And then

After they’d stopped the car the key thing was to figure out whether or not it was dead. 

“Are its eyes open?”

“I think so.”

“It came out of nowhere.”

“I know.”

“Nowhere.”

“It appeared as if by magic. The eyes are open. Does that mean that it’s dead or alive?”

The deer was lying on its side, it’ right leg twisted at an obscene angle. There was probably some internal bleeding. The road was straight and narrow. On the right hand side a stand of elms stood tall and black, on the right, telephone wires threaded through bits of sky. It was dusk. Mosquitoes were starting to appear with birds weaving in and out, swooping down from the wires like crazed gymnasts. 

“I think he’s still breathing?”

Neither one of them wanted to touch the deer to confirm that it was breathing. If the deer was still breathing then they’d have to do something about it. H was squeamish about killing anything larger than an ant. He regarded animals larger than that as ensouled beings without really developing any sort of theological framework. In his mind it was related to the eyes.

The deer was definitely still breathing.

“We’re going to have to kill it. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. We’re going to have to kill it.”

“Why do we have to? Maybe it’ll get up or pass away on its own time.  What if we just stand here and wait until it goes?”

“We could be standing here for hours. I think we need to call 911 and tell them we hit a deer.”

The deer was lying on its side—the edge of its tongue was resting in the dirt. A few cars drove by, briefly slowing before moving on down the highway. Certainly someone would stop soon and tell them what to do before it got dark. The deer had big dark eyes that flicked back and forth between the two of them, and you could just tell that under better circumstances it would have been running already.