Red Orchard

I don’t remember much about the day the deer jumped the fence and broke its neck. Late summer and I inhaled the plump morning air—red apples, brown sugar and grass, my pudgy feet padding the damp linoleum squares where sunlit streams flooded gol- den through the yawning kitchen window. And out that window, just beyond the five-foot chain link line, an antlered buck lay, his great head twisted toward an ‘appled’ sky. Then my mother a steam kettle whist- ling “look away! look away!” “look away!” and my father’s whispers thick curtains closing on the jagged red light rising.