The Animal

I slipped the folders under the door and that was that. I didn't ask why, or who picked them up, or how the information was distributed and the people picked up. I didn't know people were being picked up. It was a job, I was a kid. I needed money for a bike.

The information was sent to me in bits and pieces. No discernible order to it, not that I would know to look for some. It wasn't my job to arrange it in any sort of manner. The blue pages went with the blue pages, the yellow with the yellow, green with green and red with red and finally the black page on top. I wasn't to look at any of it and I never did, because they took the time to trust me. And, really, how was I to know?

I'd put the pages in a blank filing folder, simple and boring, and would walk across town to where Shipley met Doane. On the corner was a shoe repair shop, stocked with soles and smelling of oils. It was my job to walk around back and slip the folder under the door with the high doorknob, the one that almost met my eye. I'd slip it under Sundays and Thursday, and on Mondays and Fridays I'd have envelopes of crisp ones and fives to get me through my week and weekend. I kept the money a secret; if I told anyone they'd want me to buy them candy, go to the movies, all sorts of things, and I wanted that bike. All the other kids had theirs.

You heard about people going missing, hear about a problem that suddenly went away. Mr. Taylor owed whoever some money and then Mr. Taylor moved. Jordy Tolliver was always picking fights with people after three beers, and he always had three beers in him. One day he said he was sober, and that was the last anybody heard him talk. There was a bully, a girl, Chrissy, who picked on most kids, even the boys. She wound up in the hospital with a broken arm. She wouldn't say why. It didn't heal properly, couldn't even raise it to shoulder level.

It was a Sunday night. I always had to sneak out of my house for the Sunday run, it had to be late and I had school. I had the papers in the folder, I was quick without being fast, I kept my head down. I turned the corner into the alley, the alley that was usually empty, and stared directly into a pair of giant eyes. I jumped and thought, what a strange looking man, and was terrified. It was a buck, five times my size, antlers, black nose, breathing, the only thing telling me that it was not a statue. I gripped my folder; there was no delivering it, not with this beast in my path. I was too scared to move around it, too scared to move at all. What if the thing charged, what if it jumped, what if it kicked and stomped me down? No. I stayed motionless. Tried to make him think I was a statue, too.

How did that get here? I'd never seen a deer, certainly not a buck, and never in the city. There were no reports, no shoutings down the street of hey did you hear about what's walking all over town. Nobody ran for their guns, nobody called animal control, nobody seemed to know of its existence. And I wondered how long it had been here. If, by some chance, it had been here all its life. Abandoned and small, eating scraps from dumpsters, sleeping in the abandoned electrical warehouse four blocks away, lapping its water from the dirty potholes of our forgotten streets. Suddenly it seemed to me not a terrifying creature at all, not even wild, but a sad and lonely thing. Nestled into a world it didn't know but that it somehow made its own, something in need of a friend, in need of my help. I reached out toward it, my hand eerily calm, its smoothness and whiteness never more stark to me. I had no plan for if my fingers touched the buck. I wouldn't have known what to do. But I thought it important that I try. And suddenly, without a previous blink or flinch of muscle, the animal bolted down the alley, towards the shadows, into them and gone.

After that I couldn't do it. I was six feet from the door, but I couldn't put the folder under. I looked at the folder, bent from my grip, and thought of reading whatever it was that was inside. Whatever made these people quiet, hurt, disappear. But I couldn't even do that. So instead I fed the pages, one by one, into drain, and made my way back home. My bed seemed larger than before.

When I woke up there was no envelope. No brand new Washingtons and Lincolns. The stash in the shoebox under my bed was gone, the hopes of my bike along with them. In the money's horrible place, still warm, was a spotted and bloodied clump of fur. From what animal I couldn't tell.