Young Writers Society

The deer looked silver in the moonlight. Silver, as they nibbled on grass in the clearing, ringed by thick pine trees that swallowed up sound.Their cloven hooves made no noise as they picked their way delicately over the carpet of needles. Wind whistled, over the stars muted by clouds blue in the darkening twilight. But deer don’t care for the stars.

Maybe they should have. Maybe they’d have been able to run.

When one of them fell.

A pinprick of light blinked in the smooth black bowl of night, flashing through the atmosphere and trailing a glowing tail of gases and stardust. There was a sizzling sound. The ozone peeled away layers of ice and rock as fire swam over the surface, sending a spray of sparks and burning pieces of meteorite into the sky.

BOOM

The dirt exploded out from under it and the rock underneath split. It shook apart the trees and stripped branches of their needles and made the carpet of needles bubble up in clouds of ash. Trees were ripped from their roots like weeds and torn from limb to limb, as flakes of bark and cellulose rippled in gusts of sawdust. Every organic fragment of the humus was shot through with burns and the burrowing worms curled like withered leaves.

The Meteorite.

It lay, cradled by the crater of hardened earth it had carved out for itself. Swaths of dirt chunks fanned from its burrow, as it smoldered like a hot coal, seething in blazing fever and rippling heat over the skeletal remains of its landing sight. A steaming path was cut through pines of mile off, telling the tale of its fall as the honey-dipped needles crackled and shot tongues of flame from between scaly embers. The hot pores on the pockmarked surface were rimmed with a gilding of white-hot gold, the cool flats with a dull red glow.

So. The Meteorite had landed.

It would have been fine. The affected deer population would be stunned for a while, and the pebbles and debris burned into their skins would bleed. They would lay, muscles taut in aftershock, ropes that tangled them in frozen stillness, for a few minutes, maybe longer. Their eyes would be glazed and they would probably wander in a daze for a day or two. They wouldn’t get to finish nibbling on the grass. It would be a while before it would grow back. It would be a while before anything would grow back, but not too long. They’d live.

It would have been fine.

The Meteorite Landing. It would have been fine.

If the Fates hadn’t conspired. Conspired the gross unluck of the frozen permafrost beneath the pine needles.

One that held a deadly plague.

As the meteorite drove into the earth, frost crystals frozen for millenia turned to steam, bubbles of steam that burst and made the soil fizz like a freshly opened soda. Clods of old dirt mixed with new, free from the cage of time, free of the ice and cold that had trapped it there for centuries.

Mingling with spores.

Spores. Spores of a deadly fungus. Spores that flew like seagulls through the air in a flurry of ashes and cosmic dust. Dusts forged in the heart of young stars, particles of nebulae, pieces of planets, shards of asteroid and comet. Young space dust and broken pieces of ancient meteorite, mixing with fresh pine needles and dirt long stale, with the spores. The spores that outlived them all.

It was a powerful and searing fusion, a marriage of young stardust and timeworn mycology, atoms forming links and bonds and particles snapping together in chains and rings.

To form something more powerful.

Ah yes. The spores.

Those are exactly why…

it wasn’t fine.

It was more than space dust. It was more than dirt. It was in the air. The spores. As their wet deer lungs pumped, absorbing air, taking in oxygen through branching networks of sacs, they breathed in more than dust.

They breathed in death.

It didn’t take long for the spores to take root. The fleshy deer insides were warm and moist, with plenty of nutrients for them to feed on. As the weeks slipped by, they started to grow, on the rubbery walls, in the thick, suffocating moisture of the cavernous empty spaces within, a fine layer of mildew, a few moldering flakes here and there, in the creases and folds. They grew just fine, on that pulsating, wet surface. Flat, thin growths sprouted through. They grew thin and webbed, stretched with a net of veins, squeezing between organs and crawling across messes of nerves and stringy, throbbing veins, skimming off nutrients, molecular packets of energy, life force, leeching off their vitality like parasites. Their muscles weakened, their eyes becoming glazed, and their hoofsteps languid and listless.

The fungus grew. It looked a lot like butterfly wings.

After they’d filled the cracks between the innards, they wormed their way out through their skin, sprouting between deer fur, growing up their sinuous necks like a frost of mussels coating the timbers of sunken wreck. They bloomed from their eyes and rooted in their brain, sapping them of their strength and robbing them of their grace.

The disease was beautiful. It was like butterfly wings.

Their skin pinched around their hollow bodies. They had been emptied like tea mugs, left to rot on the countertop with the wings blossoming from them like mold. Their organs had withered, their hearts were sluggish, their breaths were few, they couldn’t think, they couldn’t see. Nothing inside but a few bites of leaf torn feverishly from nettles and thorns, with their serrated-leaf stings helpless on the deadened nerves. Nothing inside but the butterfly wings.

They soon died. It was barely a death, for the thing that now wandered mindlessly on crooked legs could hardly be called living. After a while, they simply sunk to their knees and sat on the pine needles for days, often weeks, staring at nothing, and then got up to stumble around again. You only could tell if they were dead when the flies started to land on them, or when they met the grisly fate of being torn limb to limb by hungry wolves with lean sinews rippling under their fur, smearing translucent blood over the earth. But there were hardly any good parts left, or any at all. Even the ravens pulled only a few lobes and left the rest to rot.

It would’ve been fine. Only the flies cared for those deer.

It would have.

Nearby was a town. It didn’t really matter what it was like. One of the deer had wandered into a yard there, and died without a breath in the soft grass. The rolled-back eyeballs leaked lifelessly like pickled eggs and the stringy, torn fur coated it like a tangle of stubby weeds. One of its legs had a bullet lodged, matted with dried blood and leaking pus. Its death was long overdue.

It was fine. No one really lived there.

There it lay, splayed, eaten from the inside to the out.

Nothing happened to it, really, it just died and rotted. Flies laid their eggs in the skin and maggots ate at the flesh, crawling out of the eyes like wriggling grains of rice. Crows plucked a few sinews from the flanks. Beetles ate the flesh off the bones. The waters of time rolled over it, as rotting flower petals and leaves covered it. Layer upon layer, rotting beneath the snow, going down deep as earthworms ate away at the leaves and churned it into soil, giving it a slow, gradual burial as the months and years patted a thin layer of ground over it.

It was only a thin one. But it would’ve been fine. The spores had nothing left to feed on.

The town seemed to rot along with the deer, getting rougher and rougher, emptier and emptier, more riddled with tears and blood as melodramas wormed their way between the floorboards.

A baby fell out the window of the house, where the deer had died. No one even knew it’d been born, and no one knew it’d died. It was a perfect little tragedy. It was never even moved from where it fell. It was never buried. Never named.

But it’d fallen and died on that thin layer of earth, where underneath, lay the deer.

It’d been particularly humid that year.