Deer
His hands are as delicate as the wilted lily spilling over my mother’s vase.
I dream about the texture of his palm, a whisper thin trickle curled around my rotund coarseness, the rhythm of our pulses syncing together like two ticking clocks. His fingers are spidery and thin with knots protruding between each joint. I feel each digit reach far into me into untouched crevices and unmarked soil. He presses into every inch of my skin and leaves prints on the inner fat of my thighs.
I love his shoulders. The hollows of his collar bone. The creases across his chest between each rib. He is skinnier than a spine. If I squeeze too hard, I imagine I’ll snap him apart like a twig. He doesn’t make me feel dainty or delicate. He makes me feel like the man my father wants me to be. I want to possess him entirely.
Three days after his family moves into the house next door, I learn his name is Isaac. Their moving truck can barely fit into the narrow driveway, and for two hours, I watch a steady stream of people carry boxes to the house from my seat on the porch.
His sister is a foot taller than him, model-like, thin and slender like the curve of a pale white swan. She wears a ring on every other finger and keeps her hair tied up into a neat tight ponytail.
Isaac is a delicate 5 feet 3 inches. He reclines in the shadow of his sister’s charisma, painfully shy, quiet, beautiful in a misshapen sort of way. A starry-night sky of freckles spills over his cheeks, chin, the bridge of his nose, and his neck. I imagine they trickle down his chest to kiss the pebbles of his nipples.
I run outside every morning.
I run for hours until my skin smells like sweat and musk, like the sticky underside of a rotten peach. I jog past their house six times in a single hour. Sometimes the mottled brown curtain upstairs shifts slightly, and I wonder if he can see me. Does he notice me like I notice him?
I pass the house again until Diane from across the street comes out to ask what I’m doing. I only shrug my shoulders, and she mutters something about
weird kids and
this generation before going back inside. I retreat to my room after that and watch from my window. If I crane my head from the corner of my room, I can just barely see the ugly pale curtain. My breath catches in my throat every time it shifts.
Two days later, Isaac comes over with a pie.
He knocks three times before I open the door, almost slamming it shut in his face when I see him. He holds the pastry out in front of him with a shy smile, offering it like a trophy.
The tip of his thumb sinks into the edge of the tin, viscous purple oozing out of the hole left behind. I feel my throat dry up as I take the pie from him. His smile makes my chest ache.
When I was little, I used to cry after I masturbated.
I would bring myself to completion and then lie on my bed, grieving my own conscience. I prayed for hours for forgiveness from God.
Now, I don’t feel guilty anymore. I touch myself to the image of Isaac’s thumb sinking into the edge of the pie. After I come, my body sinks into my mattress like a dead fish.
Sometimes, I see Isaac outside on my runs. He smiles at me when I pass him. My heart flutters its wings like a sparrow in my rib cage. I want to rip open my chest and let it out, let the sparrow free into the sky. Isaac passes, and I cannot breathe. His grip on my throat is tight and unforgiving. I imagine I look like a fish gaping after him, big and dumb.
Summer ends as quickly as it started. One second I’m napping in the warm thick of the sun, and the next, I’m bundling into a hoodie jacket and waking up at 6 am for football practice.
Isaac is a junior, a grade below me. I spend each minute in school distinctly aware of his position respective to my own. Between Chemistry and English, we pass each other in the hallway. He waves, and I stutter out a stilted
Hi. I’m not used to words escaping me, to losing my voice. I am not shy, but Isaac makes me painfully quiet.
He sits with a small group of other juniors during lunch. I sit with the football players two tables away. I have strategically chosen the seat adjacent to his, so I can watch him out of the corner of my eye without facing him directly. Thomas hollers about last night’s game, about his girlfriend who won’t put out, about Mr. Walker’s tests, and I watch Isaac pick at his mashed peas. He catches my stare from across the cafeteria and smiles around a fork full of food.
-
Practice ends at 5 every day. We run laps, practice plays, listen to the incessant beration of our pot-bellied coach, ending every day sweaty and hot. I have never noticed the naked bodies of my fellow teammates in the locker room, but today, I let my eyes stray. I take in shades of glistening skin, taut muscles, hairy limbs, thick columns of meat. Nothing about these men pulls me in like Isaac. Isaac is a delicate, wobbly legged doe. These men are boars, oxen, broad-shouldered giants. I look down at myself, at the thick, uncut hairiness of my length, and imagine what Isaac would look next to me.
I see him the next day in art. Apparently, a scheduling mishap had placed him in the wrong class and now the mistake has been corrected and his rightful place is in Mrs. Eason’s fifth period. With me.
He sees me from across the room, his whole face lighting up as he waves. I ignore him, but he plops his stuff on the empty seat next to mine anyways. No matter how hard I try I cannot avoid the gaze of his smile from the corner of my eye.
Mrs. Eason instructs us to paint an animal. Isaac pulls out a watercolor palette and a sketchbook, dipping his brush into shades of blue and violet as he strokes the gentle wings of a peacock.
I paint a deer, wide eyed and trembling. I imagine running my hands down the slender back of the deer. I imagine staring into dark hooded eyes, moving my gaze across freckled skin and delicate collar bones. I feel myself swell in my shorts as I paint, and my face reddens with embarrassment.
The painting is unsurprisingly ugly, and I throw it away after class. Isaac insists on keeping it, but I couldn’t handle him having it, knowing what I thought as I painted it. Once again, I cannot ignore his smile.
I start to see him everywhere. Do I follow him everywhere or does he follow me? He sits in the bleachers during football practice sometimes. Those days are either my best or worst practices. I run at 8 am every Saturday morning. I start to see him on these runs, even though it's freezing, even though his shoulders shake from the cold. We encircle each other. Two orbiting planets. Two hollow rocks hurtling through the emptiness of space.
It comes to a head at the game.
The homecoming game is the weekend before the dance. The cafeteria is decorated, limp painted banners hanging from walls, streamers across doorways, balloons hanging from the ceiling. We practice to the sound of the cheerleaders,
ra-ra-ra-ing as they shake their pom-poms and launch themselves into contorted formations. I know without even asking that Isaac will be at the game.
The game goes by in a flash. All I can see is Isaac, a single face among a sea of others. We win, a moving sense of elation enveloping the team. I feel the glee and happiness and satisfaction wash over me and bask in the victory.
He finds me afterwards, smiling wide and innocent like a crescent moon. He gushes about the win, pressing himself up to my chest, and I feel the gentle vibration of his heartbeat against my own. A drop of sweat trickles down my nose and drips onto his cheek, and I resist the urge to wipe it off a glistening freckle. He looks up at me, wide eyed, before tugging on my sweat-soaked shirt.
I let myself be pulled along as he moves us to the school, his eyes darting here and there as he leads me to an empty hallway. “Isaac--” I whisper.
Suddenly, he kisses me. Surges up on tip toes and fills my mouth with the inky warm cavern of his own. I kiss back. I push against him, shove him up against a locker, swallow quiet whimpers and groans.
Oh, I think,
he’s kissing me. I can almost see myself, outside of my own body looking at the scene before me. My body seems to engulf his, big and broad around spindly thin limbs. I don’t know what to do with my hands. Should I keep them by my side or let them do what they want, tug on his hair, curl around his waist?
Before I decide, he pulls away, a string of spit connecting our lips. He’s smiling so widely, a half-dazed look on his face. “Do--do you want to…” he trails off and gestures to the door.
It’s when his head is turned that I notice it. There are bruises on his neck. I know I didn’t leave them there, didn’t go anywhere near his neck.
“Where are these from?” I ask.
Isaac looks confused at first, but when he realizes what I’m gesturing to, he giggles. “Sorry, I usually cover those up. You know how guys can get.”
He says it nonchalantly, as if it’s just another remark.
Yes, I like sugar with my coffee. Yes, I let men touch me and fuck me. It’s almost funny how abrupt my image of him curls up and distorts, like the surface of a lake broken by a thrown pebble.
I want to vomit. I feel anger rise up in my throat, a boiling, bubbling venom. I want to kill him, to hurt him. So I do.
I punch him. I throw my fist back and slam it into his jaw, hear the crunch of bone against bone. My knuckles ache with the force of the hit. Isaac reels back and collapses on the ground, clutching his chin with his hands. He looks up at me, his eyes big and watery like two round moons, his hands covering his mouth where red peeks out between spidery thin fingers. I watch the blood seep down his shirt, a dripping spill of red that spreads across white cotton. I watch little drops of blood hit the linoleum next to his feet and then on his feet, red staining his sneakers.
He doesn’t cry, doesn’t say a word, doesn’t ask a single question. He just stands up and runs. He sprints down the hallway as fast as he can. I watch his retreating back, growing smaller and smaller as he runs.
He sways like a leaf in the wind, a single wobbly shape of white and red. A deer crashing through the brush.