They roamed the silver prairies during the day and the velvet mountains at night. We could hear their wings pounding the air in our nightmares—white enough to blind you and so big that if you saw them you would forget there was anything in the world but feathers. And you would be enveloped in those wings and left there to soak in your own guilt and regret until you turned green all the way through like the vegetables pickled in herbs in that jar on the top shelf. The jar that sat in the kitchen like a lazy green cat, full of unrecognizable bloated shapes that, once upon a time, grew from the earth and drank the golden sun.
Our grandparents told us that the deer were messengers of the angels.
They drank you up with big brown eyes and then spat you out again, for the angels to see. During the gray woolly moments when day and night were sisters, the deer came out to guide the migrating angels.
We, too, would migrate during those times. At dawn, we hiked up to our dwellings in the mountains and at dusk we descended again into the prairie-village so as to keep out of the way of angels. Whenever we migrated, we left behind grain for the deer to eat. Foreigners liked to say we revered the deer, but if you want the angels to be kind to you you must be kind to their messengers.
One morning, as I was laying out grain, a deer approached me in the high grass. I kept very still and pretended I was like the mist that clings to the sun as it rises. The grass was up to our chins, the deer and I, and most of what we could see of each other was eyes. The deer's eyes were rounder and browner than anything I had ever seen; browner than the chestnuts in the ceramic bowl in the cupboard.
The sun was rising, and with it the gnats. They swarmed the prairie like spores. I could feel them on my face and in my hair but I dared not move; the deer was so close now. It had not blinked yet and I was determined to blink last.
A gnat was crawling on my lip, in the kind of way that blurs the boundary between lip and brain. I could feel its minuscule toenails scratching my thoughts aside, leaving emotions free to tumble around inside my throat before erupting from my mouth.
The deer paused.
Slowly, it began to rise out of the grass, revealing a slender white neck—a human neck. As the deer rose more I saw that it was in fact not a deer at all, but a creature with the head of a deer and the body of a woman. Hands reached up to the deer's head and lifted it away.
I never saw the woman's face because when the mask was lifted, dark hair cascaded over her face and touched the feathers hanging on strings from around her neck. When she reached to push her hair aside, it occurred to me that I had never seen hair of that color before. We had hair like dried grass and hers was darker than wet wood.
I thought, then, that she must be an angel. She had no wings, but who else but an angel would have such hair? The dawn was almost gone and I knew our brothers and sisters would already be high in the mountains. Who else but an angel would be in the high grasses so late in the morning?
We had been told to be ware of angels.
So I was ware. I was ware before she pushed her hair from her face. I was ware as I ran into the mountains, and I am still ware today, though sometimes I feel as though I am being pickled in my ware-being. Pickled like some long-unidentifiable vegetable in the glass jar that we keep on the windowsill now, next to the bag of grain that we still scatter twice a day for the deer to eat after their migration.
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