“Summer Deer”

When the human world fails us, we turn—where else?—to the natural one, hoping for some kind of healing. The character in Michael Gray’s beautiful story “Summer Deer” does this. Here’s how it starts:

“I retreated to an old farmhouse beyond town to nurse a broken heart. A change of scenery is supposed to help. That’s what people say. I knew that was a flawed theory, of course. Troubles follow you no matter what, no matter where. But the remote house meant fewer people and that was at least a start.

It was late afternoon, light waning, everything with an amber cast to it. Sort of eerie-like. Otherworldly, like in disaster movies. Like maybe a cataclysm was coming. A tornado. Nuclear war. A Donald Trump rally.

A doe poked its head out from under low-lying branches in the grove behind the house. She watched me and snorted and stomped the ground with a hoof. I took that to be friendly advice worth heeding.

‘Okay, okay,’ I said softly, with a little wave of a hand, like I was some Jedi knight fooling imperial stormtroopers.

The doe chewed leaves from a vine snaking along a fence. She glanced at me several times, sniffing the air. I shrugged, hands up in surrender, my Jedi magic exhausted. She chewed until a dog barked, far off, and her head popped up sharply, ears staining to locate the sound. Deer radar. I was on it, too, a pulsating blip the doe kept an eye on.

‘It’s just a dog,’ I said, and the doe studied me as if mulling the claim. She looked like she wanted to say something. Her almond eyes loomed larger….”