Deer

Deer

by CL Bledsoe

She thought it was a deer at first, and in dreams, even years later, it was always a deer until it hit the car and became a man. The antlers or horns or whatever you called them became, somehow, a cap and hair. The thin, long form became a crouched body, cut short in mid flight.

In dreams and near dreams, she felt time not stop, but skip like a needle on a record.

She had been driving home from work, late. She managed a coffee shop downtown. She’d come out of the tunnel under the airport runway, and it had come from the woods, crossed the road in the dark and turned; she always saw this in dreams, turned and looked directly into her eyes, held them for the moment until it bounced into the ditch and she screeched to a halt.

In the dreams, this was when it changed from a deer to a man; when he caught her eye and stared. She imagined him calm, serene like she imagined deer to be. He was wearing orange, though he hadn’t been, before.

They told her when they found her, still in the car, that he was an escaped convict from the prison south of town. The sheriff shook her hand, days later, and offered to pay to have her car cleaned and fixed. She didn’t tell him that in the dreams, sometimes, it wasn’t orange, the man was wearing. Sometimes, he was a child, a stranger, her son.

Posted over on Staccato: Micro fiction