Creative Nonfiction

Written by Judson Merrill | Illustrated by DefinitelyJenny

Deer thrive in liminal spaces, the borderlands at the edge of the woods. That’s why they’re so prevalent in the suburbs, why you see them along the side of the road, and why they inhabit this coastal peninsula, where the forest opens onto dune and marsh. They have a wide field of vision well suited to these perimeters, but they struggle to see things that aren’t in motion. I knew this vaguely, but spending time around deer, facts like that — tidbits gleaned from nature shows and old relatives — they crystallize into something saltier than knowledge.

I was walking yesterday evening down a dirt road winding along Maine’s infinite shore. I was looking west, toward the setting sun, and didn’t notice the doe on the east side of the road until I was right next to her, practically close enough to touch. Deer do this sometimes, allow you to get surprisingly close even as they remain piqued, ready to run. I froze in my tracks, half in surprise, half in sympathetic response to her stillness. As she stood unmoving, staring at me without seeming to see me, I remembered that her non-motion vision was poor. And, of course, she had no other conception of vision. This was why she had frozen instead of bolted — in her instinctual way, she believed there was a decent chance that by not moving she had become invisible. It was sweet, really, this hope, and I felt bad being able to see her so clearly, to make out the grain of her russet coat.

As I stood watching her, thinking these things, I was myself completely still, wanting to prolong our meeting. Which meant, then, that I had achieved what the doe had only hoped to achieve. I really was invisible. From her perspective, she’d been keeping a wary eye on me as I walked along the road and then I’d blinked out of sight. In the moment when I suddenly saw her, she suddenly didn’t see me. Now we stood facing each other, each of us wondering if the other was going to move. If she moved, it would be to bound away, to disappear in an instant into the trees. If I moved, it would be to reappear, to lurch back into her field of vision.

This moment is another kind of liminal space, neither deer nor human, affording a glimpse, however fleeting and impossible, of the reality between us. Deer thrive in liminal spaces, and I wish this doe was having some equivalent moment, whatever that means for a deer, discerning for an instant life on the other side of the borderland. But the only reason we are standing so close, staring at each other across this dirt road, is because of her inability to even conceive of how I see the world, that I might be able to do something so incredible as watch her standing completely still in the last golden light of day.

Judson Merrill grew up in Maine, studied literature and writing at Brown University, and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Southampton Review, Unstuck, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other publications. He has recently been an Artist in Residence at Millay Colony, Ox-Bow, Lighthouse Works, and Guild Hall.

DefinitelyJenny: Illustrator//Book Lover//Cat Video Addict

Currently based in High Wycombe, I am an illustrator with a strong interest in graphic design, particularly in layout and publishing.

The Free Clinic

It was getting dark. The millennium was about to turn over and under the shadow of the second Bush administration the clinic would be shut down. We sat, waited for her name to be called, for her to be taken into the back to sit on that crinkly paper, scratching at her thighs.

Borderland

Dear Nnamdi

I shouldn’t show up today, but I’m coming to your wedding. The American wedding. I will stand when the minister asks if anyone objects because I do, and I’ve always wanted to attend a wedding where that happens. I’m a law student, I know how to object. I’ve got evidence to sustain. Your poems. Dick-pics. Clothes in my dresser. Toothbrush in my bathroom.

Café

The cappuccino machine whirrs, clicks and sings. It sends out a deep hiss, a musky sound, as resonant as something from the throat of a big cat. The air is sugar-scented, the trays are loaded with bite-size confections, aspic red jellies on circlets of biscotti, dabs of meringue, blobs and swirls of chocolate.

Sex with Indians

The Institute was where I’d been working since age twenty-one, an Institute “devoted to ending violence against women and girls.” In reality, it looked nothing like an Institute. It was a former bookie’s office set above a fancy San Francisco Chinese restaurant.

Chrysalis

At one end was the Interaction Section — bubble machines, drones to fly, crafts and building activities. The busiest was the Technology Zone — banks of screens where small fingers swiped and tapped, the odd shriek as a wailing victim was dragged off to be fed.

body memory

the hum and purr in my elbow when my phone’s on the desk at work and a text comes through. the thrill in my veins when i see your name on the screen. every time. my thumbs tapping letters, punctuation marks, spelling out our own version of shorthand, scrolling for bitmojis, and gifs, racing with yours

The King of the Jungle

It’s about emotional engagement, he reminds himself as he puts on the kettle, not exposure. Their customers will love that they’re giving back. Even if they don’t tell their friends about it, they’ll become more loyal to the brand. He stares at the sea for a while. It’s the same dark grey as the granite countertops, as the sky.

When the Rains Come

There are the war machines rolling down the street in all their military glory, wreathed in jasmine and marigold garlands. They are affectionately known as war elephants, because underneath all the glamour the bulky tanks are gunmetal grey. They belch out plumes of black smoke into the already polluted air. Despite their decorations, they are colossal beasts made of pistons and steel, lumbering about the narrow streets, and yet there are still vendors who walk fearlessly beside them, calling out their wares.

Queen of Wings

He got that way from eating pieces of string like they was noodles with sauce on top and everything, and string beans, and nothing else. But out in the woods the girl and him didn’t have much of anything to eat. He was too proud to farm in the dirt and he was a lousy hunter. They would have starved except the wolves took pity on him and left out a few scraps of rotten meat.

The Balloon Loan

Just for a moment, I hesitated. Outside my locked glass door, I could see them still swirling around, the dreamers and the idiots. Money trembles at the top of their bank accounts like beer foam, just waiting to spill out. You can see it, how the wanting sweeps through them like a fever. You can see it in their eyes.

Between the Wish and the Thing

Out in public, you tell your colleagues that the two of you have become “close friends.” That you are strictly platonic confidantes. That your connection is akin to a brother/sister bond. That your conversations are equal parts vapid college anecdotes, light-hearted work gossip, and generic commiseration. That even if there was more there, you don’t even find each other attractive.

Music Our Mothers Made

Our mothers were wolves. They roamed the great, cold northern night in a pack, electric purple van screaming down county roads from party to party, where they caught boys named Jesse and Jason and James with their abundant thighs and sharp eyes and clever tongues.

Mike Doesn't Seem to Want to Join the Other Dogs

She looks ordinary, though she has terrific posture because she’s a dancer. She has wavy brown hair and thin lips and isn’t afraid to lock eyes with me; then she begins to look better and better, telling me all about her meditation, that she meditates every morning, though she’s never had any instruction. When I ask her how she knows she’s meditating, she says she just knows.

Succulents

I was laying on the grass by the bubble stream listening to Tribe play out of the speaker cone of my rock. Watching the bubble bubbling. Pink nettle cactus and tall frond trees all around. Not much else.

April, Quakes in Kathmandu

You announced you were coming with the roar of a supersonic motorbike revving. You had us at your first knock. The billows of dust clung to the windows, which had unlocked themselves. Still, the curtains danced, and the glass cracked. I remembered what I held. We were arrested without the cuffs. You clanked the plates together; we tumbled.

Stones

Lonely tantrums. Eyelids. Adhesive bandages. Mother says that you have taken a course. Mother says that you can intubate a man and shake his stomach back into its sac. You sent her a copy of your stamped certificate.

Bedlam

The bed we bought from Sears, a sale, a snip, and it became to us the all but boundless sea, an ocean even, on which our bodies, those separate ships that did not pass in the night, but met, came alongside one with the other, grappled together, rocked together, joined, conjoined, a nautical act of union upon the white-sheeted waves our urgent

A Rare Spark

The accumulated weight of days. That’s what I told her. When she asked why I was still in bed. What the fuck does that mean. What it means. She said she was done. Well, so am I. Like a steak at Denny’s: barely edible and covered with sadness and salt.

Sophie

Sophie dropped the sentence into the room like flour. It formed a thick, white cloud that, once spoken, she could not wipe from the table. There was an empty chair where Robbie should have sat. While the ice machine crunched in the corner, Sophie’s hands grew into the table. People getting their morning coffee didn’t notice her.

Ting's Tale

I hate cats. At least I thought I did. I was in the midst of a whirlwind a couple of years ago, writing a book about Emily Dickinson, who also hated cats. Seems her kid sister, Lavinia, had a whole kingdom of cats, and the poet found Lavinia and her cats as vindictive as King Saul. I had other reasons to look at cats a little aslant.

An Accounting of Small and Large Catastrophes

Then I gave what was left of my heart to a losing battle, knowing the end of the story before it began. Terminal: years or months or weeks. My parents worried that it was too much for me, all those hours of driving and the hours spent sitting by her bed. I took the heart from my chest when it became too heavy to carry, and kept going.

Birds Want to Kill You

It’s best to wear a hardhat when feeding barred owls. There is always one asshole among them who will dive bomb your head. Maybe it is the same one each time and that fucker just has an attitude problem, or maybe they take turns. It’s hard to tell.

Preschool Remembered in Hashtags

Adults spoke through hissed genealogies, the early tantra of tongues disguised by complicated trigonometries settling in the corners made by angled remarks rather than traveling the vistas of straight lines. Realizing perhaps to be considered smart like my brother Jonah involved mastering pointed comments, the art of pricking people with words.

Better

The only thing he laughed at was a plastic fan we bought from Ace Hardware on clearance because that summer was blistering. We moved the fan into his bedroom where it ran all day and all night. The fan made him flap his arms as if he believed he were a bird.

Hypothetical

Wouldn’t you have to choose someone dead,” I say, “because I mean come on wouldn’t that be amazing to bring someone back from the dead wouldn’t that be wicked but wait though would they still be dead but dug up and woken up like would they be all gross and worm-eaten and rotting or would they be at like the prime of their life and healthy ’cause that makes a difference or wait what if you choose someone dead but you didn’t realize you have to die to have lunch with them and then it’s too late to change your mind because you already made your choice

Breaking the Hand That Feeds You

Some suggested voice-to-text software. “I don’t write that way,” I explained. They shrugged their shoulders as if it were an excuse. Words come out of my fingers differently than my throat. Sentences surprise me. Ideas are more organized. Words flow instead of spilling over each other.

He Named Himself

Lyrebird, rumpled Australian ground fowl. He sings the song of a gas-powered chainsaw. He hears it every time a pink-cheeked forester cuts a flank of the landscape, then mimics the brattle until it synchs. Lyrebird named himself as a way to lie, maybe, delights to clack and tick like the strappy gear of a bird-watching troupe.

In Lost Time

The first thing you hear your father do after your mother leaves is laugh so uncontrollably it hurts your insides. He’s a large, large man, and you think of all his blood hitting fast food joints on its way through the capillaries.

The Margin of Error

She counted the number of words in each love letter, the duration of every phone call and every kiss, counted each petal on each flower in each bouquet. She quantified the warmth of his hand on hers with an infrared thermometer. She tallied the expense of his gifts, accounted for every drink, every meal. She timed his eye contact.