Garrett Ashley

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The Woods

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A deer had found its way into the house. I came down and she tapped across the floor and froze next to the record player. She had floppy ears, a fat belly, and a big white spot beneath her eye. I could hear construction noise and saw that the front door had been left wide ass open.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said. I moved to the left of the deer. I’d herded cattle before, just like this. She turned and winked at me. “Go on.” 

But she jerked in the direction opposite the open door and trotted near the dining room entrance.

The doe’s fur was matted all over, wet looking. She must have jumped a barbed wire fence. Her ears poked up like little flags whenever I came back into the living room where she stood.

This was bound to happen eventually. Cassie hadn’t been herself. She’d been leaving doors unlocked, packages of half-eaten food sitting out on the counter. There was some stress in her life which she never talked about, and it was causing her to forget small things. She often left for work late, in a hurry, doors still open or just unlocked—it was a human thing to do, but now there was a deer in the house. 

A new neighborhood was going up across the street from us, what had once been a marshy wooded area with bird sounds and crickets and frogs. The construction company had even run an eagle out of its nest. Eagles! There had been some litigation there. 

Three or four deer had already been hit on the road. And the dust from construction had stirred up in our neighborhood and covered everything in orange and yellow. We were all understandably depressed about the woods and of our lack of autonomy in the way we lived.

She raised her head, huffed, and lowered it again. She scraped a hoof against the floor. I pulled my phone out and called the county animal control. 

“Deer in the house?” They said, and there was a rustling on their end of the phone like they were writing down what I’d told them: deer in house. 

“She looks pregnant,” I said. 

“See if you can get her to go out the door on her own.”

“I already tried that.”

There was silence for a moment, another intense shuffling. I gave them my address. They said they’d be here soon, but I knew what that meant.  

Because I didn’t know what to do, the only thing I could do was walk back into the living room, try to figure out what the deer was up to without freaking it out, sneak out again, scratch my head, and repeat. The front door, a foot or two open, was right next to Cassie’s upright piano. So I figured while I waited on animal control, it couldn’t hurt to try wrangling her out again.

Except when I approached this time, she lunged forward into the entertainment center, knocking the television back against the wall. When she calmed herself, tapping her hooves again, I called Cassie’s work.

“Wallace Feed,” Jacob said.

“I need Cassie. This is Mark. There’s a deer in the house.”

“A deer?”

“I need Cassie to come to the phone. She left the goddamn door wide-ass open again. Get her now, please.” But I was getting winded trying to block off the deer from other parts of the house; she would freak, knock something expensive and breakable over, tumble uncomfortably close to me, buckle her knees, then back off. She kicked at the entertainment center and something crunched. 

I could hear Jacob yelling after Cassie. God knows where she was in there. I hoped she was stuck under a pile of fertilizer because I realized now that I didn’t want to talk to her. I had no idea why I’d called in the first place.

The phone rustled. “Jacob said there’s a deer in the house?”

“You left the door open. Wide open.”

“Oh no. I was in a hurry this morning.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Did you call animal control?”

“I already called animal control.” The deer kicked again, this time only knocking over a wooden bookend, but the sound startled me. “Shit. Can you come home?”

“I’m really busy,” she said. “If it’s just a deer, you should just be able to wrangle it out the door, right?”

I hung up on her. I never hang the phone up on anyone except telemarketers. But the deer kept taking quick steps at me and backing off and I needed to feel that I had full control of the situation.

She was terrifying, the look in her brown eyes. She lowered her head, curled into herself, hauled ass in the other direction, and before I could get around the couch she’d already bolted into the kitchen where all our most beloved things lived on walls and in cabinets and right there on the rickety breakfast table where Cassie had placed them, an old chinaware plate and teacup that was part of her morning routine which occurred whether she was up early or running late.

The deer slammed into the table and the plate and teacup sailed towards the wall, somehow didn’t break, and for a moment she was frozen. She looked out the window above the sink, past the ropes of bamboo into the white, blue clouds and imagined something there that she could no longer be a part of: a picture of green and calmness, of dirt and fallen persimmon, of clover and bitter sumac, and for a moment I thought she would jump through the window. The windows had been the most expensive part of the remodel. I got myself ready to grab the doe and possibly bring her down with my bodyweight alone. She was big for a deer, nearly as high as my chest, and her pregnant stomach undulated, throbbed beneath her anxious tension. I lunged for her, and she pivoted and bolted but I was on her neck, pulling her down to the white linoleum with me. Some sharp bone in her hip collided with my stomach. She kicked and thrashed, and I felt parts of myself numbing, punctuated by shoots of pain, knife-point gashes forming somewhere on my chest, sides, all the way to my groin. Eventually the deer wormed her way out of my death grip and, sliding against the linoleum, found her balance long enough to smash against the cabinets, loosening cups from their hooks, from their crooked stacks, loose into the cabinet, a couple falling out with a smash. She skipped nose first onto the floor. Syrupy blood smeared against the linoleum. A cabinet popped off the wall and hung about four inches from the top. The deer hauled ass back into the living room, and I tried to corner her again and wrangle her towards the front door which was still open but which might not have been open enough—I held my arms out, walked the deer around, and she ignored the door completely and toppled into the coffee table next to the recliner, hooves smashing through the glass like little hammers.

Then—maybe because I was freaking it out—the deer shot up the stairs, got halfway up before pausing, falling sideways, and tumbling down the steps back towards me and smashing into the vanity mirror at the bottom. I moved out of the way just in time. Now she held on at the bottom of the steps, struggling to get up, and I reached for her neck again. Her fur was rough, dirty. Some greasy substance covered her deer fur and made it too difficult to grab with just one hand. She shot up the steps again, made it all the way up and disappeared. 

I smelled my hands. The smell wasn’t good. It wasn’t anywhere near a bearable smell, something more like oil and a cigar smoke and rotten wood.

I went back to the kitchen and washed my hands. I figured the deer would get upstairs and stay fucking still if I didn’t pursue it. She was tired. I wondered where animal control was, what they were doing in between my call and actually getting here and resolving the problem with a blow dart gun or whatever they used to knock out a deer. I called the police because I suddenly dreamed the police might be able to do something. But they told me if animal control was coming, they’d be able to get out there a lot faster, and they’d be a lot more efficient; usually, the police had to call animal control, anyway. And it was just some doe right? It wasn’t a buck or anything?

“It’s causing a ton of property damage,” I said.

“Lock it in a room and don’t do anything. She’ll calm down. It’s a deer.”

“I’m telling you the deer is destroying my house.”

“And I’m telling you that if this is a wild animal you’re dealing with, law enforcement is going to be just as afraid as you are.”

Things were already crashing upstairs. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and held it against my chest as I painfully crept up the stairs, pointed it in front of me as I pushed open the bedroom door. The deer had split our cheap headboard (no real loss) in two down the middle and one of its hooves had punched a hole in the mattress and gotten stuck that way. She twisted herself as she kicked holes in the walls trying to get away from the mattress (subsequently a shitty mattress but also the only thing in the bedroom we’d spent any significant amount of money on). Her eyes grew as she watched me. She froze for a moment, then started pulling again.

As I approached her, she let out a pained bleat. She shook her whole body, head low, her tongue pointed out stiff as an arrow between her teeth. She bleated until my ears rang. She wrenched the hoof and I think I heard a splitting noise, bone fracturing, skin tearing away from muscle.

“Please stop. Please stop.”

I raised my hands, knife blade pointed up, like she was supposed to know what I was trying to tell her. She quieted for just a moment before yelping like a dog. I had no idea that a deer could make that kind of sound. Blood and fur from her ankle spread across the bedsheets, squirted all over before lightly spraying to a halt. She jerked her leg until it broke free of the mattress and stood there for a moment hunched over looking at me, huffing and panting.

“Wait until they come,” I said. I backed away from the deer. “Just stay still like that. Just for a little while.”

I called Cassie’s work again. Jacob answered the phone. He didn’t even try anymore, didn’t say Wallace Feed or announce who I was speaking to, just said “Hello?” like his job wasn’t to take orders and set up appointments.

“I need to talk to Cassie,” I said.

“Deer still in the house?”

I waited for him to get Cassie. I practiced in my head what I’d say to her: the bedroom and kitchen are ruined. The house was a mess, and it was going to cost so much money to fix this and that; insurance would never cover a deer coming into the house because the door was left open and the woods across the street had been eviscerated; these weren’t the kinds of things insurance companies cared about.

“Jacob said the deer’s still in the house,” Cassie said.

“First of all, Jacob can go fuck himself. What is he doing answering the phone like that? Does he think he’s at home or something?” I’d never met Jacob—even when I’d had to drop Cassie off at work in the past, there was never a reason for me to go in to see her people.

“Does it make you feel better to yell? To yell at me?”

“I’m not yelling.”

“I think everyone can hear that you’re yelling.”

Had to get off the phone in a hurry, though, because the deer was getting into Cassie’s jewelry—more specifically, she’d begun rooting around in the drawers, pawing at the wood with her bloody leg.

Maybe she just wouldn’t come home—maybe she would go somewhere else, to her parents’ trailer or to a friend’s place. If she ever came home and saw what was happening, she’d never let it go. The deer butted her head against the jewelry cabinet. I was about to call animal control again and ask their ETA but the deer was coming towards me.

“I’m going to grab you,” I said. But I still had the knife in my hand—didn’t want to put it down now. The deer, apparently tired of running, let me put an arm under her pregnant belly. But as I began to lift her up, she kicked again, thrashed her body sideways, knocking me down; something cold struck my hip. The deer thrashed around but I kept a grip on her neck; something tight, a tight feeling against my hip. My leg had locked up.

A chemical hotness surged through me, from the chest. Maybe nothing directly related to Cassie or Jacob answering the phone at Cassie’s work or the animal control officer not showing up at a good enough time—I should have told them a mountain lion was in the house and was currently eating my baby—I tried to pull the knife out of my leg but I must have landed on it at just the right angle, it was in there real good—the deer’s pregnant belly kept undulating against me. I let her go.

She got up and walked out of the bedroom and lay down by the stairs. She breathed heavily. I pulled at the knife again. I’d heard not to pull knives out of wounds, but the pain was extraordinary, shifting from hot to cold in throbbing beats. It crunched and I had to wiggle it around to get it to come out, then it slid out, yanked out threads of something; surprisingly not that much blood at first, but then there was enough to soak my pants and carpet, and I thought I might faint.

Tried to reach for a garbage can, ripped the plastic bag out and knocked the can over, couldn’t get it back up in time; my leg was immobile; threw up into the can, still sideways. The deer made a chirping sound. Felt a ringing in my ears; the ringing in my ears mixed with the sounds from the construction crew, something beeping out there.

I took my shirt off, spun it around into a rope, and tied it around the stab mark on my leg. I sat there for a moment, waited for my heart to finish racing. I’d never been stabbed before and I didn’t know whether I was having a heart attack or was suffering the side effects of shock or something completely else, and the deer was still sitting there at the top of the steps not five feet from me, her big pregnant belly heaving out from under it like a bullfrog’s throat.

Propped on my right elbow, bloody knife against the carpet in my right hand, I watched her. Rubbed my chest with my left hand. Pretended it was my mother rubbing my chest—I strained my eyes to see the deer; the ringing fading, replaced by the air conditioner unit throbbing, someone outside amongst the construction crew yelling, saying something in Spanish. Then there was English. They were trying to understand one another. This had been going on for days, back and forth exchanges like this leading to nothing; our power would go out, and the guys at the construction company would bark at one another in several different languages, suspect-looking power cords in hand, and I’d see all the yellow and red clay and dirt smeared over the road and think to myself, if only we had trees out there instead of all these construction workers yelling at one another, and Cassie would say, when we moved here, that the sound of bullfrogs helped her to sleep again. 

I picked myself up and leaned against the dresser. The deer stirred, hooves pushing her heavy body up. She rolled towards the stairs. I lunged for her again, caught her by the back of the neck and she whined and lowered her bottom half. I made a stab for her neck, and she bolted towards the stairs, me with her; I dropped the knife, held onto her (the door was right within sight, as we rolled down the steps); hit my head on the handrail, put a hole in the wall at the bottom of the stairs. The deer lay next to the knife on the floorboards. I picked up the knife and swatted at her again, cutting into her eye, the soft spot under her jaw. She got up like nothing was wrong, like nothing I did could ever hurt her.

Phone buzzing in my pocket—the door was open, the yard empty except for some leaves twitching in the grass, the sigh of a car, tires scratching into one of the neighboring houses. The deer poked her head through the door and nudged herself out. She stopped on the sidewalk, overgrown with some kind of Chinese weed. She looked for a place to go. She turned left, cut through the yard towards the fence and a bog we’d never been able to do anything with.

“There’s nothing over there,” I said. I sat there and watched her through the door. I waited for animal control to get there. Thought to call Cassie again before I passed out to let her know that I didn’t really think this was her fault. We all had bad days, we lived in a fog. The deer never came around again. She’d be curled in the bog when they came. Across the street, the construction workers yelled at one another, never even looking in my direction.

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