The Fawn I Killed

At about midnight on Sunday we hit a deer. It was a small deer—a fawn, with spots of pale white tiptoeing across its back and its sides like flecks of snow—but when we hit it I could feel the whole car rattling and rattling; it rattled me awake. My snake diorama was tucked away in the back and I heard it slipping down through the luggage.

“Shit,” said Jake. He stared. The headlights blared crookedly forward, dim and smothered, and he stared into them. I did too, tense enough to feel my heartbeat, and it felt too slow, too heavy. I felt sweaty; I extricated myself from my blanket, letting it drop to the floor of the car, and drowsily I asked what had happened. No one spoke in the ensuing silence, until Aicia did.

“Stay in the car, Gavin,” she said. I heard her clawing open her door and the car’s warmth bled out like an open wound. Jake followed her out. From the back seat I could see them both through the windshield, engulfed in the silver half-light of the headlights and staring down at something below my field of vision. I felt scared and cold and tired, so I picked up my blanket and stumbled outside, out onto the concrete that was so black I couldn’t even see it, couldn’t even tell it was there. My blanket was also black; I pulled it around my shoulders like a jacket and it fluttered behind me.

I walked around the car until I could see what they were watching. It was a dead fawn. I was seven, but I’d seen enough movies to know what death looked like. Though its body was bloodless and unbroken, I could tell it was dead by how still it was, like it was waiting for something, waiting and waiting. It looked cold and I had a sudden impulse to throw my blanket over it, but I opted not to. I didn’t know what Jake or Aicia would think if I did that.

“I didn’t see it,” Jake said, apologizing not to us but to something else, maybe himself. He crouched and he looked at it. A light was swimming in its left eye that was either a corner of the headlights or a star hanging overhead. Jake stared at it and it stared back. “You came out of nowhere,” he said, this time speaking to the fawn. It didn’t respond.

At some point Aicia raised the issue of how badly the car had been damaged. It was Jake’s car, so he turned and did his best to feel along the bumper. I followed his hand with my eyes.

“I don’t feel anything,” he concluded. “Maybe a small dent. I don’t know. I’ll look at it closer tomorrow.”

I was breathing into my blanket. I was breathing into it so that my cool breath got trapped in a space I’d enclosed between my chest and the blanket and floated around there, slowly dissipating into the warmth like melting ice. I looked up and said, “We should move it.”

“We should move it,” echoed Jake.

“Let’s just put it in the grass over there,” said Aicia. “By the side of the road.”

“That’s a good place to put it,” Jake said. He paused, still fixated on the deer, then added: “It would like that.”

“We have to carry it.”

“Okay.”

Aicia crouched to get a good grip on the deer’s lower back, and in doing so seemed to notice for the first time that I was out here with them.

“Why are you out here?” she said to me. “I told you to stay in the car. I told you to stay there.”

"He wants to see what he killed," Jake said. It seemed like a perverse thing to say but Aicia didn’t respond. Jake reached and curled his arms around the deer's neck, careful not to touch its head, and I was standing by him and for some reason I dug my fingers into the fur too. It didn't feel like death.

“Lift,” Jake said. It was small even for a fawn, but lifting it seemed to be difficult for them; when they did, its head hung limply from the lower neck and grazed my knee each time I stepped. We dragged it through the haze of the crooked headlights and into the grass past the concrete, further and further and further into it. The blades seemed to grow increasingly tall as we proceeded until they were brushing up against the bottom edges of my blanket, which I still had sprawled across my back and shoulders. Jake kept pressing on and on, like he was chasing something.

At some point though we made a tacit decision to stop, and when we did we laid the fawn down and without much ceremony turned back in the direction of the car. There was a silence, after that, and I could hear my cousins breathing, could hear their feet stepping through the grass loudly and wearily. Aicia was the first to speak.

“Gavin,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, in a small voice.

“Spread your arms.”

I spread them. The blanket fluttered.

“You’re a bird,” she said.

I looked down. My blanket was spread and flat under my arms and I realized that it wasn’t a blanket but two wings.

“I’m a bird.” I felt wrong.

“You’re a bird.”

*

Monday we did reports. Most memorable was Stella Sherwood's report on owls. In her diorama she hung an owl from strings—a real owl, she said, a stuffed one. Was that what a real owl looked like? Its wings were unwound and fanned like cirri against the nighttime backdrop of the diorama, locked in eternal flight by rigor mortis and plaster. Too-big wings, I decided, looking at them. The body I could nurse in the hollow of my palm but the wings, those two dark clouds, were wide enough to swallow up the whole classroom, the whole world. They reminded me of my own wings from the night before. I kept thinking about that, about the deer.

"Owls have special feathers that let them fly silently," Stella Sherwood was reading. "That's how they catch their prey. They swoop in, get the prey with their talons, and then swoop away.”

I felt wrong. After school Henry Nadeau came up behind me pretending he was an owl. He pretended to catch me with his hands, which he curled up like talons, and swoop away. I pushed him into the wall hard before he could.

"That's not something to joke about," I told him.