Religion for Deer
- Nov 1, 2024
- 3 min read
by Lio Abendan
I have been dreaming on unstable legs, hooves dipped into stagnant water, algae stained up the tawny side of my ankles. When they buckle like still-green sprigs, I pitch forward into the pond and emerge with my lashes dripping, blinking my murky eyes clear. Elain and the others nose me back towards the shore. They chide me for dreaming, their ears flicking at flies, but when I hang my head in penitence I hear them whisper between themselves, susurrant and concerned.
The evening atmosphere is solemn, soured by our impending worship. I see the way they turn — anxious, uneasy — flinching back from me and my shaking, buckling, lurching body. Drooling, stumbling, wasting away. I cannot blame them. The moon looms above head, queerly coloured.
Tonight, they curl up to sleep in a hollow stump, pressed nose to tail, their hides brushing together like the caress of a swordhair through the underbrush. A thousand casual, careless touches transfer between them, and when they rise in the morning, the six members of my family are all browned and painted with aromatic crumbled cedarwood. I sleep to the side, in the hollow between two rocks, and when I wake, I smell of nothing.
You were wheezing long into the night, Elain murmurs, privately. Your chest is twitching, sinking, caving in. I droop over like a wilted bud, eyelids clasping shut over and over again. Spittle foams at my mouth and spills out. I am sorry, I slur, through numb lips.
After dawn, Elain says a prayer with her teeth clamped around a buttercup, asking for safe passage. I try not to cough up any more lung tissue, in case I drown her out. She stands again, the flower still clasped in her mouth. God has heard me — he will come to meet us.
We return to the murky pond and dip my snicking ankles again. I watch my sisters duck away from me, joints clicking as they scramble away from the shore. Elain helps me ugly myself with muddied algae before heading out to the north where the angels walk. The ugliness is to soothe God’s uneasy conscience. I will look old and sickly, even older and sicklier than I am. My chest flutters like an insect lives inside.
Northward is all uneven, rocky terrain. The hilly, graveled slope looms like an animal through the dark. As a fawn I would have picked my way nimbly through its dimples and its pores, weaving between the trees, chasing after my mother and siblings with bucking aliveness. Now my body lumbers, limbs no longer in unison. The bevy follows close behind, snuffing to themselves, so loving, so rich with terror and mourning. In my stomach I feel the nodes churning, an organic prognostication. Elain sings me a ritual song to calm my discordant nerves.
It is growing darker, the light changing as it prisms through the mottled canopy. Remember what we practiced, Elain says, and I think of pinpoint stars glittering above us, frantic fireflies, the scream of fire in the distance. I think of spotted sunlight glimmering in a stagnant pool, cleansing it, making it clean and new in His image.
We reach the path of angels. It is smooth, like a stripped and fleshless log, or a broad stone surfaced underwater. My ankles crash and buckle as I stagger out onto the stripe of black smoothness, my head lowered. In my teeth, I hold Elain’s plucked buttercup to signal my devotion. In the distance, I hear it coming.
My family waits with wide eyes and bated breath. One of my nieces makes to clamber forward, to join me in salvation, but my sister tugs her back. Her eyes glisten in the underbrush, dark as ponds.
God is here, Elain brays, and I turn myself to face Him.
He is two points of light — bright like the sun and moon, bright like the eyes of my mother. Stillness is demanded of my rotting body. The lights roar with anticipation, widening, larger, larger. The stars are singing to me, joining the choir of my family on the other side of the path. I ache to run but my disobedient body stills under the light. All my practice has led me nowhere. I cannot look away.
Lio Abendan (any pronouns) writes speculative fiction. Their work is forthcoming in Foglifter & Coffin Bell. You can find them at @lioabendan (Instagram & X) or curled up in the corner of your nearest library.
