We Are the Daughters of The Witches You Never Noticed
The way he told it, heaven itself tilted slightly, just enough to spill forth this majestic creature onto the parking lot behind the Burrito Loco Taqueria & Grill. Its hooves touched down lightly upon the asphalt. Time crystallized and swirled through its antlers as it stepped toward the nearby housing development. Over the week, she noted in her husband’s descriptions the reverence explorers held for new-world fauna, frosted in a layer of myth.
“Strong gait, those perfect velvet muscles,” he’d say. And yes, she could picture this timeless creature, poised and striding through the parking lot, ignoring the owner’s rusted Harley, ignoring the pink LEDs advertising the specials, ignoring her husband, who’d just tossed a stack of scratch-offs on the dashboard of his pickup.
Then, the heavenly buck turned and looked at him, “right through the windshield,” its blacker-than-black eyes pinning him in time and space. To a degree, she understood: there was something about the antlers, the measured and composed way bucks carry them. In the right circumstances, an encounter like that feels like a visitation. Like the universe filling a void you’d forgotten with the exact beauty you’d missed. Here you were, filling a you-shaped hole in the natural order of things.
“Fourteen points,” he said, like the antlers’ existence physically pained him. “The goddamn rack on that thing. Just walking like it was nothing.” Like the highway was a pitted black river and the strip mall a strange wash of scents. “My God, 72 hours before opening day,” he said, making an exasperated gesture toward the heavens. His shift in tone didn’t break the spell, but how strange to hear that locker-room desire wailing from an adult mouth. By this point, it didn’t matter if she was listening. His story always ended the same: “I swear, I was so close. If I’d only had my rifle.”
Over and over he told the story, as if reminding himself it wasn’t a dream. She didn’t correct or comment, though occasionally, she thought about saying, It was a deer. They are native to this commonwealth. You have in fact seen them before. But, again, to some degree, she understood. In the story of her own visitation, she was a young girl on the edge of puberty. Most of her memories from then seemed to involve cars, but on a trip back from a county fair north of the city, she spotted a white deer by the road. Her dad was driving uncharacteristically slowly, maybe following someone he couldn’t pass. There wasn’t enough time to grab a camera, and besides, she was out of film. The Ferris wheel had been particularly photogenic. For a second, the white deer was perfectly framed in her passenger window: it stood placid beyond the guardrail, fur practically glowing against the burdock and stiltgrass. There must have been some sound only it could hear because it spooked, front legs stiffening as it crouched. The spell ended, and she twisted in her seat, filled with so much wonder it seemed to extend beyond her body, but the window only yielded asphalt and a rusting Yield sign.
Another thing: the albino buck was so close she could see its mouth. Its pink gums were mottled in a way she found vaguely repulsive. The color of them. It was young; tiny points of antlers emerged from bulbous pink nubs that looked vaguely inflamed.
Back in the present, her husband’s truck rumbled down the driveway, then faint birdsong filled the silence in his wake. On the counter sat the lunch she’d packed for him. She reached for her phone but set it down halfway through the text. The white deer was crossing her mind again, and when she dwelled too long on its face instead of its countenance, she had to remind herself the nubs weren’t the point. And why remember that part at all? The point had something to do with how young they were, her clutching that purple 110 camera in case the deer somehow reappeared. This was before marriage, children — before high school and the threat of early grandchildren, and now their kids were nearly graduated from college. That white deer hadn’t lived very long, probably. Probably it hadn’t survived the season.
That afternoon, as she slid a bolt of flannel and a Snickers bar onto the counter at JOANN Fabrics, she thought: there aren’t mirrors in nature, and deer wouldn’t recognize themselves anyway. Also, they can’t see color. Meaning that albino buck lived and died without a thought to its own ethereal rarity. Or the danger that followed.
Sometimes, memories feel grafted, especially unbidden ones. She’d been younger than her daughters were now when she’d seen that deer. It might as well have been a wild shadow, a melancholy tone from a dream that echoed into waking life. And that echo had been growing louder. Maybe she was more sensitive to the wilderness on the eve of hunting season, but there was a new urgency as birds scattered from trees and opossums turned from the road. Past the treeline and into the forest, the fog swirled apart.
It was a sign to begin early; with a new sense of purpose, she swung her shopping bags on the walk up the flagstones to their house. Her husband’s truck was of course parked behind the Mexican restaurant; at that moment, he was holding a Thermos of coffee between his legs, a pair of binoculars pressed to his face.
This year like always, doubt tugged at her. To some, she was about to commit a primal transgression, a crime that preceded the word. Alone at home, she pictured girlfriends who prayed with shaking hands for a kill, knowing what it meant if their boyfriends came home empty handed. She considered the DUIs and accidents, all the wives who would soon nurse husbands fallen out of tree stands regardless. Across the nation, freezers would yawn empty, women just like her picking through freezer-burned bags at the bottom, wondering how far they’d stretch. This could be the year the miracles run out. It’s happened before.
As the future recedes into the present, she checks over the list, reciting the steps out loud. There’s a worn-in comfort to the ritual, the words and intentions smoothing her reservations. She leans into the fridge and knots each bag before closing the door with a mighty hip. After gathering ingredients from the counter, she sets her resolve and heads somewhere I cannot follow. Maybe a new door appears in the kitchen, one leading to a verdant place where no one goes hungry. There are no stray animals, and nothing dies. She paints a sentence on this new door, then another until it opens — and she heaves her shoulder against it.
If I were a hunter, I’d press her for specifics. Is the chanting in Celtic? Cherokee? Where do the glowing runes appear? Women have explained it to me, but they talked like I already knew. I stopped following up. “It’s more a portal than a door,” someone said, and someone else said they were both metaphors. “You have heard of magic before?” my girlfriend asked. The internet shouted everything and nothin.
Maybe it’s that tapping sound a crock pot lid makes, or a kitchen table stacked high with ancient Tupperwares packed with lemon slices that glow like antique candy. Root vegetables soak in a bucket, soaking the kitchen with a damp, earthy smell as the woman sings, accompanied by a voice that might be her grandmother’s but might be much older. Bones churn in a pot on the stove, and she swears she can feel them vibrating, the bones of every beloved pet buried under the garden.
It could be simple as prayer, something gentle that sways her curtains, then ripples outward, persistent as the color green. Whether it’s all this or something else, the wild turns its ear toward her, toward a chorus of women, in the way animals hear with their whole bodies before following their instincts and springing away.
Tomorrow, her husband will rumble up the driveway and trudge through the door, musky with campfire smoke. Ditto with the couple who live down the street, and a little cousin toting a brand-new rifle with a pink camo stock. “I can’t believe it,” her husband will say, shaking his head. The deer that had sauntered past his trailcams, the deer that bolted onto the freeway, great herds passing through orchards and suburban tracts — they’d all fled in some mass migration. Or slipped into glittering pockets of timespace. Even the scattered pieces beside the highway seemed gone.
***
Having cleaned and stored her supplies for next year, somehow both diminished and restored, she’ll make a sympathetic sound toward her husband and agree. “Yes,” she’ll say. “How strange. It’s like they knew.”