Deer Crossing

When the couple drowned after running their car into the lake just after graduation, Jamie’s dad told her that if she ever ended up in the water like that, the first thing to do was to roll down her window. This was the second piece of driving advice from her dad she remembered. The first was that if an animal jumped in front of her on the road, she should accelerate so that the animal might fly over the car instead of going through her windshield. This would also probably kill it instantly and she wouldn’t leave it suffering or have to put it down herself. Don’t swerve, he told her. You’ll hit a tree or drive into oncoming traffic and then everyone but the animal is dead.
Jamie knew that the swerving thing was true, obviously, but the thing about accelerating seemed a bit violent. She imagined a deer illuminated by her LEDs, growing, frozen, then taken apart by the speed of her Tracker. She imagined some of it coming through the windshield, some of it stuck in her grill, legs bent. Chevrolet logo lost under the remains. She imagined a red stain down the road in the snow, merging with the white.


Jamie is driving to her hometown to visit her family. It’s already dark and she’s traveling on what is described by some as a “highway”—only two lanes with shoulders that give way to car-deep ditches in the summer. She hasn’t seen another car in hours, though she’s not surprised by this. She’s not sure who else would want to be driving towards Winfield, ever, but especially in the dark, in the snow, and she doesn’t know anybody left in Winfield who would know how to leave.
It’s just past the sign that tells Jamie she has around an hour to go when the deer is just there. Even with the high beams, the deer materializes on the snowy road with a backdrop of black, trees and sky melded together.
In the moment, it doesn’t matter what Jamie’s dad has told her because logic is weaker than instinct, and she pushes her foot down on the brake pedal, which does nothing for her or the deer, which is still staring towards her vehicle, unmoving.
She slides on ice into the deer, the impact a deep thunk that echoes through the cab. The vehicle shakes and rattles and the air freshener to Jamie’s right jumps into the rear-view mirror with the new terrain.
Bracing herself, Jamie grips the wheel and locks her elbows, waiting for an impact against the windshield. She even closes her eyes, which she knows is dumb. Maybe she’s protecting them from glass or seeing a body fly towards her, but when she opens them, the vehicle has slid to a stop. Off-kilter, half in the ditch, but there is no deer body bowing through the windshield. There are no broken limbs puncturing through the glass towards Jamie, no fur lining the windshield wipers, no vacant eye staring at her.
In the dark, Jamie cannot see any damage from where she sits. She knows that she hit it, she felt it, but she can’t see any evidence. She wonders if it survived and ran off the road into the forest while her eyes were screwed shut. Maybe it was just stunned, unhurt.
The vehicle is leaning slightly downwards, veering into the snowy ditch, but there’s so much snow that’s been plowed into it in the recent days that it doesn’t have very far to fall. If it were the summer, Jamie would be upside-down, crawling out of a rolled vehicle, or alive pinned into her seat under a crunched cab—or dead. Instead, she’s kind of in the ditch, kind of on the road, waiting for a vehicle to come too fast from behind and slam into her. Jamie puts her hazard lights on, though she’s not sure they will do much in the event of an over-confident truck hauling down the highway like the ones she last saw hours ago.
During the initial impact, Jamie’s phone was sitting in a cup holder, plugged into the radio. The music that was keeping Jamie awake is now grating, adding to a sensory overload, too loud. She unplugs the phone, pauses the music, and while she does not expect there to be cell service on this stretch of road, when she sees that she is correct, there is a flicker of disappointment or maybe premonitory dread at her inability to alert her family that she will be, at the very least, delayed in her arrival. She guesses her mother wouldn’t come looking, but would rather just assume Jamie changed her mind without saying anything.


Jamie’s family was not confused by her leaving, but by her staying gone. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of her making somewhere not Winfield home. When she left for school at eighteen, they understood. There was nowhere to do that there. But every time she spoke to them after leaving, they’d say things like once you’re done and come home, and she never understood where that assumption of a return came from. Her family had put an expiry date on her time away, and once that date, which Jamie presumed to be her graduation, came to pass, she was expected back home, to make her return to the tiny town. It seemed she had been allotted one soul-search after which she must roll back to where she belonged. 
When Jamie didn’t return following her graduation, there were several emotions. There was a bit of sadness, or maybe it was guilt tripping. She couldn’t quite tell. Her mother claimed that, without Jamie, she would get so lonely now that she had finally separated from Jamie’s father, and her younger sister was in her mid-teens, alternating weeks between homes. Jamie wondered, sometimes aloud to her mother, where her mother’s friends were in these situations. Why it was Jamie’s job to return to Winfield and keep her company? It was in the same breath that her mother would say she was glad Jamie was doing well that she would tell her she hoped she came home soon. When Jamie told her mother she was a lesbian, her mother asked if it was Vancouver that had made her gay. In her mother’s eyes, the city, a villain, had converted her daughter and made it even more difficult to bring her back home. She cried, and said there are no gay people in Winfield. Jamie would never find someone, she said.


The hazards flash red onto the icy ground as Jamie steps out of the vehicle. Her foot nearly slides out from underneath her, the road is so slick. She holds tight onto the door and then the hood as she inches around to the front bumper, inspecting for damage with the flashlight on her phone. She searches for a dent, maybe a tuft of fur where the deer bounced off before retreating into the woods, but at first, she doesn’t see anything. Her headlight is intact, and so is the top of the grill, but as Jamie tracks down towards the center of the bumper, she sees that the deer did not bounce away. There are two legs jutting out from under the vehicle, criss-crossed. White belly disappears underneath where the other two legs must be mangled together, pretzled under the chassis, or maybe wrapped in an axle. Jamie can see the neck, though the head is jerked back in a crooked, twisted angle that doesn’t align with the deer’s god-given physiology. A one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn just under the Tracker’s front bumper means that Jamie can just barely see one of the deer’s shiny, blank eyes, staring straight up past the plastic. It has small antlers, still leathery, that are wedged just under the bumper. One of the antlers has snapped off, bloody at the break. Jamie didn’t think antlers bled.
She can’t stomach the thought of grabbing the legs, still warm, and trying to pull it out. Bones crunching, tendons snapping as she untangles the loose body before it begins to stiffen. Plus, the cold is starting to get to Jamie, her breath visible billowing off the front of her car. She nudges one of the jutting legs with her foot and her body tingles, her own legs feel gelatinous, as it springs back into place.
There’s stress running through Jamie’s bones as she returns to the warmth of the driver’s seat. Her hand struggles to grip the door handle, cold and somatic fear restricting movement. She weighs her options.
The Tracker isn’t that deep into the ditch, Jamie thinks. There’s a chance she could throw it in reverse and back out onto the road, unfold the deer from underneath, and be on her way. There’s also a chance she could get stuck worse, dig the tires deeper into the snow, slide deeper into the ditch, catch the deer under the car even worse than it might already be. Sitting in the road and waiting for a vehicle to hit her from behind, however, makes Jamie’s chest tighten.
She shifts into reverse and slowly pushes her foot on the gas. The engine revs in revolt, and the car does not move. Further down on the gas, the engine revs louder, and lurches slightly, filling Jamie with a jolt of excitement. She can feel the tires catch some traction, the vehicle moves forward more, and Jamie keeps her foot on the gas. Her hope of extracting herself from her problem on her own, of not requiring help, builds. But soon enough, the tires spin over the snow and the vehicle lurches back into place. Jamie tries again, and again, and with each press on the gas pedal, the vehicle moves less, until all she can hear is spinning tires and a revving engine. Jamie’s face gets hot with anger. She feels helpless.
Jamie leaves the vehicle and tries digging out the tires by hand. She digs down until the snow is ice and her hands burn too long in the cold before going numb. In the dark, Jamie can’t see the red in her skin but her fingers are visibly darker than they were before she dug around her tires. She holds them in front of the vents, blasting hot air at them, pins and needles shooting through her skin before they regain feeling. When she can move her hands with confidence again, she tries once more to back out of the ditch, and once again, all that happens is tires spinning over frozen ground.
Jamie doesn’t hit the steering wheel or cry out in frustration, only lays her head on her hands and listens to the hum of the engine. She thinks of the deer under the vehicle, being warmed by the heat of the running engine, its glassy eye staring up at her through the metal and plastic and oil, asking her what to do next.


There was no particular event that made Jamie want to leave. The feeling simply crept up her skin, crawling up from her feet like invasive ivy to the rest of her until it wrapped around her throat and she vibrated with the fear of staying. As Jamie walked through her high school years, she felt less and less like she was meant to live in Winfield, and that staying would be some sort of failure. After the kids drowned in the car, people that Jamie had known from a distance since childhood, she started having a dream about being buried alive in Winfield, in the same cemetery as the kids and her dead family members. This nightmare about dying in the place she was born recurred until she left.
Maybe it was the closeness that first frightened her. How everyone seemed to know each other’s secrets. There wasn’t anything slightly deviant or outside of the norm anyone could get away with in Winfield without the word spreading from family to family through voices dropped an octave. Did you hear about all those children that found Norm Harris’s body in a shed by the lake? Parents let their kids run too far off these days. He was still homeless. I haven’t seen his daughter in years. Married? And just left her father like that. Ssth.
Even when everyone knew everything about everyone, when Jamie would see someone and know every detail, what began to make her feel sick about living in a town like Winfield was the implied consent of shared secrets. Introducing herself to an adult and seeing the recognition only in the last name. Oh, you’re a Forsyth. You’re the daughter of who? Oh, yes! You’re the one who went away and… the news of Jamie’s queerness an implicit piece of her now when returning. Jamie was born into a place where she would never have any choice but to give herself up to the town’s lore. In a city, she could remain anonymous. She wouldn’t walk past the beach and think of it only as where the kids drowned, or see their families and know too much about them. In Winfield, there was no one she could walk past without them knowing too much about her.


Jamie sits in the Tracker for long enough without anyone driving by that she begins to worry about falling asleep. It’s 3 a.m., hours past her intended arrival, and she knows nobody is looking for her. Her eyes are heavy and the warmth of the constant heat running feels like a blanket, though Jamie is becoming conscious of conserving gas should she be here all night. She imagines turning off the vehicle, the lights with it, and a truck speeding down the highway behind her, not spotting her until it’s too late. She becomes the deer, a flash in the new driver’s headlights, killed instantly or maybe not. Maybe she becomes tangled in a puzzle of warped metal, bleeding and confused, cups and air fresheners and forgotten trash thrown around the cab, waiting to die in her crumpled Tracker before anyone can find help.
Jamie decides to leave the vehicle running, leave the hazard lights on.
As she sits in the warm blanket of her heated vehicle, she feels the deer below her, looking at her with its blank and glossy eye. She falls asleep thinking of the deer. She dreams about it. She dreams that it reanimates. The warmth of Jamie’s still-running vehicle restarts its heart, pushes blood back through its stiff limbs. The limbs untangle themselves, sharp and jagged and quick like a spider. Broken and dislocated bones snap back into place, snapped tendons reconnect, torn muscles tie themselves back together. The deer does this as it pulls itself from under the chassis of Jamie’s vehicle, shaking itself off like it slipped on ice and was embarrassed to have someone witness a fall. It looks at Jamie, eyes alive and moving, and walks, gently on the slick ground, to her driver’s side window. It looks at her, eyelashes long and beautiful and Jamie almost forgets that this must be a zombie, by definition. She holds her finger up to the window, frosty, and drags a fingernail across the gritty frozen glass, the sound and sensation making her teeth hurt. The deer’s eye follows, then looks at her, and then runs into the forest from which it jumped the last time it was alive.
Jamie twists around in an attempt to see where the deer disappeared, but when she turns, she’s met with headlights and a shrill squeal.


There is a man knocking on Jamie’s driver’s side window. This jolts her awake. He’s illuminated by headlights that are not Jamie’s, must be his own, and he is wearing a black and white flannel jacket. It reminds Jamie of something her dad would wear, in fact, might be a jacket her dad already owns. Jamie’s eyes are still sticky and heavy and unfocused, and she’s trying to figure out if she should even let this man in, surprised that she doesn’t recognize him, someone driving out of Winfield in the early morning. The vehicle is still running, though her gas meter is now teetering towards E. She rubs her eyes, remembers why she is where she is, and rolls down her window.
“You know how dangerous being on the road in the dark is?” the man tells her.
“I’m stuck in the ditch. Hit a deer,” Jamie says, though she can’t imagine a way he missed this, walking up to her from his side of the road. She guesses he was likely frightened by a stopped vehicle and a sleeping girl and needed a way to tell her off.
“And you slept instead of calling for help.”
“No service.”
She thinks about getting snarky, instead just matches his slightly annoyed energy. She would prefer he didn’t leave her without getting help.
Jamie continues, “I think the deer is stuck under there pretty good, but if you have tow straps, maybe you could just pull me out.
He huffs at Jamie offering a plan to him. He continues to remind her of her dad. “Don’t got tow straps. I’ll call someone when I get service up the road. You’re welcome for stopping.”
The man turns before Jamie can respond or question why a man with a truck like his wouldn’t have tow straps in the winter, so she rolls her window back up and turns her engine off.
Jamie does not sleep again while she waits to see if the man indeed called someone for her. The sky is beginning to turn light, a subtle black-blue, around four-thirty AM when another car approaches from town. As it nears, the shape and colors reveal that it’s a police SUV. It turns around in front of Jamie’s vehicle and backs up close-ish before stopping, turning on its lights, hurting Jamie’s eyes with the abrasive red and blue after a night of nothing but dull red hazards and yellow headlights. She squints through the windows in the SUV, sees the driver tapping on a screen, watches them sit for a few more moments before they finally get out of the vehicle and approach her, a shadow illuminated by flashing lights. She rolls down her window.
“Hello,” Jamie says first, as the figure approaches and turns into a medium-sized man.
When she’s able to make out his face, Jamie recognizes him as someone she went to high school with. His name is Tim LeVay, and he was two or three years above her. Jamie does not have any memories of Tim LeVay that are only him. She would have only passed by him at bush parties in clearings surrounded by woods or a half-friend’s house party. Jamie remembers Tim LeVay’s face, remembers his hypermasculine aura that came with being a teenage boy in a small town in the woods, remembers not wanting to be around him or any of his equally-as-masculine friends for too long.
“Good morning,” he says, and then corrects himself, “or not such a good morning for you, it looks like.” He doesn’t yet recognize her.
“Not really. I’ve been here overnight.” Jamie watches the cop survey her Tracker. “I hit a deer,” she continues, “it’s still under there.”


Jamie’s always felt like she was in trouble when she spoke to cops, even if it was a guy she kind of knew. There’s an inherent power imbalance between the one with the weapon and the one without. Jamie’s dad is the one that told her to dislike cops, told her they were all pigs. Jamie never really saw her dad’s active hatred for cops, a white guy who, as far as Jamie knew, minded his own business, went to work, came home, saw Jamie and her sister when they were around.
When Jamie started passing by cops on her own, seeing how they carried themselves, seeing how they treated people who didn’t look like Jamie, also white and minding her own business, she understood. She watched people she went to school with become cops with a sullen understanding, like watching girls who were mean to her become nurses for the same morbid power imbalance.
The thing about cops Jamie noticed was also something she noticed about men, moving away from Winfield. The men she met in Vancouver were different from the ones she grew up with, had less to prove. It seemed like they puffed their chests out less, or maybe were just better at hiding it.
One of the reasons for this, she thought, was that everyone knew she was a lesbian now. She wasn’t treated like a person who was in search of a man, whereas growing up, she didn’t have any reference for how to be anything else. She only knew how to grow up as she saw others doing—catering to the males around her. Unlearning this when men now saw her as someone who didn’t want them, instead was an equal, was a difficult concept to grasp.
And besides, Jamie thought, men like Tim LeVay didn’t know any other way to be. They had only ever been taught to be one kind of person. One kind of boy, then teen, then man. Jamie felt the same way. Be one kind of girl, quiet, conscious of her appearance, pretty for someone. It bled into everyone. The culture inhabited Jamie in a way that she didn’t know entirely how to translate when she began to understand that she did not like boys, or didn’t want to look like the other girls who seemed to accept the rules of engagement so easily. The boys and men, in response, treated Jamie as if she was an anomaly in their carefully planned-out lives. Anomalies are to be ignored, treated as if they do not exist. Maybe this is why Jamie left. Maybe this is why Jamie did not see men as anything other than loud and dirty creatures before she left.


“That’s a long time to be stuck. Pretty dangerous,” Tim LeVay says and leans in toward Jamie. Finally, his eyes light with recognition. “Oh! You’re,” he pauses, playing the name game in his head. Jamie waits. “You’re Forsyth. Jamie.”
Jamie nods at Tim LeVay’s success. “That’s me.” She’s too tired to join in on the celebration.
Very quickly, Tim LeVay drops the cop demeanor. The quasi-familiarity somehow makes this a casual interaction. He leans on the door of the stuck vehicle, his elbow intruding towards Jamie’s shoulder, inches away. Jamie turns in her driver’s seat the best she can to face him.
“Where did you go?” Tim LeVay begins with the small town small talk, but Jamie cuts him off.
“So, I hit a deer. It’s still under there. I was hoping you had straps to tow me out and we could get a better look to see if I need a tow truck or whatever.” Jamie’s curtness catches him.
“I guess you would be in a hurry to get out of here,” he says, also curt, maybe making himself feel better. He lingers at the window for a moment before slowly walking to the front of the Tracker.
Jamie gets out and follows him.
“Hold my flashlight?” he says, extending a big, cop flashlight to Jamie. She turns it on and points it to where she can see brown fur, same as before. Not like her dream.
Tim LeVay crouches in front of the vehicle, surveying.
“I’m gonna try to pull the deer out like this, and then we can pull you out.”
“I thought leaving the deer was the best idea because I don’t know how far up in there it is.”
He ignores her and reaches under the vehicle, grabbing on to some limb. He pulls on the deer, now mostly frozen with cold but also rigor mortis. The body moves as a whole, scraping on metal and plastic under the vehicle as Tim LeVay pulls on it, attempting to unpuzzle it from where it has been tangled for the last several hours. He pulls, leveraging his body weight against the deer, and Jamie thinks that it must be caught on something if it’s this hard to pull out, and just as Jamie opens her mouth to say this, Tim LeVay flies back onto the frozen ground, not holding anything. What he was holding onto, what wasn’t a limb but the crooked neck, has broken, the skin torn open, butterflied apart to reveal semi-frozen muscle and sinew and partially congealed blood too slow to leak from the postmortem wound. The head and the wide-open glassy eyes and long eyelashes are fully out from under the vehicle now and Jamie looks at them once and then looks away, a twist in her stomach at what has been sitting directly underneath her all night.
The rest of the body that has been revealed is suddenly wet, and Jamie points the cop flashlight to the ground, illuminating a spreading reddish fluid. It looks like a horror-movie amount of blood, but the deer is clearly past the point of bleeding. Jamie crouches and shines the light under the vehicle, where she sees something leaking. Something must have torn or popped or snapped as Tim LeVay pulled the deer out, as she predicted. Her dad taught her that red means transmission fluid. Sometimes Jamie would see pictures of horrific car accidents and there would be puddles of red surrounding the vehicles, and her friends would say things like Oh my god, why would they show these pictures with all that blood in them and Jamie would have to say It’s actually just transmission fluid which maybe made her sound insensitive, but now, she was relieved to see that the deer hadn’t been reanimated under her Tracker only to be torn apart by Tim LeVay and bleed out all over the road.
Jamie turns back to Tim LeVay who has already gathered himself, though she can tell he is still embarrassed. Jamie pretends she can’t tell and didn’t see. She hands him the flashlight and waits for him to say something, which takes a while.
“Well, that’s not blood on the ground,” he says, wanting to be the only one to know the transmission fluid fact. All cops know the transmission fluid fact. “It’s transmission fluid. Your line or seals could have broke whenever. The deer could have been holding it in place.”
“Okay, so now I have to wait for a tow truck.” Jamie is annoyed and hopes he can’t tell.
“Well, you should come with me.” He steps toward her. “It’s dangerous to sit on this road, and you’ve been out here all night.” He lightens his tone to say, “and we can catch up. It’s been, like, since school.”
Jamie never spoke to Tim in high school. Only knew him as an abrasive, loud, older boy. Now, she sees an overconfident cop. Getting in a car with him in the woods in the early morning for an hour drive to Winfield makes her skin crawl. She thinks her dad was maybe right.
“I think,” Jamie starts, “I should wait with my car.” She feels a jolt in her chest, saying no.
He shakes his head. “Don’t know how long that could take. You could be here for another few hours.” He sounds like a cop again, and stands like one. Crosses his arms, legs shoulder-width apart.
Jamie leans against her vehicle, unconvinced. “I’ll wait,” she says.
“Why?” His tone is flat, accusatory.
“Don’t want to leave my vehicle. Don’t want the truck to miss it. I’ll go with them. Thanks Tim, it was good to see you.” Jamie turns and opens the door to the Tracker. Her skin burns and her heart is pounding, she’s not sure if it’s because she said no to a cop or one of the loud boys from school. As she’s getting into her seat, Tim LeVay speaks again.
“I was just trying to be nice. Thought maybe you’d grown up nice, too.”
Jamie closes her door.
She sits and watches Tim LeVay, a cop, drive away, back into Winfield, and thinks of the deer, now partially sticking out from under her vehicle, now with an open neck wound. She hopes her third encounter of the night, now morning, will be less aggressive—she just wants to get her Tracker out of the ditch and make it into Winfield. She will have to sneak into her dad’s house, quiet to not wake him up. When he asks about her drive, she will have to explain that, no, she couldn’t call him, she couldn’t call anybody. She probably won’t tell him about Tim LeVay, cop. Winfield is too small to land in for a few days at Christmas and go around telling people that one of the cops really wanted her to get in his car with him. She will have to convince him to let the mechanic’s shop look at her Tracker because yes, she’s sure it’s the transmission, and they should look at the rest of it because the deer was really under there good.
She will not tell him that she thinks the deer is some sort of message, a message that she should stop returning, that Winfield does not want her back in the right way, so why does she keep offering parts of herself to the town? She thinks of the deer and its eyelashes, batting in her driver’s side window, alive in a dream way, and thinks that the deer is telling her that this should be the last time, the deer is a prophet, and speaks to her in her dreams, and is telling her to turn around and run, leave her Tracker how it is on the highway, stuck with fur, blood, strips of skin still attached, leave it as a sign to warn others that this is where you go to stay or leave, nothing ever in between. The deer sacrificed himself to remind Jamie of this. She will not tell anyone this, but will think of the deer when she gives her pretend reasons for why she does not believe she will ever return.