I sit up in bed and spread out the skin of my stomach. The hole the tick made swelled up into a bead, a pink bead of skin, like some new growth. I pick at it but it is hard and I can’t get much purchase. I rest the tip of one finger on the spot, as if my finger is a stethoscope. I try to hear what is happening underneath. There is something going on, a rumbling. Maybe he didn’t get the head out. It’s not his fault. It’s hard to get the head out and he’s squeamish when it comes to hurting me. Even when I ask him to.
“I wonder if I have Lyme disease,” I finally say to him, but this is actually a minor fear, a made-up fear compared with what I am really thinking about: my tail, my hooves. He turns to look at me. I try again. “I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot about deer.” He has a seat beside me on the bed, raising his eyebrows. But that is not quite what I mean, and so this time I try to be honest with my husband. I say it. “I mean, I think I’m becoming a deer.”
“You think you’re becoming a deer?” he asks.
*
Erich called me at work yesterday to tell me what he wanted to do to me. He said he wanted to see me. He said he wanted to eat my roast beef pussy. One thing very general, one thing very specific. It made it difficult for me to breathe hearing those very specific words. No one had ever said that combination of things to me before. I was shocked by how powerful those words were. I started to think that maybe he actually wanted to kill me. Thus, the reference to beef. Thus, “I’d fuck you to death.”
After he hung up I thought about Becky and Tom Sawyer in the cave, though I haven’t read that book in twenty years. I don’t think Tom would ever talk that way to Becky. And I couldn’t actually remember what happened to them down in the cave or why they were there, but danger was nearby and Tom was keeping Becky safe. There were bad men in the cave, bad men who filled the cave with the stench of their badness. I bet Becky could smell it. I bet it made her think differently about Tom. Maybe she would have been interested to hear the things those bad men wanted to do to her.
This morning I can see through the living room into the kitchen. I can see the mailboxes waiting by the edge of the road. Lust makes room, the way a bomb exploding makes room, clearing things out of the way. I listen for a moment, trying to position my ear near my heart. I can’t get my head very close. Ticktickticktickticktickticktick. I don’t actually hear any bombs ticking. I’m just worried for my husband.
“You’re becoming a deer?” he asks me again.
My husband is looking out the window. He is wincing. Maybe he is thinking about something else, something that happened at the heavy machinery plant, maybe he is thinking about another woman, perhaps one we knew in high school who didn’t have problems like this.
We sit in silence. I don’t want to say anything more just yet. I want, for a moment, to let it be.
“Will you show me?” he asks and doesn’t wait for an answer before telling me what to do. “Show me.”
That’s not what I had thought he’d say.
“Okay,” I answer very quietly. “I will tonight.”
“A deer,” he says.
“A deer,” I repeat.
“All right,” he says. “All right,” and then he leaves without kissing me goodbye.
“Bye,” I yell.
He grabs his coat and the front door slams shut, not because he’s angry but because the wood has swollen and in order to get our front door to shut one has to slam it closed. Or maybe he is also angry and he is just disguising his slamming in the swollen door.
I stay home while he’s at work, as if I really am sick. In the bed I feel something foreign bloom between my husband and me, an intruder, a mold. I see my husband with eyes that don’t know him, as if he quite suddenly became a man from Brazil, or grew a beard, or started speaking in a southern accent. As if after eleven years of marriage he somehow had all of his secrets returned to him, made secret again.
*
We don’t talk about it at dinner or even after dinner when we’re watching TV, brushing our teeth. Instead he tells me a story about a guy at work who’d been running a credit card scam and got caught. “You never would have suspected this guy,” he says. “Older fella, balding and stooped. He didn’t seem smart enough. He didn’t seem like he cared enough about being rich to become a criminal.”
I climb in bed to read the paper, but can’t concentrate on the words there. The nervousness inside me is messing with my thoughts, getting ready to blow. The newspaper says something about the Peking Opera, something about a volcano in Indonesia, something about a government cover-up, but it’s all the same to me.
My husband has stopped talking. He takes off his clothes without my even asking him to and stands in front of me, pulling on one ear like there’s an honesty tonight, a bright rawness I’d never seen before. He is beautiful to look at. I slide the newspaper to the floor and he shuts off the light. We don’t say good night to each other. I’m too nervous. We don’t say anything, and the air is rigid between us in the dark. I wait, blinking my eyes, seeing nothing. I worry. There’s no guarantee anything will happen. Just because something has happened doesn’t mean it will continue to happen and then he will think I’m crazy and then he will call some girl we knew in high school, one who doesn’t have problems like this. One who doesn’t have a dead brother. I listen for him to fall asleep, for his breath to change, but it doesn’t. Instead he clears his throat. I hear him stay awake, imagining his eyes blinking open against the dark like mine. I wait and wait, listening. America at night, a couple of cars, some wind, a plane overhead, a blue jay or a crow—one of the birds with an ugly voice is upset about something outside. I wait and listen until I can’t wait any longer. The blanket is up around the back of my neck. My eyes shut as a woman, and I am asleep before it happens.
*
When I wake it is still night. I can tell because there is a small knot of unknown fear in my lungs and a soupy proximity to every memory I’ve ever had. Something is rousing me, something wants for attention. A poke, a sharpness dragged across the fur of my back. I seize up the muscles in my neck. The barrel of a gun.
Though the room is dark I can see in the light of the alarm clock’s blue digital numbers, 12:32. I can see my hooves. I am too scared to move, too scared to turn around. The newspaper is lying on the floor. The brother in Minnesota is probably still at his security job after having worked all day at the chicken plant. I wonder if his sister is home asleep or if she is out at the bar with her college friends. It seems important to know. It seems important to understand whether or not it is worth it to sacrifice your life for someone else.
I feel the poke again. It is sharp. There’s no mistaking it. I let my breath out, resigned. I get all four legs underneath me. They tremble as I turn, prepared for what I might deserve.
The digital clock changes to 12:33. There is no gun.