Fawn
by Viola Wang
The air was so crisp, it burned my lungs going down. The shifting mountains, waylaid by dense greenery, passed me by as I drove deeper into the wilderness.
My mind was preoccupied with the thought of her.
The sun should have been brighter, I thought. It should have mocked me more.
The windows were rolled down, and the concrete road rushed under the tires as I went fast as I dared. Passing another car was rare, the sight of them making something clench in my stomach.
How I had come to hate the sight of other people, I didn’t know.
The radio had gone silent since I entered the mountains, no signal to be found. In this deep, the only sounds were the roar of the engine and the wind cutting through the window, echoing the scream building in the back of my throat. It had been there for a long, long time, awaiting what would not come. It had made its home there. My hands squeezed at the leather of the steering wheel. I kept my eyes ahead.
I arrived at the camping grounds just before night fell.
* *. *
“You doing alright, Miss?” The bearded man squinted at me from under his eyebrows. “You’ve got everything?”
“Yes, I’m sure I’m fine.” I handed him the money, and received a little plastic square, forty-three written on it. The fluorescents of the registration cabin hurt my eyes.
He shrugged. “Well, if you need anything, feel free to come by and ask. It's no problem at all. We’ve gotta stick together out here.”
“It’s been a long drive up here,” I said. A few months ago, I would have loved to stay and chat, meeting people that made up the world.
My smile probably looked as brittle as I felt, because he handed me the map and a friendly smile. I wanted him to stop.
“Of course, of course, you best be off to bed. Be careful out there. If you hear something in the night, it's probably just a deer. We’ve got a bunch of those out here.”
“Thank you.”
I got back into my car, and headed down the dirt road, light leaching from the sky, replaced by the gloom that heralds true night. There were no lights out here. The way was narrow, branching off into little cleared plots of land. I could hear people laughing, smell the smoke of their campfires through the trees.
I rolled up my car window.
The dirt road went on as I crawled through the forest at a snail's pace, the narrowing of my field of view forcing me to turn on the headlights, casting an unnatural brightness up ahead.
I turned at the only bend in the road, car rolling to a stop at a clear plot, carpeted in wet grass. There was nothing but a picnic bench chained to the ground.
I got out of the car.
The damp of the grass wet my calves and soaked through my shoes. The silence was absolute. It was now dark enough that if I looked up, I knew I would see the stars.
I slept in my car that night.
* *. *
I remember the day, the day it had all disappeared. I was walking down the street with Tristan, hand-in-hand, so in love it made me sick to remember. I was pointing at the cute little socks in the window, patterned with little duckies.
“Tristan, aren’t they adorable?”
I marvelled how they wouldn’t even fit on my hand. Then fire ripped through my abdomen.
After that, there wasn’t a lot I remembered.
I remembered screaming.
I remembered the hot blood running down my legs, the deadness in me where my heart still beat but hers did not, not anymore.
I remembered sinking to the floor, groaning and clutching at my stomach, as if I could cradle her back into being.
I don’t remember the ambulance ride.
I remembered Tristan’s hand in mine when the doctor told me she was gone.
I remembered the doctor’s funny little bow tie.
I remembered thinking how funny all of it was, that a soul could just slip away like that; that my love and Tristan’s love, the love of my mother and father—her grandparents, and the love of my sister who was so excited to be an aunt, couldn’t keep her here.
I remembered bleeding out her body in increments.
Tristan and I fought. He told me it wasn’t my fault—he didn’t blame me. But I could see it in his eyes, how he wouldn’t look at me. I blamed myself. He tried to comfort me. He made the calls to my parents, my sister. I sat in the house, in the dark. I was cold to him and I hated him, for something he couldn’t do. I pushed him away. I treated him like a stranger would.
Maybe I blamed him, too.
And then I needed to get away. I needed out of my house, of the house with a nursery and a sturdy little crib Tristan’s grandfather had made. I left a note saying I wouldn’t be back for a week.
I thought I craved the wild. I hoped it would heal me.
* *. *
The next day I managed to get the tent built. I was sorely in need of a bath, but I didn’t want the people at the public bathing areas to see me. Didn’t want them to see the sagging of my belly, the loose skin that used to be stretched taut.
I trekked into the woods. There was a stream nearby. I saw it on the map, too far for anyone to make the effort.
Just as I began to feel lost, there it was: deep and almost blue. I shrugged off my clothes, shivering nude in the dappling sun. Wind whipped through my hair.
The first foray into the stream sent needles shrieking through my skin, the cold so complete that by the time I was standing in it, my lower half had gone numb. My toenails scraped at the pebbles on the bottom, touching the slipperiness of the moss. I trailed my fingers through the water, watching the ripples and feeling the giddy self-consciousness of a child. I dunked my head under the water and all sounds disappeared, leaving me in the muffled underwater.
When I finally emerged and shook the water from my eyes, there was a doe staring at me from the opposite bank.
I froze. She stared at me with huge, black eyes, ears flicking, and snorted. Her pelt was glossy in the morning sun.
Her belly swung low and heavy under her.
Hatred flashed through me, a visceral kind of hate. I wanted to remind her who was the superior animal, who had played the games of survival and won. I wanted to snarl, to politely insist that I was more than the animal she was. And yet, I hated her more than I have ever hated a person.
I wanted to lunge at her, to make fear widen her eyes, to make her hooves struggle to stand, to make her slip. Make her fall. But I stood, cold and mute, as she walked away nimbly, only slightly off-balance from the weight of her precious cargo.
A familiar cramp started low in my belly, burning and forcing me to hunch over. Blood bloomed into the water.
I hadn’t counted the days properly. I thought I wouldn’t need to.
With the pain came more hatred.
That night, after a can of soup and a heating pad, I slept in the tent for the first time. A plastic smell permeated everything. My hair was damp and I shivered in my sleeping bag.
* *. *
I awoke to darkness and fever. Sweat soaked the back of my thin sleep shirt. Breathing only made me conscious of the heat rattling inside my lungs. I shivered, cold, despite the warmth of the bag and the warmth of my body as I slowly burned.
The night was silent and still and utterly familiar. I stared into the nothingness of my tent, waiting for fever or sleep to lull me into unconsciousness.
From outside came the pitter-pattering of tiny little feet. So close, I could hear the sounds of the grass as it raced by, unsteady but joyous.
I sat up, every movement bringing me pain and my hands scrabbled at the zipper. Unzipping it brought cool, night air, sweet as a balm. I stepped outside and breathed in deep, straining my ears and standing unsteadily.
I waited to hear the little footsteps. I prayed for them, brought to humility and piety by fever and the dizziness of night. I swayed unsteadily, the nearly full moon illuminating the clearing. The breeze ruffled the branches of the trees and I felt a loneliness that was never meant to be shared.
Nothing was there.
The next day, it rained so heavily that the only thing I could do was sit curled up in my tent, staring through the clear plastic window to the outside, raindrops distorting the image into smudged slate grey and watery, verdant green.
I couldn’t stop shivering, shaking so violently that my teeth clacked against each other. I had piled every single item of clothing together and I still wasn’t warm enough, even though my eyes burned with the effort it took to blink. To twitch a finger meant to move a mountain. My mouth was hot and dry, my lips cracking and peeling.
I should have wished for anything but solitude. I should have wished for comfort, from Tristan or my sister, even my mother, who had a habit of smothering me when I was sick.
But all I could think, all I could do, was wish for her. It was the only thing I was capable of.
* *. *
I do not remember falling asleep.
When I awoke, it was to obscurity and a high-pitched giggling, sweet and childlike. Pure and innocent. So close, so close—just outside, a little muffled by the thin nylon wall. My heart swelled in my chest.
I ripped open the tent flap and nearly flung myself to the ground in my haste. The air seemed to steam against the heat of my skin. I stood, twitching and frantic, chest heaving from the strain, vision tilting and pain eating its way into my head.
I was alone in the clearing, yet again. My feet carried me swiftly to the edge of the forest where shivers overtook my frame and forced me to fall into the hardened embrace of bark, scraping at the skin on my face. My head lolled, breathing shallow, and I peered into the gloom.
Never had the lack of something ever left me this enraged. My knees hit the damp ground, cold soaking into my pants instantly, and I threw up whatever meager offerings were left in my stomach.
* *. *
The next day was all a blur. It lasted my entire life. In a blink, it was noon; another blink, nightfall. I spent the day again in my tent. My fever made my vision blur at the edges and I was so besieged by headaches that any light would cause me indescribable agony.
Time and sunlight were dust on my parched, sweltering brow. My body was not my own, possessed by stone; every movement was pain. My own body heat cooked the heart in my chest and I fed it to my sister. I forgave Tristan. I could tell time by the shadows, and they traced my face lovingly. I forgave my mother, forgave her for me.
I hadn’t eaten in days. I had never wanted less in my life. My father took a fishing knife and filleted out my collarbone, boiling it down to pain and stock, and washed me with it. I forgave myself, for my girlhood and grievances, for all the sins I ever committed.
I whispered words of delirium into the stale air of the tent and the doctor whispered back.
I fell into sleep the same way a diving bird breaches into water.
Night tugged me under the tide, but I awoke to a scream. A little girl’s shriek of terror.
The iron surged in my blood and I chased it into the woods.
The forest rushed past, and I could not feel the branches as they cut into me, nor the tread of the earth as my bare feet bounded forward. I searched for her. I craved her more than the air in my lungs. I only paused, certain my chest must be heaving, at a clearing.
I paused for an eternity. The sky was clouded and black, a pointless darkness. I could not feel the many things I thought a human should.
And just as I feared the fever would overtake me for nothing, that I would bleed into the dark and be but an imprint on the world, that the ground would slip from underneath my feet, she stepped out from behind a tree.
There she was. My perfect little baby girl.
My mother’s soft brown hair brushing her small shoulders. Tristan’s big, dark eyes set into her round, curious face. The little Cupid’s bow on my lips was etched into hers.
I knelt down and reached out my hand. She wobbled towards me, unsteady on her own two feet. Her soft, pink hand, warm and fragile, slipped into mine. I cradled her, enfolded her close, then closer.
My belly ached, and I drew her closer still, as if I could press her right back into me. My hold was almost tight enough to be painful, but she was a good baby. She didn’t protest.
I raised my lips to the soft skin of her forehead, smoothed over her ribs with my hands.
I needed to make her stay with me.
* *. *
The moon shone through the clouds when my fever broke.
I was squatting, hunched over a mess of blood and flesh, small hooves sticking out at awkward angles. The brown pelt was dappled with more red than white. The ribs had been cracked in two, the ivory bright; I could feel the fragments of bone stuck under my fingernails. The slick, gleaming sight of organs spilled onto the grass.
My throat was sore. The salty taste of iron was in my mouth, my hair, my stomach.
Blood and saliva dripped down my chin. There was a piece of fur wedged between my two back teeth.
My belly was distended, stuffed full to bursting, heavy and round.
My jaw ached.
The scream was mine, I realized. The one that had found its home within me. I recalled the heavy slide of meat down my throat. Of shredding and gorging with crude urgency.
A branch snapped and I glanced up.
A lone doe stared at me from the hill.