"Deer in the Headlights" by Allison Field Bell
- Roi Fainéant
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
My friend has written a poem about a pair of deer—one with antlers, the other without. In the poem, they are in a cemetery filled with green grass and large trees. The antlered deer fixates on the poem’s speaker. He watches her with his whole body. And the antlers too: like antennae reading the air for threat. She is no threat. And, the speaker claims, the deer determines that.
My friend loves deer and wants a tattoo of one on her shoulder.
We are talking about deer and we are also talking about my ex. I say, “We own a house together.” She says she’s sorry for that. I say, “There were years where things were all right.” She nods. I say, “But anyway, a deer is just a deer. A nuisance, a pest really.”
She shakes her head sadly. She says my ex’s name. And then she says, “It wasn’t your fault.”
I say, “I lived in Santa Cruz for a while. Maybe that’s why: so many deer there.” I’m thinking about the soft dewy eyes of them, and the velvety antlers too. Their small flicking tails, their precarious stick legs.
My friend is also from California, a suburb in the east bay. And now, we’re both in Utah. The mountains here. The snow. The seasons. My ex, meanwhile, is in Albuquerque living with his mother. My friend says, “Really, you’re better off.”
I try to remember the poem’s lines, but all I can do is think of the expression deer in the headlights. I say it over and over to myself. Out loud, I say, “Six years of my life.”
She says, “We all have different paths to walk.”
I hate this. And I wonder if, in this moment, I kind of hate her too. And her cemetery deer. And maybe all deer. Like rats. Like mosquitos.
As a child, I hated no animal. I loved them all, deeply. Maybe all children do. When you’re young, you see possibility, not a tired old buck plodding above coffins.
I want to tell all this to my friend. To apologize for hating her and her deer.
She says, “In reality, they ran away from me, you know. The deer.”
She looks at me for a long time. Like I am the deer, and she is the headlights.
I imagine the deer fleeing her and her long looks. And I imagine them moving away from each other too. Each deer for themself. The buck with his impressive rack of antlers slinking off behind a cottonwood tree. And the doe—of course the doe—springing through spring grass between gravestones under the blue blue mountain sky.