Doe-eyed
There is a softness in me that I can't name or ruin. On the drive home, I rub at the heat rash on the side of my neck, note the animal shape of my pulse. I keep a list in my notes app of the wildlife that I encounter each evening: deer unbraiding through a field, a handful of trembling rabbits. I don't document what lies on the side of the road but I still try to identify it before it decays beyond recognition. Ribs protruding like shorn trees, marrow full of bright: maybe a bobcat or coyote. The ninety degree weather could kill a child with heatstroke. I glimpse four more deer, their long bodies hemmed in dusk.
On nights that it's too hot to sleep, I add entries to my dream journal. In the second week of June, I dream I am becoming some strange animal. I'm scratching the raised skin on my neck when my touch turns soft, short brown fur beginning to emerge from my pores. My pupils grow oblong, so large I could have entered them and lived there. I wake up before I can discern my species or learn what else resides in my body. When I mull over the dream, I blame it on a nature podcast I was listening to the previous night. They had been discussing the major overpopulation of deer. They weren't concerned, citing hunting season. Thinning the herd in November, they said, would be beneficial to the surviving population by preventing starvation.
I dream I am becoming some strange animal.
Traffic delays become more frequent that month due to deer being hit on the interstate. Construction crews are often on site, hefting stags across three or four lanes, antlers dragging against asphalt. I rarely drive on the highway but I remember the signs instructing drivers only to stop in the event of an emergency. I'm taking 89 home one night because the backroads are closed when I see the border of bright traffic cones and reflective vests, a doe and two fawns being borne into the woods on the shoulders of faceless men. I don't know what happens after their bodies are removed and the rest of the cars bleed into the night, if someone stays to bury them or they just fester for weeks. On the radio channel covering traffic patterns, someone calls it clemency and I believe them. Sometimes I wish something had killed me before I knew hunger or grief.
In the first week of July, I dream a deer stands placidly before my fenders. I can't feel the impact. I can only see the point at which it disappears behind the hood of the car. Once I wake up, I can't fall asleep again. I listen to a different podcast that my therapist sent me about adoptees returning to China. It'll help you cope, she had said. They converse about catalysts of the one-child policy, overpopulation, the current economy. Infanticide. I don't dream again that night. In the morning, the heatwave has broken and a breeze grazes my cheek, the nape of my neck. As I drive to work, I'm thinking of toddlers abandoned on the side of the road in August, faces red as the interior of a wound. I'm thinking of men in reflective vests, tender and afraid of the dead they carried. I don't see the animal in the road, or maybe I do. Maybe I don't understand what constitutes an emergency rather than a necessary violence. My collarbones grow warm as I press forward. The fawn melded once more into her mother's womb, bloody and new.
