HE SAID/SHE SAID: A Love Story (Reposted from Deep Dixie))

1.  One Winter's Afternoon, After A Snow-Storm, He Prepares to Shovel The Drive and Front Walkway            

 She said, "Isn't it just beautiful out there?  Look at the icicles hanging from the limbs and power lines!" 

   He said, "I hate snow.  I hate the cold.  I hate shoveling."

 She said, "It makes me miss Alaska."

   He said, "You miss Alaska?  Why did we move here then?"

 She said, "To be closer to where YOU work."

   He said, "So, you're saying you would go back there?"

 She said, "Look at that view.  Doesn't it make you homesick for Alaska, even a little bit?"

   He said,  "You're nuts.  You know that, don't you?"

 She said, "I'm nuts?  You're the one wearing a knit cap with a pom-pom on top."

   He said, "Hey, it does the job."

 She said, "And makes a bold fashion statement in the process."

   He said, "So now I should shovel snow AND make a fashion statement?"

 She said, "I'm just saying. . . ."

    He said, "If you wanted a man who could make a fashion statement, you should've married Tim Gunn."

 She said, "Tim Gunn's not into women."

 (long pause)

    He said, "Tim Gunn is gay?"

2.  Early One Morning, He Enters The Kitchen Where She Is Making Coffee and Feeding The Cat

 He said, "Hey, did the cat just drop a turd in the litterbox downstairs?"

   She said, "I think he must have.  Smells like it."

 He said, "Oh, good.  I thought that was my breath."

3.  After She Brings A New Kitten Home

 He said, "What's that?"

   She said, "A cat."

 He said, "I mean, whose cat is that?" 

   She said, "It belongs to Beau."

 He said, "You got a cat for the cat?" 

   She said, "Yes.  He's been very lonely since the old cat died."

 He said, "Oh for God's sake.  He's not lonely.  He's a cat.  He eats and sleeps and craps."

   She said, "He is distraught with grief.  And lonely.  Even a blind man could see that."

 He said, "He doesn't even remember the other cat.  He's a cat.  A cat only has about three brain cells."

   She said, "One to remember me, one to remember the old cat, and one to remember the new little cat."

 He said, "Hey, what happened to one for remembering me?"

   She said, "You're the one with the mad math skills. If you wanted him to think of you, you should have given him four brain cells."

 He said, "So now it's my fault that he's dumb?" 

   She said, "Oh look! He's licking the little cat.  He likes the little cat!"

 He said, "He's probably just cleaning him up good before he kills and eats him."

4.  They Approach, Again, the Subject of Valentines Day Gifts

 He said, "Hey, check this out:  it says here that you can buy your sweetheart a star for Valentine's Day.  Only $49.99.  And they'll give you a chart and a deed to it."

   She said, "That's crazy-talk.  They can't sell a star.  They can't sell something they don't own."

 He said, "I'm just telling you what the ad says."

    She said, "Tell me you didn't buy one."

 He said, "I didn't buy one."

    She said, "Good."

 He said, "But you have to admit, getting a star would a lot better than getting chocolates. Or flowers."

    She said, "Since when?  With my luck, five minutes after they sent me the deed, the damned thing would explode and fling hot gas and debris towards the earth and the force of that explosion would send the earth careening towards a black hole and the force of that would pull the planet nearly in two and people would die horribly.  And then the few survivors left will make sure everyone knows it was MY star that killed off  half the human population. I don't want to be remembered like that."

 He said, "Where do you come up with this stuff?"

    She said, "Hey, I've read the Book of Revelations. It's biblical."

 He said, "So, are you saying you'd rather have flowers and chocolates like everyone else?"

    She said, "Tell you what.  Forget stars and outer space and the cosmos and, for once, just do the stuff normal people do on Valentine's Day."

(pause)

 He said, "So, does this mean you want me to return the star?"

My Jezebel

Last July, just before the 2012 summer residency session began in Alaska, Ian and I quietly began our long move South, to the Outer Banks of North Carolina where we'd bought a home.  There was the usual relocation frenzy and furor that we have become familiar with since we married 18 years ago: the endless sorting through and packing up of all our worldly goods into brown boxes, renting a U-Haul truck and trying to squeeze everything into it, and I was also finding out odd and interesting historical facts about Kill Devil Hills that were sending me me spiraling into a dream of life in a place with that kind of history, life in a place where that kind of history is admitted and lauded, where it becomes a delightful part of the stories retold at bonfires on the beach at night. Pirates. Lanterns hung from the horses' heads to lure passing rum ships into the barrier reef. Murder and mayhem.  The din of iniquity.  The rummy hills. . . .

While Ian went back to our old farmhouse in the North to pack up another load of household goods (and to prepare our two travel-reluctant cats for the move), I flew off to Alaska for two weeks, to teach, still breathless with the anticipation of moving to warmer climes and to making a quiet life as a writer at the edge of the Atlantic: toes in the sand, head in the sunsets, a dreamy fool easing into the "next" phase of life. 

In August and September, we finally got everything moved in – including the two spooked fur-balls – and the next few months were spent painting walls and trim, unpacking, putting a household together again, re-carpeting, putting wood flooring in my studio (it was raw plywood before), and endlessly trying to devise new ways to lure the cats out of all the new hiding places where they were hunkered down in deep denial of the move.  I was eager to get on with the toes-in-the-sand-head-in-the-clouds part of the writing life.  I was missing too many sunsets on the sound and sunrises on the ocean, too many walks on an emptied beach.  I wanted to stand with my feet in the roar of the Atlantic again and be at peace, for once, with who I am and where I find myself.  I worked and dreamed. Worked and imagined.  The words came as a wild tide in me while I painted walls and scrubbed floors and bathtubs, while I ripped up old carpeting, scribbling things down on whatever was at hand: sometimes the lid of the paint can, other times a part of the wall I would paint over soon as I'd had a chance to copy it all out into my daybook, sometimes a torn corner of an old brown bag or paper towel.  My life in scraps.  Words floating from every corner, hidden in every pocket.

Being near moving water has always had that effect on me: it sends my logical brain out on errands and invites my imagination to the party, that little jezebel in silks, where it moves into my inner ear and starts doing its crazy little word-jig, starts up its vaudevillean song and dance with memory, turns up the stage lights and throws open the doors.  

Come one; come all. . .

And I am always the first one in the door, waving happily, ticket stub in hand.  Who needs popcorn?  Who needs reserved seats? Who needs anything more than a wicked little strumpet of an imagination starting to dance with  a life that has been filled with experiences no one ever told you would be out there in the world waiting. As the play is about to begin, the theater amicably darkening, the imagination clears its throat and puts one hand on its ample hip.  

It seems ironic now that, in all my imagining, I had neglected to imagine hurricane season.

It isn't as if I don't know first-hand about hurricanes; I grew up in Florida, in Jacksonville, and we experienced a few.  I vaguely recall eating "hurricane food" – melting cheese over Sterno can flames and slathering it on Saltine crackers – and the old dog being allowed inside the house during the worst ones, and the candles and Coleman lantern we lit when the power went out, and the bathtub filled with water and stoppered just in case, and the wild gray rabbit my older sister brought in once from a storm that bit us and bit us in its terror.  I remember school was closed.  And I think we missed Sunday services - oh rare event. And that's about it.  

So long ago.  So far away.

Just as hurricane season here seemed to be going out "with a whimper," all the meteorologists suddenly became highly-excitable, pointing to the double meteor-swirl of clouds on their charts, babbling about conditions being ripe for a hundred-year superstorm. Where landfall might be. And when. It dawned on me that there was Something doing a little two-step shuffle near the stage-door of that theater in my head that I might have overlooked: Trouble.  Trouble named Sandy.

Isn't that how it goes with an imagination like mine?  She stands there – the sassy tart, the little bejeweled jezebel –  urgently insisting that I consider the fine detail of some elegantly-made costume or prop, drawing my attention to stage-right and all its sparkle so that I miss the storm brewing at stage-left.  Before I know it, the proscenium is ragged with wind and water, the plot has thickened disastrously, the curtains heave, the lights flicker, the fly system is rattling wickedly overhead, all sixes and sevens, and the ticket-taker is rowing off in the last yellow lifeboat.  

By the time I did notice what was approaching, I had little more than a day left to fill old plastic jugs with potable water, to dig the candles and matches out of moving boxes and place them strategically around the house, to figure out where the small propane grill and tanks were going to be safe – just in case – and to bake sweet loaves of storm bread and get them to the neighbors. By the time my imagination had receded again, that fickle floozy, and my wits had returned, the rains had descended and the streets were flooding. Avalon Pier was knocked from its timbers.   North of us, Kitty Hawk was being evacuated. To the south of us, the webcam at Jennette's Pier went darkly down. 

We were all left to our own devices then, forced to lie quietly in the beds we had made for ourselves, in the dark – with our sweet breads and old milk-jugs filled with water near at hand, with our little candles and matches, with our somewhat soggy dreams – ever at the mercy of that other old jezebel, the sea, who had come calling, in her wet overcoat and sandy heels, ill-tempered, a distraction, dragging herself to our doorstoops and porches.

Welcome to paradise.

In My Dream of the End-of-Days

I am alone in a deep ravine, standing before a towering wall of layered stone. Before me is recorded Time – Rock-Time. Geologic time.  At my back, the End-of-Time:  an ink-black sky where far-off stars flare, then fall through deep space, leaving behind a comet’s-tail of debris – a smear of light.

Like a blind man reading his world, I put out my hands to the great wall, fingering what lies before me, trying to discern what each remnant, each layer, signifies.

I move my fingers farther up the ledge: Here was fire, and here was water, a great flood; here, a tectonic shift. 

But where, in geologic time, did we exist?

Here, I say to no one, is where dinosaurs lived and the mammoth and mastadon.  Over here, I move my fingertips to trace a faint ledge, was a great flood; here a tectonic shift.

But where was Man?

I search higher on the rock and see, mid-wall, a thin chalk-white smear: all that remains now of the great cities, libraries, monuments, kindergartens and their noisy playgrounds; the greater and lesser works of philosophy, literature, art; the landfills and landmines; great deserts and polar ice-caps. Thus goes also the lush savanna with all its beasts; also all the sundials, clocks, metronomes; likewise, the cracked mug and china teacup; the weed and rose, timothy grass and lily pad.

This thin white rim is all that is left to mark our place in Time.  The chalk comes off on my fingertips. I put it to my tongue, to test it, the way an infant brings the world first to its tongue, learning the world one mouthful at a time.

It tastes like the world once tasted to me: bitter and sweet.  Like milkweed. Like fog. Like promise and betrayal.  A little bittersweet, like love.  The salt of remorse; the sugar of redemption.

Like some last Kilroy, I dip my finger again into the chalky crevice and write on the wall's stone face with my finger: We were here.

Then I turn and enter the End-of-Time.  Not-time, and all its stars.

LESSONS FROM THE CAT

"Art and music will survive without you."

– Eliza Doolittle (to Henry Higgins), My Fair Lady

A friend asked me today what my inspirations are, as a writer, my literary "influences." I thought hard for a moment, the way I do every time that question comes up. I hesitated because of the qualifier, "literary."

I know I am supposed to have been – to be continuously – "influenced" by the great ones who have come before: Dickinson, Yeats, Keats; Dante, Milton, Auden; Sappho, Kipling, Millay; the Psalms of David, the prophets (those brooding malcontents of the Old Testament), the hymns and spirituals and sermons of my Southern childhood. If not directly "influenced" by these, I have certainly been encouraged by them. And these have set a deep music in me, a music and a cadence which rises again and again like a phantom in my own writing. Because of these who came before, because they did their necessary work and it survived them, I have been strengthened and comforted by my return to those writings, discovering and rediscovering what has risen from the solitary minds of those who spent their lives wrestling with the human experience and making of it a kind of dark and troubled beauty, a splendor, an art.

I have loved them and been awed by them and taken solace from them, but what can I learn from them that might sustain me when an emptiness looms in me where it never loomed before? What have I ever had in common with any of the great writers that I could get through such emptinesses with any grace or goodness? And what do I learn by placing myself before the literary ancestors and their works when my own writing doesn't seem to go along so well, or when it grinds to a halt?

Nothing.

For all the good lessons those great works of literature have to offer a writer, that particular lesson isn't in them. My life is as far-removed from their greatnesses, and their troubles, as the far stars are from the morning glories withering on my front trellises.

So what then, in my ordinary life, has opened itself long enough to let me "see" something profound enough to get me through, to decipher its meaning and merit on my own, to see a gesture, an act of faith strong enough to get me through the rough spots of the writing life. There are a few, I think. But none more immediate lately than my little cat, that amber-eyed, 6-pound sack of fur and birdlike bones, that eating and sleeping and pooping fiend. He manages everything he does with a curious feline finesse and I have never seen him depressed or filled with melancholy. When he's not eating or sleeping or hunched in the litter box with that far-off, how-did-I-come-down-to-this "look" on his face, he's curling up on the chair-back for a nap or devising new ways by which to instigate the daily bug-tussles with the big, blue-eyed cat who, by now, is frankly annoyed with his chronic merriment and curiosity.

That dumb little cat knows nothing of discipline, artistic or otherwise. He knows even less of poetry, classical or contemporary, and memoir and fiction are wholly beyond him. My cookbooks are about as intriguing to him as my textbooks are: something to distract me so he can go about his daily mischief. Awards and honorariums and professorships do not impress him. He could care less about publications and tenure. What impresses him is his daily tuna - and catnip toys. He will chase, with gusto, the red light on the laser-pointer across the floor and up a wall. He will do this for hours. He will sit alertly and watch a toy bird with as much attention as he watches an actual bird. And he relishes my time at the desk each morning because it means he can sit on my desk and amuse himself with the paper clips and stapler, so he can swat at my fingers or the pencil as I write. Sometimes, he gets bored and places his soft-furred head alongside the warm keyboard and dozes off. It's of no consequence to him if I agonize half the morning over the structure of a sentence, if I'm pleased with the task of it all or stuck in a subjunctive rut.

But just let me run out for a half hour to do the morning's errands or head upstairs to put away clean laundry, and he'll diligently post himself at the living room stairwell, looking up, waiting for me to return. He'll sit like that, looking up an empty stairwell, for however long it takes for me to come down again, or to return with groceries or mail. He doesn't just sit and wait; he anticipates. He sits in a chronic state of belief: something will come.

After all, he's never been disappointed. I go away; I return. And with my return comes the return of the food and play and more time at the desk and catnip toys.

It's a grand time for him, that sitting, and he does it with all his catlike little heart and body and those three little synapses that my husband believes are the only standard operating equipment for thinking that cats bring to the game. Like Romeo at the balcony, he waits with great fervor.

The odd thing though, is that crazy little cat is never neurotic or unhappy when I go away. He takes up his position at the foot of the stairs and lifts his eyes. He can stare into the emptiness like nobody else I know. He never flinches, never gives up. He is – as my people are wont to say – in a state of blissful ignorance, believing he will sit and I will return. Not exactly cause-and-effect; more like waiting for the payoff after he's put in the time. Cat logic. Or a human imagining cat logic.

Call it what you will, but I am learning a kind of grace from that cat's gesture of waiting that is making me less crazy, less anxiety-riddled, less paranoid when I sit down at my desk in the pre-dawn hours of the mornings and nothing comes to me. And by "nothing," I mean nothing. In the deeply-troubling moments of no-words-coming, the moments of I-have-nothing-left-to-say-of-any-importance, moments when I would formerly have fled the emptiness for the productive distractions of gathering laundry or unloading the dishwasher, when those moments come to me now, I am learning to sit back in my chair, to wrap my hands around the coffee mug and stare out into the dark wintry morning beyond the windows and to wait. Something will come. After all, something has always come. Not because I have demanded it. Not because I have bargained with the gods for it. Not because I am strong-willed and dedicated. Not because anyone else in the world cares if I am writing or not. And certainly not because I arrived on the planet infused with greatness. It has arrived for as many years as it has because I have been open to it, because I wanted it badly enough to wait until it arrived: hours, days, years. Maybe it arrives some mornings because I wouldn't know who I was without it, because it's my oldest habit, my most faithful vice or virtue. And now I am learning, thanks to a cat, the joy of sitting in the largesse of emptiness, in anticipation of an arrival.

photo by Anne Caston

WHAT I'D LOVE TO HEAR, JUST ONCE. . . .

(with gratitude to Scott Banks for the inspiration!)

Thanks for bringing me into the world, Mom: you are the night-light in a dark and scary world.

Mom, you made mine the happiest childhood ever.

Why, I think freckles and a pale complexion are beautiful.

Oh, here, let me get that for you.

You have changed my life for the better.

You rescued me from bachelorhood.

I will be there for you.

You were my first. Really. You were.

No way do you have eleven grandchildren!

No, I'll scoop the cat-box.

Merry Christmas, darling, and doesn't Aruba look tiny from way up here?

Let's stay an extra week if you like.

Beach hut or condo? Diamonds or pearls?

Want to have some torrid make-up sex now?

I think you look hot in flannel.

You haven't aged a day.

You're married to THAT man? For sixteen years? Really?

No, this year I'll do all the Christmas shopping.

I'll wrap the gifts and mail them out.

Put your feet up and let me get you a glass of something bubbly.

Shall I make dinner for you tonight?

What movie do you want to see?

I scooped the cat-box.

I picked up the dry-cleaning on my way home.

I'll run you a bath and turn down the sheets.

Truffles and a chick-flick tonight, just for you, babe.

Let's go to IKEA and buy you some new bookcases today; I will assemble them, and I'll follow the directions.

Then, let's have some friends over for a cookout.

Wow. That light WAS red.

You're right again.

I mean always.

I'm a better person for having married you.

No, really; I want to hear what you think.

That book you wrote changed my life.

For your birthday this year, a Mercedes Benz AND roadside assistance. I meant roadside assistants: meet Ramon and his cousin, Julio.

Why yes, they were Chippendales.

I'll take the middle seat on the plane this time.

I left the Blackberry at home tonight; let's sit close and hold hands.

Why don't we eat by candlelight?

Your students all speak so highly of you. Your colleagues think you're wonderful.

This is your lucky day.

No, your butt doesn't look big in that dress.

I'm the luckiest man in the room.

Red roses. Just because.

This year, I'm throwing a birthday bash for you.

I'm inviting your friends and hiring a band.

I'd love to dance with you.

photo courtesy of photos.com

AN EVENING WITH THE MOUSE

Not the Mickey. The Chuck. As in Chuck E. Cheese, the big gray mouse sporting a bright purple tee-shirt and a baseball cap. Mouse with a game arcade, lots of really bad pizza, and hundreds of running, screaming, tantrum-throwing children – mostly under the age of six.

The decibel level in here rivals a heavy-metal concert. And speaking of heavy-metal and industrial drums, I happen to be guarding the winning cups for my granddaughters at a table across the aisle from Guitar Hero, an arcade game which features a large, animated screen of an industrial band who are performing for convicts in white- and gray-striped prison pajamas. At the moment, two sweet-faced sisters are manning the two interactive guitars while their younger brother looks on in wonder from the sidelines and their young mother gives them instructions. The only on-screen instructions to the wanna-be rockers are found in a smallish box near the top of the screen: Don't fret; strum. Beginner's mode. And the song they are rocking-out to just now? "Hit Me With Your Best Shot."

Next to them, my two-year-old granddaughter, Whitney, is feeding a gold coin to the Big Bass Wheel Pro arcade game which, all evening, has returned – to even the most skilled players – only 2 or 3 tickets. The good thing about a two-year-old, though, is how she is equally as happy with one ticket as she is with ten or twenty. That is how young she still is. How wonder-filled. Not far away, her big sister, Haley, is torpedoing ships with great gusto from the submarine Sea Wolf. She brings back to the table an impressive string of tickets for her "winning cup" and then runs right back off to her Papaw to ride the big white horse in the Derby game over in the Toddlers' section. In front of her, the track and the heads and rumps of other virtual horses against whom her horse competes.

In the far back of the General Admission tables, where we sit, is the section of specially-reserved tables for the birthday parties. The children back there have a stage and a larger-than-life stuffed version of The Mouse. They have a video booth where they can watch themselves dance and make faces at themselves. They have a big cake and get a visit, every hour, from The Mouse himself: someone dressed in a big gray mouse costume who waves nd moves among the birthday children, giving them high-fives and hugs and posing with the children for their parents' cameras. Big smiles and excitement all around.

The children in our section want to hug The Mouse too, but they are not "allowed." One mop-headed toddler has to be carried away by his mother who seems weary and distracted, uninterested in the moppet's sadness. She plops the boy on his father's lap and goes for a refill of her diet soda; the boy's father continues texting someone and tells the boy to "shut up." The boy does, but his eyes are still following the big mouse around the back of the room. Even in a children's paradise such as this, there is privilege and hierarchy, permission and denial. Haves and have-nots. Not that the boy yet understands this. But he will, in time; he will.

Outside, the sky has gone stormy and, across the parking lot, both flags atop the Texas Roadhouse are flying perpendicular to their flagpoles. Hurricane Irene is moving up the coast. Not that we have much to fear, inland, except maybe the amping-up of the usual high winds, hard rain, and flooding that we are growing accustomed to here in Central Pennsylvania. But we have become a sort of "tornado alley" in the last two years – 3 of them so far this year – so we are learning to keep a watchful eye on the wind, even as the winning cups fill with tickets, then overrun their plastic rims in that "my-cup-runneth-over" way that they do.

When all the gold tokens have been spent in the arcade, when all the games have been played and replayed, when the tickets are gathered up and cashed in, there will be prizes to select and carry home. Small treasures for the children. Keepsakes. Departing gifts from The Mouse and all his weary, faithful minions.

photo courtesy of photos.com, author's collection

THE HART

Early October and the leaves were already long-gone to orange and gold, already falling from the old oaks and maples, the air chilly, mornings damp with low-lying fog and mist. I'd soon be needing more than a wool sweater for morning walks. The long field I had to cross to enter the woods was nothing by then but rough stubble and thorns, brown, a no-man's land, and I'd taken to wearing boots in the last few weeks so my walk to the woods and back would be less miserable, so I wouldn't have to spend half an hour after I got home again picking prickly stubble from my socks.

A thick mist lingered wetly at the wood's edge that October morning when I'd headed for the solitude of the woods, my heavy wool sweater growing heavier, and clammy from the damp air. Once I'd entered the trees though, the discomfort of the crossing lifted. The deep woods always smelled faintly sweet, like bark and dirt and rot. Like things falling back to their most basic elements.

Without thinking, I'd entered the tree-line that morning by the old post that marked where the property ended, and had turned immediately to the left, picking my way through thick underbrush and fallen limbs to a clearing where I knew a wide stump squatted beside a creek-bed. Cold water trickled in it and made its crooked way around large rocks and fallen tree limbs. It didn't matter to me where it had come from, that icy water, or where it was heading. I wanted to sit a while at its muddy edge and watch, mindlessly, as it made its way from here to there.

In those first long months after my husband had packed his things and moved out – moved on – it had seemed easier to be alone deep in the woods than to be among others; easier to be solitary and silent than to be among sympathetic friends who didn't know how to help me or what to say to pull me past the ache of failure and sorrow that seemed never to lift. In that wood, I could be out of sight of curious neighbors. Away from well-meaning friends who were trying to set me up on blind dates with their bachelor cousins or uncles or brothers or widowed fathers. Away from my stunned, confused children for whom I had no way of explaining where their father had gone or the terrible turn our lives had taken.

One morning, a dog – a hay-colored retriever – had come to drink from the slow-running creek while I sat on the old stump thinking – or trying not to think. He'd dropped his yellow head and had lapped loudly, greedily, with his long pink tongue. Though I sat still, though I hadn't moved or shifted or even exhaled, he suddenly raised his head, ears lifted, and looked at me. Maybe that was how long it had taken for my scent to reach him – that fragrance of damp wool and shampoo. Or maybe he'd been startled by the sharp tang of late apples and cinnamon that still lingered on my hands and fingers from the morning's apple-peeling and canning.

Whatever had alerted him, I'd had enough time in those few seconds to see clearly the drops of water that hung, suspended, in the fine hairs of his muzzle. I was stunned, as if it were the first time I'd seen such a small detail so clearly. And then he turned and trotted off again in the direction from which he'd come.

There had been rumors in town of a feral dog pack roaming the fields and woods, but the animal I saw that morning hadn't been thin or ragged and he'd been alone, not in a pack. He had been one of only three animals I'd ever encountered in those morning woods. Once, there'd been a raccoon who'd stood up on hind legs and chittered madly at me and swayed menacingly then, seeing I wasn't to be frightened away by his fussing, he had dropped to all fours and waddled off again. Another morning, a small white opossum ambled into the clearing; it so much resembled a large rat I'd gasped and stood up, stumbling backwards in fright. The opossum hadn't seemed to give me much thought as it nosed around in the leaves and twigs. Backing up and moving forward. Backwards and forwards, over and over, his pink snout to the ground. He looked comical, like a wind-up toy, not a real animal. Then he, too had snuffled his way into the underbrush again and was gone. He'd seemed impossibly white and out of place in that dark, mossy, lichen-riddled place: a little pink-eyed ghost, popping in to root among the fallen leaves for grubs and bugs.

I knew there were also deer nearby but I'd never seen them. A tree grew crookedly at the edge of the property – a gnarled tree, split and charry still from an old lightning-strike – and sometimes, after strong winds or a thunderstorm storm had shaken the tree, small hard apples would lie in heaps beneath those twisted boughs. I always left apples from that tree to rot because they'd have made a poor applesauce or cobbler, hard and sour as they were. Not a one would have been sweet enough to eat. The deer though, in their hunger, had arrived soundlessly in the twilight – one, two, sometimes many at a time – to gorge themselves on the windfall apples. I knew because I'd seen the tamped-down grasses where they'd stood eating and the white fleshy apple cores they'd dropped. I'd seen the hoof-prints they'd left behind when they walked again across the clearing and vanished.

But the animal that followed me as I made my way homeward, out of the woods that October morning, was noisy and crashing, staggering forward like a wild, drunken thing, out of the tree-line and into the open field behind me. I heard it, then turned and saw it for what it was: a gray-brown deer, swaying, looking back at me. I don't know how long it took before it registered on me that the deer was a doe, or that she stood there with an arrow through her throat, pink foam frothing around the bright silver shaft. By the time I saw her clear, she charged away again along the tree-line, leaping with a speed that belied a wound so devastating. I stood there, unmoving, blinking hard, not quite believing I'd seen what I had seen.

She must have been moving, by then, out of adrenalin and sheer terror.

* * * * *

A hart, my grandmother had called that large-antlered stag we'd come upon suddenly in a narrow clearing in the forest where we'd taken a shortcut on our walk to the store. When the stag had turned solemnly and walked back into the trees, she'd told me the story of Cernunnos, an Irish legend, a tale in which a lone stag would appear and disappear again at the edge of a haunted wood. A mythic creature, a being "outside of time." A hart who shifted its shape from an antlered man to a stag. An ageless creature who moved with ease between the Land of the Dead and the Land of the Living. When he appeared, it was a message. A sign.

Of what, I'd asked her excitably then, a sign of what?

But she had grown quiet and strange by then, saying only that the one for whom the sign was intended would know what it meant. She had always been given to odd beliefs, my grandmother, a woman with a penchant for seeing signs and portents in every simple thing: tangled twine on a pathway meant a traveler would become lost; two sticks laid across each other at a crossroads meant that there would be quarrels among friends and an unmendable rift; birds flying, break-neck, into windows were a sign that some devastation was coming. I'd learned to take most of what my grandmother told me as a kind of pleasant fiction, a story-teller's way of explaining the inexplicable. Of giving small things significance. Something by which to amuse an easily-amused granddaughter.

* * * * *

And yet, years later, that October morning, a deer had appeared out of nowhere, had stepped out of the mist, and had stood in front of me. She'd seemed, in that moment, a doppelganger, a mirror-image. For long seconds we stood like that, a plain little doe with a steely arrow lodged in her throat facing a woman gone almost mute.

No one had seemed able tell me why my voice was failing, not the white-coated doctors in the halls of medicine, not the specialists they'd sent me to, not the old women among whom I lived who'd offered me their best broths, brought me herbs and homemade poultices to soothe the raw, wrecked throat and the ruined vocal cords.

Back then, I wouldn't have been able to tell anyone of that morning in the field, much less say what I'd felt when the doe passed into view, halted before me, the arrow protruding from her throat, then leapt furiously away again. I remember putting my hand to my throat. I remember the thunder of her arrival and the thunder of her departure. I remember seeing her gray flanks disappear as she reentered heavy mists far down the field in which I stood. I remember also the rise of hot anger in me when the huntsman with his heavy bow had stepped from the woods, following her trail: a man hunting out of season, a man who'd shot a doe – a female – which was forbidden around those parts, even during hunting season.

Only a coward would shoot a doe; a doe might well have had a young fawn or two tucked into a bed of leaves somewhere in the forest.

He looked up and, seeing me there, briefly lowered his bow. But when I said not a word, when I stood there, flushing bright with anger, one hand at my throat, he looked again at the ground and found something that seemed more interesting than the silent woman who stood in a cleared field before him – perhaps crushed stubble where the doe had thrashed her way into the field, or a blood trail, or the distinctive curve of hooves in the soft ground – and he set out again, in the direction where she had bounded away.

How far could a thing, thus stricken, run?

* * * * *

In my dreams of the hart, she turns back into the forest and makes her way, staggering, to some safe place, to the mud bank of that stream where, finally, her forelegs give way and she kneels on the leafy ground, a supplicant, a penitent at the water's edge. The hind legs tremble and give way too until the soft white underbelly lies full-length along the muddy, leaf-strewn ground. The silky head sinks to the marsh, the wild light of terror or of pain flickering and going out, the jaw going slack, the soft ears no longer flicking.

In the dream, no other animals, large or small, devour her; neither does she fall to rot and stench, the soft hide stiffening. In the dream, the huntsman does not find her or take her body. As I drift some nights now toward sleep, she also sleeps and, in time, the arrow snaps and falls through and the wound in her throat closes and she quickens and wrenches herself upright and stumbles on unsteady legs, regaining her footing. She lifts her head and steps silently back through the dense forest and vanishes.

In the dream, I am standing again in that stubbled field when she steps forward, out of a wet morning fog, when she approaches me again, so close this time that I can see the white throat and the tender place where the arrow pierced her, the slight scar of it that remains, so close I can put out my hand and almost touch her. In the dream, I always understand, I always know what she means; the sign of her comes clear. When I wake again, I don't remember what it is that I knew in the dream. When I waken, she is always vanishing again, moving back through the mists, back through the field of time, a phantom, a lost sign, a deep and unfathomable silence.

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