Be Mine by Laura Kasischke

I'd been struck by lightning, but the lightning was solid, had a body, with mass, with weight—a body that was tossed onto the hood of my car, where it erupted in a fountain of blood. Somehow I came to a stop at the side of the freeway, the radio still on, my windshield wipers rhythmically sloshing the blood off my window with them. And then I was standing in my silk dress at the side of the road with the wind cutting straight through to my skin, and a man in a white lab coat was running from his car to mine along the shoulder, shouting, "Ma'am, are you all right?"
    I shook my head as if to let him know I had no idea. I asked him, "What happened?"
    "You hit a deer," he said, and then turned to point to the median, where a tawny mangled thing, lying on its side, lifted its head, then let it drop.
    Cars and trucks whirred by us with incredible speed. My dress snapped around me in the wind of them. Here and there I glimpsed the face of a driver—repulsed, or concerned, or surprised. The man in the white lab coat looked at me, and, seeing that I wasn't hurt, said, "You're lucky. Really lucky. You could have been killed."
    "Honestly?" I asked him.
    "Honestly," he said.
    We looked at one another for a few seconds, but his features were a blur to me. He was no one I had ever seen before.
    "Really," he said. "I saw the whole thing. I pulled over because I thought you might actually be dead."
    "I'm not," I said. "I'm fine."
    From the corner of my eye I saw it again in the median, raising its head, and lowering it, either to die, or to rest.
    The man in the white lab coat stepped around the front of my car to inspect the damage, then called over the wind of the traffic to me to say he thought it was fine to drive, but that I'd want to have someone straighten out the bumper. It was a mess.
    Neither of us said anything about the deer. Helping it. Or killing it. It wasn't until much later in the day that I thought about that—the inevitable sin of that, because what could we have done? Had either of us tried to cross the freeway to it, we would have suffered its fate.
    "How can I thank you?" I asked him as we parted.
    "Drive carefully," he said, and shook his head.
     
    A T THE office there was much, much drama about my accident. Beth told me to sit down after I told her why I was late, and she brought me a cup of coffee with so much sugar and cream that it tasted like syrup, or medicine—thick and sickening, I couldn't drink it—and then she proceeded to inform everyone. "Sherry hit a deer on the freeway!"
    Condolences, commiseration, and, all the time, I was in my silk dress, shivering—not from cold, it was warm enough in the office, but still from the surprise of it. The solidity of it, that animal, and then the blood cascading over my white Honda, a ghastly rain of it on the windshield. When I parked my car in the college parking lot, it was still bloody, the windshield, and I couldn't stand to go around to the front of it, to see if there were any remains of that deer on my bumper, on the hood.
    So many people, it turned out, had hit a deer—so many stories swapped in the office—that it began to seem surprising there were any left for me to have killed. Robert Z hit
two
a year ago, a doe and her fawn. (They'd leaped out of nowhere in a snowstorm as he was driving home to visit his parents in Wisconsin for Christmas. Only the fawn had been killed. The doe had glanced off of him, and she'd kept going.) Beth's uncle had careened into a whole herd of them up north in a fog, totaled his car but been given permission by the state police to take one home for the meat.
    And there were worse stories. Someone's neighbor had been killed, swerved to avoid a deer on a country road, hit a tree instead, and died instantly. Someone's cousin had been killed when the deer he hit crashed through his windshield, landing in the car with him, crushing him—landing, it had seemed to the paramedics on the scene, into the cousin's
arms.
    "Your