John Brantingham
Deer and Apple
Wanda wakes up from a nightmare that she can’t remember although she can guess what it was about. They’re always about the same thing, her first husband, dead a long time now. He was never a violent man, not to her, but still he scared her with his near constant anger and drunkenness.
She doesn’t want to wake up Steven, so she gets out of bed and goes downstairs to get herself some coffee, knowing that she’s not going to be able to get back to sleep, not the way she’s feeling now, still afraid of whatever terror was a part of her dream. That it’s unknown means that she can’t talk herself out of being afraid of it.
Wanda steps out onto the front porch to find a herd of deer trotting down the middle of the street in the moonlight. One notices her and stops and watches her, as if she is someone to be watched and not trusted. “Good morning,” she says, but the deer doesn’t move.
She imagines that this is a deer who knows what she’s done. Her first husband used to go out this time of year and get deer, as many as three, and he never bothered with a hunting license. He would go off to the middle of nowhere, kill it and bring it back and it was up to her to skin it, dress it, cut it up and get it into the freezer. He never told her that it was up to her. The only thing he told her was where the knives were, and he left her a book about how to do it.
So she imagines that this deer watched her while she struggled to hang the carcass of one of its relatives as her little boy would sit on the steps out back and watch her. She imagines that’s what her dream was about, these animals coming back for revenge. Or maybe it was about how awful it had been to have her arms covered in blood up to her shoulders the first time she did this without any instruction except what came out of a book.
“Hold on,” she tells the deer. She goes back inside and gets three apples from the fridge. She figures the deer will probably move on before she gets back outside, but it hasn’t and she tosses two of the apples near his feet. The third one she keeps for herself, and they have an early breakfast that way.
She wonders what her first husband would think about this. In the dreamy fog of early morning, she’s having a little difficulty remembering his face, his smell, his sounds. Good, she thinks. It’s better that way.