Hold Me with Your Deer Hand
November 16, 2011
I made a friend while I was walking down Ellis today. This lady was standing in front of the group home hovering over a dead deer.
I smiled at her gently, hoping she would tell me why she was petting the carcass. She waived me over and asked if I would call the game commission and have them remove the deer. That’s reasonable, I thought.
She said the deer was cold and pregnant, but I assure you that it was dead and bloated. I walked closer to look at the foam bubbling from the deer’s nose. The woman told me that the local oil company poisoned the deer and dropped it on the lawn to scare the residents. You see, my take is that they sprayed sewage on the corn field and waited for the deer to eat it so they could then use the carcass to scare the mentally disabled residents and veterans out of their homes.
Then she waved her hand over a “bullet hole” on the belly of the deer. She was talking about a chunk of mud, absent of blood, lodged in its fur. She had marked the “wound” with a piece of roadside trash- a Mapquest map printed on an 8′x11′. She ripped a hole in it and centered it around the wound so the game commission would find the evidence.
She gave me clues about her dimension and I found it relaxing…even therapeutic. I listened to tangled conspiracies for the next 15 minutes. She is a good story teller and entertained me with her comparison points of veterans and victims of rape. “We all suffer from PTSD, ” she declared. I abandoned her for a moment to explore those words out of context.
I told her it was time for me to be on my way and she asked if she could take my hand. I remembered what I had been clutching all morning and a huge grin spread across my face. I told her she could hold my hand, but I would have to take my magic pine cones out of it first. She collected them too! We smiled at each other and she squeezed my hand and offered me a scarf from her apartment. I declined…I was wearing two at the moment. I gave her a magic pine cone and smiled inside.
I continued walking and she yelled at me across the parking lot not to walk alone at night and if I do, I should carry a bat or a jackknife. No, I had no idea that it’s legal now to carry a jackknife in this state. She said I could even carry a couple lit cigarettes and “burn ‘em”.
I saved the other pine cone for Margo and returned it to myself from her car seat when she wasn’t looking.