, just a bit.

Hattie finds her lighter, a cheap old thing colored red, and sparks it, lighting up with a single huff.

            She drove her car into the ditch after that, did her frantic best to not crash, then stumbled out of the driver's seat. It was a sizable deer, but she still grabbed its legs and pulled it into the cornfields, searching for a clearing, feeling every pull and bump and jolt. It was barely alive, she could feel, legs thumping with a weak pulse beneath her white-knuckled grip.

            After some walking, there was a rough clearing, just big enough for the two of them, and she dragged the deer in and dropped its legs.

            Her knife was heavy, awkward in her left hand. She knelt at the deer’s side.

            “Now if you ever have to kill a deer with the knife, cut it right across the throat.”

            Hattie at eleven, hiding out in the backyard with her father as he gifted her a flip blade knife. They had both known that if her mother had discovered them, she would’ve raised hell, which Hattie hadn’t understood. The blade was barely acceptable for defense and tasks like this, not nearly as dangerous as the hunting knives her father carried when going out into the forest.

            Hattie mimicked the action across the small wood log her father had pulled before them, careful not to graze it too hard and get the knife stuck. Beside her, her father cracked a smile, shifting forward. She had his nose, she knew, long and faintly hooked, his same stubborn set of mouth and thick brown hair. She didn’t have much else of him anymore.

            “There you go. Real nice and easy. When you get a bit older and your mom doesn’t worry so much, we’ll go huntin’, okay Hattie?”

            “Okay,” she whispered and beamed widely back.

The deer died by her hands with a long slash across its throat, then down its belly. It died quickly, as mercifully as she could manage.

She heaved, stumbling to her feet and backward before turning away to puke, feeling every motion, legs and neck aching. Her stomach tightened and convulsed, her throat burned; she didn’t cry. Didn’t scream. Her legs and hands and fingers shook, so she braced against her knees and prayed as she tasted filthy filthy filthy. She hated puking— rarely did it. Not when she drank too much, not when she smoked on an empty stomach or took meds in the same state or ran down dark streets without pause, shins splintered, faster and faster as dawn tried to break over the horizon. Not even in her bouts of foreboding nonsense did the nausea ever manifest in vomiting, and the unfamiliar sour taste made her sob, the sound cracking at the end. Her lips were scabbed, bitter.

            Martin was never like her; Martin never had fear of anything.

            “If ghosts make the world cold, do you think gods warm it?” he asked her, as they were making a Saturday wander across quiet streets. Hattie’s coke bottle had almost been empty, and she was ready to go back home. There was no moon out that night. She never answered.

  Heat scorched from the nape of her neck down her spine, hot like the first ray of sunlight out of a movie theater. Mercury rested above her head, and from behind her, there was a low hum. It rumbled up through her shoulders, resonating through her throat as if she had made the sound herself; she felt tears clump her bottom lashes.

Neither her mother nor her father put much stock in the local church’s teachings, but they would attend together with her every Sunday at nine, no matter what happened. Hattie learned prayers as a way of keeping ritual, patterns weaving behind her eyes; she didn’t know if she ever believed, but there was something comforting about the routine. About the stained glass and stuffy wooden pews and the hymn books she's known since before she could even make out their letters.

Church was about the only time she really saw her family nowadays, quietly piling into the car, then filing quietly in when they got there and taking up their resident pew, third from the back on the left. At the sign of peace, they would bow and shake and whisper absolution. At communion, they would receive their blessings together and eat the bread and drink the wine, and sometimes, once that was all done, they would take each other's hands and they would not stand again for the final hymn. Hattie knew neither of her parents worshiped outside of those Sundays, but it felt like, in that place considered holy, that they all could be momentarily kind to each other.

Afterward, her parents would silently leave for lunch with their friends, and Hattie would walk down the sidewalk to the nearest convenience store and buy herself a coffee, hot and cheap.

            Slowly, Hattie straightened up and turned from where she faced the corn. And before her stood the deer.

Its split stomach revealed red organs, half spilled out upon the ground, and blood was clumped to the fur of its legs, darkened to maroon in the low moonlight. Her father had briefly had a deer head mounted on the wall, found at a garage sale, but looking at it had been nothing like this. Nothing so similar an experience to baptism— stripped down to nothing and left to float.

Its eyes were black. They talked to her. They told her stories. She could drown in their dark waters, like seas and lakes and rushing brackish rivers.

“You killed me,” it said.

“He’s really gone then?” Her voice shook.

The cut across the deer’s neck, almost a beheading, seems to fall further open in the shape of some strange kind of mouth, oozing.

            “You killed me.”

            “My friend he—” she let out a shaky laugh “—you wouldn’t be here if he was, would you? There’s nothing I’d want enough of otherwise, nothing bright enough to have been lost.”

            The deer didn’t respond. Her grip on the short-bladed knife shook.

            “Deer are...not quite deer. Whatever Martin used to say— you know. You know what I want.”

            It was still perfectly still, but she swore she saw some kind of curiosity.

            “You will pull his body from the water, and the bruises will be purple-gray—do you know what a corpse looks like after a week in the water? Will you know it’s him? Will you be ready to?”

            She didn’t know; she’d never needed to. Hattie was a plain girl from South Dakota whose rebellion was typical in the scale of the midwest and terrifying to her church, a plain girl who had a stick n’ poke of an x on the inside of her knee and a heart on her thumb both done by her only friend, who carried a red rosary in her purse and would’ve done anything for that stupid boy: her twin born a whole week after her and was named Martin like war. Had been named Martin like the planet-god Mars.

            “When I pull his body from the water, his skin will be thick and cold, soft in a way it shouldn’t.”

            The god was smiling with teeth not in its mouth: teeth not of a deer. Its horns twisted out arching shapes, and she could see its ribs through the gaps between its canines. Blood was still hot on her hands, wrists, bare legs. When she pulls his body from the river, he will not be there.

            “You will eat my heart. I will be innocent.”

            “I will know him, and I will bury his body and my fingers will bleed. I will dig his grave with my bare hands and feel the way the work shreds my skin until it drip-drip-drips into the dark earth. Then throw the dirt back in handful by handful, like they did long ago.”

            “You will be innocent.”

            She couldn’t find a response. Her skin burned hot.

            The god’s pale horns seemed to twist into bigger shapes, silhouette distorting; an eye popped into being like a pustule, blinking out at her from the god’s throat. It was black, omnipotent, and it held a solemnness that prey animals lacked. That predators lacked too. Deer know what you seek, deer know everything; unicorns were made as a distorted myth because sin and salvation are the taste of venison, rich and sordid on your tongue. They know. They know you, child of red mud born many rivers away, your own eyes dark as coal.

            “It’s alright.” It didn’t bother moving the wound of a mouth in the facsimile of familiar action. She knew better, didn’t she? “Nobody really wants it either, but you will know too.”

            “If I eat your heart; I will know enough.” It was her saying the words, distantly she knew, it was her voice and stubbornness.

            “You killed me, and you are not sorry.”

            She took a long breath, and the air smelled like death.

            “I can’t be sorry. You know? I can’t be sorry or that’d be betraying him and letting this all end wrong. And I can’t do that. Not to Martin.”

            It’s a stumbling, stupid sentence, but the deer knows she is honest. The red plastic rosary, hot in her pocket instead of her purse: sacrilege and savior. The deer stood strong, steady. Another eye blinked out from along its throat, spreading up; creating another wound; this is neither God nor deer, but she feared it was holy. Fears it told the truth. One of the oldest biblical stories was the sacrifice for knowledge, the picking of the apple, the blinding of the prophets, and Hattie didn’t really understand this, but long ago her mom and she learned how to pray a rosary; within it, you were supposed to recite fifty-three Hail Mary’s. She didn’t remember the prayer fully, but that didn’t matter. It won’t be anything but a goodbye or pennant hello.

“You will know enough,” it told her. “He will escape.”

Carefully, she took a step forward. Then another. There wasn’t much space to cross, and the deer’s eyes were focused on her, unblinking and without judgement.

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” she murmured. “So blessed are you.  Blessed is your child.  Please pray for us people now—” the deer did not look away, and her words stuttered “—now and at the hour of our death.”

            The deer inclined its forehead, and she pressed her own against it, hands coming up to rest alongside its cut neck. The prayer meant nothing to the deer perhaps, maybe nothing to her either. In the reflection of its eyes, she would swear she can almost see Martin, but it’s only Hattie, wide-eyed and steady.

            “Amen,” she whispered, and she pressed a kiss against its still brow. The god spoke no longer— as if it were truly just a dead deer standing upright in some twisted miracle, a creature incapable of sin, or maybe just a forgivable one. Innocent. Seven eyes still stared at her, and she lowered her hands from its neck.

            Hattie reached slowly into its maw, into its chest, and grasped the still heart with her steady hands to pull it loose. It was warm, still fresh from a body maybe twenty minutes dead, and if she wanted to lie, she’d say it was still beating faintly; but the deer had been right, she’d killed it. The deer is dead and she is not sorry; the deer is dead and she is eighteen and in a few short days the deer meat will spoil. The flies will swarm and burrow in to eat its body from the inside to out. In a couple of weeks, the flesh will have been mostly stripped away from the bones, pelt decomposed alongside it as the Midwestern vultures and maggots dine. Mushrooms might find a home in its half-hollow skull, across its tender stomach or muscled neck, blooming up like great seeing eyes. And then, in a month or three or so, there will just be bones, yellow-brown in the dirt— forgotten by everyone but the earth and Hattie.

            And perhaps, in a month or three or so, Hattie would return, and she would bury these bones too.

            “Divine child,” the deer christened her.

            Hattie lifted the deer's heart to her mouth and bit down.

            “There’s just something reassuring about that legend, if I’m being honest,” Martin told her, sleepily, from his spot on the couch. She looked up from her notebook. Dawn was peeking through the small basement window, laying a strip of pink light across his face. “Justice found in the give and take of innocence or whatever.”

            “Way to spell it out, captain obvious.”

            He lazily tried to hit her, but she just leaned back out of reach. She stuck her tongue out at him before settling back down; at her parent’s house, hidden upstairs in her desk, was an official letter, words bright and promising, college seal blue at the top. Distant Boston; distant safety. They would make it out; she knew this as Martin turned back, burrowing into his quilt. They would make it out in whatever bitter way they could.

            “Martin… Martin had this belief of deer being sort of holy, not in the direct religious sense but in the way wild things are in particular. He always thought that if you were to kill it, and, ya know, sacrifice this symbol of innocence, then you would be able to know anything you wanted. Everything, even. But you couldn’t do it without genuine, innocent want either, and the sacrifice of that in the process.” She taps off the excess ash but doesn’t take another drag. The cigarette is pretty much gone. “No clue what the hell he ever meant by innocence really; he was always weird about those urban legends.”

            “Local legends, even,” the man suggests. “My brother told me all sorts of stories about them when I was a kid. Half-believed them too.”

            She watches him out of the corner of her eye. The night whistles around them, and the fields rustle with quiet comment. Her mouth tastes like ash and sugar and candy; Hattie doesn’t think she’ll ever want to smoke again after this. Won’t ever need to.

            “What did you want to know?” she asks. He gives a lumbering shrug.

            “How deer see the world.”

            “And how is it?”

            He chuckles.

            “Blurry.”

            Hattie nods, then slides down from the tailgate, knees bending slightly on impact with the ground. She straightens up before dropping the cigarette butt onto the asphalt and crushing it beneath the toe of her shoe. Then she picks up her half-drunken coke, returns her lighter and rosary and bag of sour worms to her jacket pockets, and half-heartedly waves to the man.

            “Goodspeed, mister,” she says, and it’s a funny turn of phrase. He salutes her lazily.

            “Godspeed, missie.”

Hattie makes it to the road before stopping to look up once at the clear sky. Behind her, she knows the man must be doing the same thing, head tilted back as far as it can go to observe the country stars, and she wonders, for a passing moment, if the man sees any more of the stars with his strange deer eyes; if he could make out constellations she would never dream of somehow— if, one day, he would tell someone about any of them. Then the moment passes, and Hattie looks back down and continues the long walk to go bury her friend.

***

Mar is a creative writing major born and raised in Texas. They enjoy writing short stories and the occasional play, all featuring consistent motifs of local flora, death, and the idea of being lost. On Wednesdays, they can be found taking long walks in the city, skating, or painting somewhere dark.