Cervidae, New and Sharp

I thought I was thirty-five and lonesome, with my car broken down on the side of the road, a grand midwestern storm brewing to the west over freshly shorn soybean fields. I’d lived amongst hills my whole life, before I’d moved north, and I’d never known what a storm looked like from a distance, never known it looked like the Hand of God come to pass judgement. I’d been taught to fear flash floods—they’d wash your house off the mountainside and there wouldn’t be a thing you could do, not on those vertiginous hills. Flash floods felt different here, because you could see them coming.

That day, beside the road, I watched the birds of prey wheel too low overhead; buzzards with their long naked necks seeking roadkill; hawks searching for rodents—hawks can dive faster than anything can run. A semi-truck passed, hauling, instead of a trailer, three identical semi-trucks. As if they’d manufactured all four in one place, then hitched them in a long, articulated row, and driven them away. Build a house, and then live in it.

That was when the deer spoke to me. Right as it started to rain. The sky-shattering sort of rain; the kind of rain that hurts as it splatters on your skin. I hadn’t noticed its approach until it was ambling up to me—a deer can amble, like a saddle horse.

This deer said to me, One day, you’ll join us. One day.

A small flock of its brethren lurked some yards back, their eyes wide and dark, with the pupils gone horizontal, their heads bobbing, hesitant, ready to flee with their tails in the air.

I thought it was when I was thirty-five and lonesome, living alone in a house full of vegetables.

But maybe it was when I was a child sleeping on the back porch during summer vacation, on a night where I had to go back inside around three in the morning, because the sky had opened up and dumped hot July rain all over me. For weeks after that, my sleeping bag smelled like a river full of frogs. I must’ve been nine years old, because I hadn’t read The Golden Compass yet and I would soon, the Thanksgiving of fourth grade. Animals talked in that book and it didn’t even register to me as fantasy, because of course animals talked. Not all, of course, but some.

Like the deer who spoke to me from over the railing of the back porch.

[How many times had the deer come to me?]

When I said that aloud in class in sixth grade, that bit about animals talking, everyone laughed and the counselor had to speak to my mom. Counselors called my mom a lot. Like when I said, far too loud, I might as well have been born a boy. The world denies you being a girl, because you’re bad at it, because you’re ugly and disgusting, but if you say that yourself, if you say you might as well have been born a boy, the world says you can’t be that either. I remember that counselor meeting with my mom. Your daughter, she said, over and again. I learned the word irony much later, but at the time I wanted only to hear animals talk again. Like they did in my books and my dreams and on summer nights when no humans were around.

[The deer rewrite my history as I breathe. As what’s inside eats me alive.

[Sometimes, I was always a girl, and sometimes, I was always a boy, and occasionally, I was neither. I just was. Those are the good histories. I’ll live them one day.]

The deer’s voice was broken, like a crow mocking a person; there, on the highway amidst the soybean fields or there, on the back porch of my mother’s house, all surrounded by southern woods. One day, you’ll join us.

I said to the deer, No, I won’t.

The deer said, It’s been judgment time. Been judgment time for a while now. The world will flood. We’ll be all that is left.

They faded into the landscape without me seeing. I breathed through my nose.

[Out in the woods now. It’s cold out here but we scarcely feel it.

[Are the deer coming?

[Yes, despite their grand, hollow organs. Despite their spare, lean flesh, they are solid.]

Nothing was ever as solid as a deer caught in headlights on the side of the road, its eyes gone bright-white-to-red in the yellow blaze, its body a car crash, its body your car covered in its blood, your bloodied car tumbling down a cliff with you inside, you are in the deer and you always have been, the deer was in me and it always was.

That’s what I told the intake nurse at the ER, when I started losing time.

[There’s a few of us out here. I do not know where we are. We wander through hills and woods and soybean fields. Coyotes try to get us, but we are too fast. It’d take a hawk to catch us but we are too big. Cars wreck when they hit us. Our blood coats their headlights. They topple off cliffs.]

* * *

In the hospital, they say my brain is melting out my nose. They don’t say it like that. They say I’m dying of a prion disease. They ask if I’ve ever eaten venison. I laugh in their faces. When would I? How could I? I have always been here, haven’t I? On the TV behind one of the neurologists—they’re all here—all of them—they want to watch me die—on the TV, the world is ending. They don’t say those words, but I remember what the deer said to me, whenever they said it to me.

[The world will flood, and we’ll be all that is left.]

I can never remember if that deer had antlers or not.

The neurologists, the infectious disease specialists, the epidemiologists, they ask me if I’ve eaten venison, maybe recently. I say, No! We’ve never eaten deer! They eat us!

They say, Deer are herbivores, Samantha.

I say, You do not understand.

[Because, back in one of the histories, maybe the one I’ve lived, my mom hunted deer and snuck their flesh into chili. I could always tell, even by smell, even through the seasoning scent. Despite that, she always understood me.]

In the notes the specialists dictate to diligent nursing students, they call me a thirty-six-year-old woman. They call me Samantha Hollins, but I am not that woman—I cannot remember the last time I was a woman. My flesh is too gamey and they say human meat is white as pork.

[In one history, I will live to fifty-five. I’ll be stabbed in the women’s bathroom for having short hair. The buzzards won’t get me, and the neurologists won’t either, because there will be nothing to get, not in that history. But apparently the pathologist will have to sew me shut before my mom claims the body. My mom outlives me then. The deer whisper to me when I camp once, lonesome and long-haired in my forties, on a mountain out west. They’ll never come back. They’ll tell me this is the wrong everything, to go look elsewhere. I look in woods and hills down south and I scour the soybean fields of the north. Out west, it’s all mountains and rams. That’s the end of it all.

[In another history, I’ll die at eighty-three. The mortician will dress me in a skirt, because that’s what the neighbor will find me in, but there will be no funeral. My mom will be long dead and I’ll have never met the deer.]

They call me a woman in the notes they dictate to silent nursing students, to residents in their pristine lab coats, and I laugh and cut them off. I yell, I am made of meat! They scribble that down. They’re watching me die. They’re getting what they want. I am made of meat and one day they will see my guts. They’ll map the degeneration of my nervous tissue, they think, but they’ll see all the holes inside my brain and not what fills them. S. Hollins, my grave built of microscope slides will say, in cursive pencil marks on the white frosted glass. S. Hollins, CJD patient. I’ll be nought but an anomaly. They’ll say I ate venison. They’ll never understand where I got it. I lived alone. I owned no gun. My kitchen contained only vegetables.

My mom hit a deer, on a backroad down south a long time ago. Her car went off the cliff. Nobody will bother to claim any flesh I have left. Samantha Hollins hasn’t been. This is the bad history.

If my luck holds out, I’ll drown first. If I’m lucky, we’ll all drown.

[Out in the woods, we do as we’ve always done and pack strips of venison into our wounds. Our meat falls away as do our bones. They grow back long and narrow, light as a bird’s, but solid, not hollow. Our flesh grows back ruminant-red. Build a house, and then live in it. Build a house; it’s made of meat. Meat is the color of the trees that loom above us, of the grass beneath our feet. Hawks will never catch us and buzzards will never see our guts. God is the birds of prey but we are atheists here below, even as the rain comes down.

[All else is stripped from me. I was never a child asleep on the back porch and I was never a woman stood by a car broken down on the side of the road.

[When the hospital does flood, I find my own body, seen through new eyes. Its meat is pale as veal but we are like a threshing sledge. Sharp. New. Full of teeth. Take your phrases, rearrange them. I’ll see them all, in the end.

[That’s all I remember from before the flood. I rewrote my history. We cannot turn back now.

[I see all in shades of green, even blood. My flesh is as the leaves. Mom is here. She’d been waiting on me. Mom is here, and everyone. The rain comes down. This is the good history. This is the end.]