No Eye Deer
“What if I took my balls out right now?” I asked.
“What if,” said Karen. Poor Karen. “You bored? Acting out again?”
“It’s just a question.” She is indubitably correct. I am bored. Acting out. Applying scorched earth tactics here. No one deserves this. Except maybe Karen. “I think I have a nose bleed.”
“Shut up,” she said. There was a pause like a sighing dog. “Look at those fucking kids on the bridge again. I swear I’m getting a pellet gun. Is that right? Wait. Maybe an air gun? What the hell do I mean?”
“You mean a blow gun. Like a prehistoric hunter. A big piece of bamboo that you put a rock into and fuck some animal up.”
“That’s bullshit. Hunting? I’m talking about murder. I want to kill those kids.”
“Are you serious? Then I think you’ll need poison-tipped darts.” In an expression of the result, I put my hands around my throat and stuck my tongue out. I rolled my eyes up into my head and realized how nice it was to keep them there. I started feeling a dull pain and had to stop. “I totally fucked up my eyes, I think. I can’t move them right.”
“I told you, stop acting out. Go yell at those kids. Get their pot, if they have some.” The neighborhood kids always sat on the bridge, dangling their feet over the water in some vaguely macho way, smoking joints and cigarettes and making out. Karen absolutely hated it. I have no idea.
In the first place, the kids were decent kids. They didn’t do break-ins or torture the cats or any of the nasty things you might imagine kids doing in a rural lake village. In the second place their parents were total racist boors. But these kids seemed to have some love in them. They looked at the stars, and they didn’t laugh when someone puked.
I got up slowly, trying to keep the cat from jumping off the couch, to no avail, and slipped on my Super-SR slip resistant shoes. They had never been useful to me except as an expression of my paranoia. I pushed open the screen door and procrastinated my way across the lawn toward the bridge.
Simple things. The oil drum trash can that no one has ever emptied. The styrofoam airplane caught in the tree for three years. The smell of mud and frogs. I see the kids try to hide their joint. They care a little. Not enough to throw it away, but enough to cup it, which I appreciate, that I’ve become an authority figure just by lingering on this planet.
“Hey, what do you call a deer with no eyes?” I ask.
“Is this a joke or a riddle?” one of them says.
“What’s the fucking difference?”
“One makes you stupid. The other is supposed to teach you something,” is his reply.
“Did you make that up? Where did you read that? Did a teacher tell you that?” I have shocked even myself with my seeming commitment to this cause. To any cause.
“What?”
“What do you mean what?”
“What do you call the deer?” they want to know. I can’t help but look straight down the shirt of the 16-year-old girl sitting on the bridge below me. Her bra is too loose. I get so sad at that moment thinking about being trapped in bodies, but it quickly turns sexual and I have to concentrate on the smell of the frogs to curb my pedophilia.
“I have no eye-deer,” I say. “Let me bum a cigarette.” I haven’t smoked for eight months, but this is not a sign of the apocalypse. The boy-child reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a dented something with a white filter.
“Blow in the end so you don’t get any in your mouth,” he says.
I examine the recessed filter and contemplate the meaning of the empty space. “Do you both live on Sycamore?” I ask.
“I do. She lives up the hill a little bit.”
“My people have lived here for generations,” I say. This is a total lie. I moved here ten years ago. I have no people. No people who speak of me as one of them, anyway. I look at the girl. Her blouse is has small horizontal stripes of orange, brown, yellow, and blue. In my day it would have been considered retro. “Has he fingered you yet?” No response. “I won’t tell anyone. I can tell you how to do it right,” I say to him.
They are unperturbed. I expected more.
–Alex Phillips
Alex Phillips is an Assistant Professor and Director of Assessment and Curriculum Development at Commonwealth Honors College. His poetry and translations have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Open City, jubilat, and in Ted Kooser’s newspaper column American Life in Poetry. His chapbook, Under a Paper Trellis, is published by Factory Hollow Press.
