my heart as a skinned deer
by Olivia Kingery
How do we learn to love the things we kill?
The albino deer has been telling me secrets. I catch her at the bedroom window, second floor, and I think to ask her the questions burning through my mind, the smell of rubber leaking from my ears, my heart the sound of a gunshot. I try to tell her I was born in the belly of the Midwest, shotgun at my shoulder before I knew what it meant to love someone. And I don’t yet know how to tell her I loved deer before I ever loved a human.
In the well of my mind, the connections between hunting and deer and roadkill are fine-tuned threads the color of moss. I learned to love deer from my father who is a hunter. Over the years, that love transformed into a type of faith.
The only deer I watched my father shoot was a large doe. She was so beautiful my body shivered as we walked to her on the horizon. The sky opened wide while my father prayed over her still warm body – umber brown against the ochre field. She was the only god he spoke to. I cried not because we would have meat in our freezer, but because I would give it all back to let her breathe, to see her again through the thick of the forest.
The first deer I hit in my car was a large doe. She crossed the lanes so quickly I thought she was flying. The sky wasn’t morning purple but almost midnight purple. She connected with the right side of my front end and kept moving after the impact into the endless Nebraska night. I love this deer more than my body knows how. I grieve her as if it is a ritual; a constant effigy burning in my mind.
In the winter, I think of the albino deer the most. Her white body a wave against a frozen white landscape. We see her on our nightly walks with the dogs, marbled and still as a statue, assessing the shape of our movements. I lower my voice and say small prayers in whatever ways I can, speak out loud so she knows my voice.
Once you hit a deer in your car, maybe a doe or maybe a six point, maybe they live, there is no forgetting. There is always a reflex when something moves on the side of the road, on the line of life and death. This rush of adrenaline is on the opposite spectrum of the rush when scoping in on a deer, breath low in a blind or tree stand. Here, we have someone behind the barrel of a gun thinking yes, and over here we have someone behind the wheel of a car saying no; they both don’t move. The same animal, different deaths – one honored for meat, one wasted for speed. Another strand added to the thread.
I learned to love deer knee deep in field grass, hand on the doe’s thick fur, moments after her last breath. But I also learned to love deer as they left the swallow against the purple of the morning sky; as I watched my father work his knife along the lines of their bodies giving gratitude with each movement; as they snacked on river grass along the banks of my childhood river; and I love them 400 miles away running along Lake Superior’s shoreline before the first hard frost; munching on the fresh green of the chard by my front door; down the trail to the creek where they bed each night.
In my mind, I invite the albino deer inside for coffee in the morning. In my mind, she understands me when I tell her my whole life will be about forgiveness, her forgiveness and the doe’s and the unending bodies alongside roads. After tea we walk down to the creek and look at each other, and in my mind, I follow her into the forest.
Olivia Kingery grows plants and words in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she reads for Passages North. When not writing, she is in the woods with her Chihuahua and Great Pyrenees. Find her mostly retweeting @olivekingery.