December 2019

By Anna Chotlos

good mornind. cup of coffee in bed. Close up. In blue interior

When it becomes winter, the deer start knocking over our garbage cans every midnight. You touch my arm to wake me, to listen to the hooves tramping outside. Our walls are too thin. We tie the cans closed with bungee cords. “You are not raccoons,” we tell the deer. “You are too beautiful to eat our trash.” The deer stand in our front yard and do not listen to us. The deer do not stop knocking over our garbage, trailing garlands of plastic on their hooves and antlers. The deer are beautiful animals. We put our garbage cans into the garage. The deer find our spare garage door opener. The deer press the button with their soft brown noses. The deer do not really want our garbage. We know because they talk to us at night, through the thin, thin walls. “We are hungry,” say the deer. “Please feed us.” What do deer eat? we wonder. We buy a salt lick for our deer. We imagine the deer belong to us. “Salt is not enough,” the deer tell us. “What do you want?” we ask the deer. “We are so cold,” the deer say. So we give the deer our scarves, even the scarves we love, the silk scarves our grandmothers gave us. The deer look so beautiful with our scarves tied around their slender necks. The deer admire our Christmas lights. The lights are shaped like small deer, made of white-coated wire wrapped in strings of twinkle lights. “How did you string together starlight?” the deer ask. They are full of light, luminous. What are the deer? We begin to dream about the blur of trees and the weight of antlers. Beside me, your legs twitch and shift in your sleep. The deer learn to knock on our doors. We do not need to speak through the walls anymore. We do not need to speak at all. When we open the doors they say, “Please let us in. It is so cold outside.” When we let the deer inside, they lie down in our beds, making ovals in our comforter and pillows, just like the hollow places other deer leave bedding down in the grass. We ask the deer, “Where will we sleep now?”