droning

There is the faint hiss of white noise. Moving through the trees, they come upon its source. A deer grazes at the low-lying ferns and grasses, stepping slowly forward in that endless way in search of food. Though even when it stands still, there is movement shimmering across it, and though they’d already frozen so as not to scare it off, they feel their breath catch in their throat.

It is not a deer.

It looks like a deer, a whitetail doe, but filling its silhouette instead is the constantly flickering image of static, glowing faintly. It does not appear to be three dimensional, but instead it is as if where once there was a doe, a cookie-cutter stamp was made and filled in with constantly flickering black and white and gray.

It continues to graze, unaffected. A tender fiddlehead is taken into its mouth, but as it withdraws, the fern remains. All it is doing is making the motions of grazing, but its surroundings are unchanged. The trees shift comfortably in the wind. A bird’s song punctuates the constant droning hiss. The deer takes another ambling step, another tuft of grass left undisturbed.

A bird, beautiful and foolish, swoops lazily from a branch, nesting material gathered in its beak. Fluttering its wings to alight on the back of the deer, instead it falls in. There is a shrill, frightened sound and an abrupt silence.

Another step. It lifts its head as if to chew. Hair prickling and a cold feeling flowing through their blood, they step back, having seen more than enough. They are sure they have not made a sound, and yet its head snaps their direction, its ears trained on them, and though it has no face they feel that its minimal awareness of this plane has all at once fallen upon them.

Every fiber of their being tells them to run, but radiating from this entity—if even it could be called that—comes the knowledge that they should not. They know at once it will not chase and yet it is imperative they do not run.

Backing through the path they’ve taken, eyes not straying from the flickering, they retrace their steps, arms reaching out to feel for trees behind them.

And just as they are about to round a tree, its head lowers, its awareness of this place again lifted, and it slips out of sight.