A LIVE-OAK GROWING

The night the men killed them, Bambi drove east. In the pine barrens the road stretches itself, straight and flat, into the indeterminate dark. In the long corridors of forest, the only interruptions in the landscape are blinking yellow mile markers and green signs announcing exits, sometimes a gas station crowded with vending machines. As Bambi drove, the white lines extended out to their convergence point, disappearing a few feet beyond the headlights. Muffled radio static whined over the roar of the truck’s engine. It was a good truck, old and not particularly well cared for, but big and loud and handsome, chrome bumpers and chipped red paint. It was reliable enough to get them where they were going. The dashboard clock read 1:43 AM.

Before this place became what it is, these trees stretched most of the east coast. The Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens reached all the way from North Carolina to Nova Scotia. The soil was poor, sandy and loose, but the pines did well in that rough ground. There used to be fires—controlled and uncontrolled—and the fires gave the pines an excuse to shed their seeds and cleared land and held balance. The trees went first, and the fires with them. You could still see vestiges of the pine barrens on Cape Cod and Long Island. They were well conserved, home to birds and frogs and turtles, money raised for their perpetuation. Most of what remained was here, where this stretch of highway passed through the largest remaining barren as it cut through the center of New Jersey.

Then—the road—something in the road—something black and horned—and the brakes—the swerve—that awful quiet that follows fear unfulfilled. Bambi’s heart stuttered against their ribs. Stopped askew both lanes, they looked hard into the woods. A deer—it would have been a deer—there were so many, and the accidents were frequent, unremarkable. They were lucky not to have hit it. They looked up into the rearview. Their eyes, pupils blown, reflected the green dashboard light. It was cartoonish, that light, left them sallow, exaggerated the swollen bags beneath the eyes. A caricature of a sleepless driver. Their breath, their heart, slowed, not without some effort. The narrow red passageways winding through the whites of their eyes almost moved, rearranged themselves. 2:17 AM. Time to keep moving.

Straightening the wheel, easing their foot off the brake, accelerating slow. They took their time getting back up to speed, the engine complaining as it shifted itself through the gears. Everyone was always telling them to get their transmission checked. The problem was that they knew how much a new transmission cost, knew in fact that was what the truck needed. It seemed pointless to pay some mechanic to tell them what they already knew, what they already knew they couldn’t afford. As long as they didn’t accelerate too quickly, the transmission worked fine—fine enough, at least. It slipped, now and then, in the upper gears, but the steering wheel shimmied over sixty anyway.

They thought about the pines as they drove on. They were beautiful trees, a little gnarled, mostly short, but beautiful. The trees were dense here, a wall of darkness in the night. In the day, light filtered through them, created patterns in the orange carpet of dead needles at their feet. Tectonic plates of bark chipped brown and red from the trunks, sometimes lichens and mosses coloring them gray, blue, green, pale purple. Bambi liked to run their hands over the bark, let their fingers slip into the crevices sticky with sap. They liked especially to find a bug, a spider or beetle, making its home in the cracks. They imagined all of the insects burrowed in the pitch pine bark, woodpeckers nesting in the hollows they bore, everything asleep, waiting for the sun.

Up ahead, a column of light fell onto the roadway, a white glimmer they didn’t remember from the last time they drove this stretch. They slowed, flicking on a blinker for no one’s benefit, and found a diner dressed in neon and chrome peeking out between the branches. It was almost identical to another diner they knew, a diner in the middle of a split highway where truckers stopped. They used to sit in that diner and watch the customers come and go for hours, drink cup after cup of black coffee. They liked to watch the blind manager pass bills to one of his children, who confirmed the enumerations. They liked to catch the truckers’ eyes, when they could, and it always felt strange no one turned on them there. They made good money in that diner, the manager’s child watching them step in and out of the glass front door, in and out of the cabs of trucks. The manager heard the bell ring them out, then in, out, then in.

Bambi turned into the parking lot and pulled in beside another pick-up truck—newer, taller, uglier—and a Jeep missing its doors. They put the truck into park and let it cool a little before they turned the key; some butch told them, once, that you can add years to an engine’s life by letting it rest before shutting it off, when you first start it. In the new quiet they sat for a moment, watching the moving darkness beyond the windshield. The trees were more widely spaced here than you would imagine, but the woods were dark, thick with huckleberry, laurel, ferns. In the daylight they knew all these shapes and colors well, the smells and textures of the plants under their hand. At night, it was all just darkness.

The chrome facets of the diner walls reflected back tiny portraits of them, fragmented portions and miniaturized duplications of their body. They blinked at the warped reflections. The dark eyes living in the diner’s side blinked back.

Two men with thick arms and baseball caps and camouflage pants sat at the counter, empty coffee cups on the white linoleum in front of them. It was bad camouflage, better suited to deer season in a mixed forest, all browned oak and maple leaves. The men turned to watch Bambi as they stepped through the glass door. No bell rang, but the woman behind the counter turned to them. She dried the same glass continuously, eyes between the men and Bambi, Bambi and the men. Inside, the diner looked like the one Bambi remembered, too, with booths along the front wall and a long slick counter to the back. They couldn’t see anyone through the window into the kitchen, though they had the sense of someone standing just out of their line of sight.

“Bathroom?” Bambi asked, their voice a little rough. It was a long while since they spoke last.

“Men’s on the left, women’s on the right,” the woman behind the counter said. She looked like a diner waitress in a movie, blonde and stern, middle aged, her uniform neatly pressed but her apron a little grease stained. She pointed to a short, bright hallway with two unlabeled doors on opposite walls, inoffensive hotel art hung on the wall between them.

In the bathroom, after Bambi had flushed and left the second stall and washed their hands, they stood very still. Their knees shook a little. They stood in front of the black-speckled mirror, leaned over the tiny steel sink. The whole bathroom was painted a nauseating shade of green, very ‘70s, perhaps not repainted since then judging by the water stains and faded graffiti. Gravity felt ratcheted up, the scaffolding of their bones barely holding them up. There was time yet to go before they slept, though. They ran the cold water and splashed a little into their eyes, blinking, watching the water slip off their lashes.

Through the blur, something caught their attention in the mirror. At first they thought it was a crack in the glass, a stray streak of marker, but they blinked hard—looked closer—black—rising above the door of the first stall. They scrubbed the water from their eyes and looked again—horns—short and curved—goat’s horns with a speckling of moss. A wrong feeling welled up in their stomach, the same looseness of missing the last step, of their near-collision on the highway. Was it a prop of some kind, a Halloween decoration stored here in the off-season? They took their time turning around, their heart beating hard again. The horns rose and fell with the soft sound of breath. Not a prop, then, but a costume?

“Hey, are you good?” they asked, trying to keep their voice nonchalant, light. Their breath quavered. The figure in the stall didn’t answer or make any gesture they heard.

Their body told them to run—they knew their body was telling them to run. They knew whoever was in that stall, whatever they were doing, wasn’t any of their business. But they found themself taking a step forward anyway, peering down to the base of the door. Black cloven hooves, clumps of mud stuck to their chipped edges. They stood just a few feet from the door, listening to the steady breathing on the other side, feeling the animal heat of whoever stood there. They wanted desperately to leave, to step back out of the bathroom door and out of the diner and into the continuity of the night. They had a long way still to drive, east and then north, and that horrible liquid feeling in their gut said over and over again—keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. But behind that sensible voice, the voice that said whatever was happening in this diner had nothing to do with Bambi, was another voice. Insidious, quiet, insistent—I know you, I know you, I know you.

“Hello?” they said, quieter than they meant, more of a whisper than an authoritative call, certainly no longer casual. “Are you okay?”

There was no answer, but the breathing behind the door grew faster, raspier. They clenched their fists at their sides; this should be it, this should be all of the proof they needed that whoever was behind that door didn’t need or want their help. The back of their neck itched, still, and they thought, somehow, that they could feel a hand reaching towards them on the other side of the door. It felt instinctual when they mirrored the gesture, beyond any decision they could make, this reaching out towards what was breathing but wouldn’t answer.

They took another step forward and pressed a firm hand to the door, surprised when it swung open, unlatched. The stall was empty, save for a toilet wrapped in a black plastic trash bag, heavily duct taped around the base. Of course. They knew the stories, and the history—political factions naming devils after one another, vagrant sand-hill cranes half-seen in the night, mass hysteria brought on by yellow journalism, foxes and fisher cats heard before settlers knew what they were. Bambi wasn’t immune to the desire to put a face to their fear of the dark. They took a few deep breaths and shook their head to clear the image still lingering there—a trick of the light—then they turned to go.

After that, there wasn’t much to tell for a while. The men with the baseball caps were waiting when Bambi opened the door. In the trunk of the Jeep, plastic bags and cigarette butts stuck to their bare skin. The men drove for what felt like hours, though it was likely they only circled the diner again, again. Brutal, yes, but unimaginative—one of them had a bat, the other a tire iron. Bambi was glad the keys to their truck, at least, were lost in the mix, dropped somewhere between the diner and the cars. They wondered what the woman behind the counter would tell the day shift about the truck, if she would call the police.

When they were finished, the men tossed the body down the roadside embankment. A handful of beer cans followed behind. By the time they landed it almost didn’t hurt, having gone past pain toward oblivion. Their eyes were swollen shut, but they heard the Jeep’s tires peel out. Right before they lost consciousness, they thought they felt someone lift them off the ground, but likely that was a dream. There was a delicious warmth passing through them as their mind blinked shut, the bathwater sensation they always imagined preceded freezing to death.

They thought, for a while, that it was over. But then they realized they were thinking, and if they were thinking they were still here. Nothing would stay still long enough for Bambi to see it, not for a long time after they woke. Pine needles dug into their skin. Sun filtered through leaves. Squirrels, sparrows, grackles with their iridescent blue heads catching light, shining—all that life went on around them. Their skin itched, burned, crawled under dirt. The microscopic teeth of live things moved through their flesh. Swallowed and digested, but still whole.

When the sun fell it gilded the thick trunk of the tree they lay at the base of—an oak of some kind, maybe a black oak, but they couldn’t be sure. Finally, without their even realizing it at first, the world held still, gold and quiet under the heavy crown of the tree. The shadows crept closer but the threat had fallen out of them. There was nothing left to dread.

In the hollow dark—moon reflecting off moss, rotting skin, leaves—the bright fur of a fox caught their eye. She approached with her tail brushing through the copper pine needles, last year’s browned oak leaves, black paws deft between roots. She snarled, tasted the air at their feet, her yellow eyes seeking out their gaze. She was a scrappy thing, the color of rust except where mange ate gray patches into her fur. Something else growled—maybe Bambi—and pushed the fox back into the underbrush. She was no longer the hungriest animal in these woods. They regretted frightening her, though—now they were alone again.

It took another sunrise for them to realize the reversing of their knees was not just a result of the beating. It was a way of being, a new reality of their body, the joints fully functional under the deformed flesh. It was like being thirteen, a familiar breaking inside, bone bending and stretching under taught skin—a growth spurt. At the hips and shoulder blades they split like a plum, opened up to some new possibility that crawled out of what was once Bambi, once Bambi’s body, what would be their body again when its opening finished. The spine extended, ribs latched tight against new bone and muscle, sinew and skin reaching out across the ground. The bone near the temple throbbed, then broke out into air. New, pink skin surfaced on charred and tenuous muscle, quivered under dew—glimmering, young, promising. They were something their old body could not have imagined without first being broken.

There were a few moments of clarity in which Bambi could think, really think, thoughts that seemed to reach out to them from their previous life. They thought of the woman in the diner, what she had done with their truck, what she had done about the men. They thought about who would be missing them by now, who would be calling and calling and calling a phone they would never answer, if any of those people might have reported them lost. They wondered, dimly, if they were dead, if they were dying, still, if this wasn’t some complicated hallucination. Then their mind reared like an unbroken horse, and thought became something else to leave behind.

This was a painful becoming, the unsheathing of what had always been beneath. They wandered the wilderness of their own ruined flesh, familiar still, in some ways no different from what having a body had always been. They could feel the mechanism of their new muscle, the reversed apparatus of the legs, the sinewy workings of the wings clinging to their back, the sturdiness of their split hooves. Their face was the last to change, and the fear surfaced again that this was the true end, that everything else was prelude to this destruction, a final thought winding its way through the haze. Eventually, though, it subsided, and their long jaw snapped open and shut, gnashing new teeth. The animal had surfaced, clawed its way out of a dark, vengeful room inside.

The skin blackened, liquid-burnt muscle solidifying around the bones. They were whole—perhaps for the first time, at least since thirteen. On the third sunrise they stood like a colt, quick and clumsy. They lay a hand on the damp bark of the oak. Three claws clicked like acrylic nails on the wood. Their new legs held them well, taller than they had been, and they stretched themself up to full height. Slowly, they extended one wing, then the other, their full wingspan filling the little clearing beneath the tree. The sunlight filtered through the wings, the thin membrane of skin dressed in coarse, short fur, casting red shadows across the leaf litter. They stood for a long time with their wings outstretched, drying their dampness, reveling in the sensation of moving in this strange new form.

In the daytime, just as they’d thought when they pulled up to the diner, it was easy to see through the trees. In the distance they could barely make out the reflection of sun off chrome. They folded their wings to their sides and started walking, slow and unsteady on spindly limbs. Soon, they would finally see their new face in the thousands of mirrors on the diner’s skin. Soon, they would look back into their own dark eyes—alive—violently and wonderfully alive.