I’ve been having a really strange week.
“Honey?” I ask once the lights are out. He mumbles, trying to sleep. I tuck the covers around my chin and close my eyes, thinking it won’t happen if I can just go to sleep fast enough. But this week I haven’t been able to fall asleep quickly. I know it’s coming, so I fret and listen while my husband’s breath deepens and slows. My chest gets tight and small. My eyes go dry. Once he is asleep the night changes. I hear every sound and every sound is scary. The furnace, the frogs, the cable wire scraping against the roof. The more alone I get, the louder the world becomes. There are wild animals outside, raccoons, squirrels, skunks, possums. I listen and then I try to brace myself, holding on to the sheets. I know it’s coming, a dream of a tidal wave. I get ready for it. I wait, and just when I think too much time has passed, that maybe it won’t happen tonight, it happens, so quickly I can’t scream. My hands and feet harden into small hooves, the fingers and toes swallowed up by bone, and then the most frightening part is over with, the part where I lose my opposable thumbs. Next the fur, brown speckled with some white. This sprouting feels like a stretch or like I’m itching each individual follicle from the inside as a wiry hair pokes through a pore. My arms and legs narrow, driving all their muscles up the flank. My neck thickens and grows. I feel my tail. I like my tail. Finally my face pulls into a tight, hard nose. My jaw extends, my tongue grows long and thick, my lips shrink before turning black and hard as leather. And then it’s done. And then I am a deer.
I still haven’t told my husband, but I practice telling him. “Lately,” I imagine saying, “when you turn out the light, something funny happens to me.”
“What?” I think he’ll ask, or just, “Funny? What do you mean?”
“I turn into a deer at night.” I plan on telling him clearly like that, no hemming, no mistaking what I mean.
“A deer?” He won’t believe it. I know he won’t.
“A deer,” I’ll confirm.
“What the fuck?” he’ll say, just like that. “What the fuck?” with a slowness that means he’s thinking hard about what I’m saying.
“Calm down,” I’ll tell him. Though he’ll probably be calm already.
“What are you talking about?” he’ll ask me, disappointed, as if he already knows deer don’t mate for life.
*
I am very careful, very quiet, planting my hooves on our bed. I stand over him, staring down at his body from up on my wobbly legs, straddling his belly. I sniff his neck, licking the hair of his armpit, cleaning him. Though I don’t want to wake him, I kind of can’t help it. I don’t know what would happen if he woke up now. He keeps a .22 and a shotgun in the hall closet.
When I was growing up the land around here was different. Mostly there were a lot of soybean farms, hog farms, and wide, wide tracts of government-owned land where every now and then you’d see men digging with bright lights late at night, looking for natural gas. Sometimes the gas diggers would wake me up when I was a girl. Their lights were so bright it was easy to imagine they were coming from an alien’s spaceship. The gas-well sites were all connected by long straight roads on the government land. These roads went on forever and, driving down them, it became easy to imagine the roads were closing up behind my parents’ car, sealing us in. No one could follow us. Or no one else existed. My brother, sister, and I would stare out the back window watching where we’d once been disappear.
It’s not like that anymore. As soon as they didn’t find much gas, the government sold the land off to developers, makers of strip malls.
When we were young, there was a man named Pete who lived around here. Pete kept a wild deer as a pet. Everyone said that Pete had done things with the deer, though I don’t see how they could know that. It was a small town. Rumors spread. Soon people started saying even more. They said that Pete had done things with his own daughter also, and there might have been some truth to that. She had been taken away by the state. People didn’t know why but they guessed why. The spookiest part of the whole story, and the reason people suspected him, is because Pete named the deer after his daughter, Jennifer. He’d call the deer, “JENNIFER. JENNIFER.” You could hear him at night. “JENNIFER. JENNIFER.” Slowly. And the deer would come when called, as if it were a dog and not a wild creature. She’d come to him.
I’ve been thinking about Pete lately, about how messed up people are by sex, by other people, because despite his failings as a human being—I liked Pete. He knew a lot about the woods, about nature. He knew which kind of mushrooms you could eat and which would kill you. He collected the old seed pods of water chestnuts. They looked like hard black stars. He told me when deer are young they have no scent. That way, before the deer can walk, their mothers can hide them in the tall grass, and as long as the mother goes away, no predators will find the babies. Some divine plan. Almost. Pete found Jennifer when she was just a fawn. He’d stumbled onto her in a field. Her mother must have been killed by a construction truck, because the fawn was about to die from hunger. She’d been waiting in the tall grass but her mother didn’t return and so Pete found the fawn, picked her up, carried her home, and made her a bottle of milk. He raised her in his barn after he lost his own daughter to the state. And then, when the deer was old enough, the rumor was that he treated the animal in a similar manner.
*
Eventually I fall asleep and, when I wake in the morning, I am a woman again. My husband is just starting to move, making a smacking noise with his lips.
Maybe Pete just thought, Well, I’m no better than this deer, am I? I don’t know what happened to the deer, but Pete is dead now so I feel like I can say it here under the covers with my husband still asleep: I always thought there was something romantic about the way he named the deer after his daughter. Even if it was messed up.
*
When I tell my husband what is happening to me at night, which I’m going to do, very soon now, he’ll want to know how, and then, after that, he’ll want to know why I am becoming a deer. That’s the most troubling part and the reason I’m having trouble telling him.
*
“My name’s Erich. With a ch,” clarifying.