Dear Deer,

This story, about a young girl who died, isn’t really about a young girl who died.

Oh, she’s in it; and she dies. But pursuing that plot line would involve a maudlin, dripping, sentimental rambling designed to vibrate sympathetically with another vibrating object (the reader) at a shared frequency, increasing the gravitas and enriching its timbre in a sickly resonance. And I haven’t even gotten into the overtones that might be involved!

Once upon a time, there was an ideal family—the Fletchers—a mother, a father, and a little girl, Martha, who was a month away from her fourth birthday. Martha was named after “Martha” in the Beatles song, “Martha My Dear,” but by the time her parents learned this was about Paul McCartney’s sheepdog, it was too late. Martha was Martha, and children’s names, mercifully, fit into them very quickly.

The Fletchers lived in a ranch-style 4-bedroom. 3 1/2-bath home on a generous lot of about half an acre. Their house sat in front of a large backyard, tidily fenced in and which backed up to a preserve area. The preserve was a major reason the Fletchers chose to buy this property, because it assured them nothing else would be built next to them.

Martha often played in her large backyard. She frequently would fetch her mom or dad to come see, quick!, for a rabbit or a chipmunk she spied.

“Daddy!” she hollered one day, and Don knew exactly what to do. He left his home office and dutifully reported to her. “Look.” She pointed to the rear of the property.

There over the fence stood a deer, staring at them. It was some distance, but Don found it strange that it seemed calm and inert even when they began walking toward it.

Every day Martha called either to her dad, Don, or to her mom, Lydia, to come see, quick!. Once, all three of them got to within ten feet of the deer before it scampered away.

“My deer!” Martha announced. “It’s got a white leg in front.”

“Yes,” agreed her parents. “‘Martha’s deer.’ You can tell by its front leg, yes.”

“Doe,” Lydia joked.

“A deer,” Don continued the joke.

“A female deer,” Lydia added, and all three laughed at the reference that even Martha caught.

The day Martha’s deer didn’t present, Martha was inconsolable.

She cried over what might have happened, such as the animal’s sickness or death. Don and Lydia just assumed the little ritual, as cute as it was, was just coincidental and was—unfortunately—over.

And soon thereafter ensued the circumstances by which Martha died, which, for the sake of avoiding the resonating heartstrings, I won’t go into here. No one wants to go there. After all, it’s about the worst thing parents could experience. Let someone else stoke those burning flames.

Daily, her parents would go out into their backyard at the usual time to look for Martha’s deer. The deer continued to remain strangely absent.

“She knows,” Lydia told Don, anthropomorphizing the deer’s sensibilities.

“Yes,” Don agreed. “It was Martha’s deer. I don’t expect we’ll see her anymore.”

Months passed and one day, as Don was finishing putting up a hammock between two trees on the backyard lawn, he stopped. That’s when he saw, once again, Martha’s deer. There was the white streak on its right leg.

Every day, at the usual time, Martha’s deer would arrive to stare Don down. Every day he was complicit with the routine, but neither tried to engage the animal nor scare it away. He even welcomed the sighting every day, for it made him think of Martha.

Even Lydia came to visit the scene each day.

Until one day, the deer didn’t show up. The next day, in a startling surprise, Don suffered an arrhythmia and abruptly died at the age of 31.

Lydia was heartbroken, having lost both her daughter and husband within a year. She thought of Martha’s deer. How it befriended the living but then would become strangely absent, as if to portend a death coming.

“She knows,” Lydia said, echoing her husband’s very words about the connection between the deer’s sudden truancy and the family tragedies.

Three years later, Lydia remarried.

She and her husband, Terry, had a son, Mark, and soon thereafter Martha’s deer began to visit again. Lydia, the first day this happened, became hysterical.

Every day, the deer returned and every day Lydia became more unmanageable in her emotional lability.

By the time Mark was three, it was clear the doe was “Mark’s deer.” Terry was thankful for that, because it seemed to reverse Lydia’s fall into neurosis. Yet, it was a mixed bag of Lydia being on a trigger-edge and the comfort the animal brought to Mark each day. But this mixed bag was quite lopsided, Lydia’s outbursts far eclipsing the cuteness of Mark’s encounters with “his deer.”

Terry was no hunter, but he still had Don’s old rifle and knew what he had to do. He didn’t discuss it with Lydia beforehand. If he could perform this grizzly task while Lydia and Mark were off shopping, all that would happen was their noticing the deer had stopped coming around. Lydia would improve; Mark would get over it.

It came to be that Martha’s deer—Mark’s deer—suddenly failed to show up, as Terry had accomplished with one spent shell. Contrary to what Terry expected, this seemed to set Lydia off. She lost it. Neurosis was one thing, but psychosis was another. She began to confabulate.

“Mark’s gonna die!” she shouted at Terry.

“What are you talking about, Lydia?” he replied. “No one’s going to die.”

“But Mark’s deer didn’t come. That’s what happens. Then someone dies.”

Terry didn’t know what to do, so he ‘fessed up. “The only one who died was the deer,” he said, not knowing what else to say in an attempt to comfort her. For Lydia, this was a new wrinkle in the script she was writing. She didn’t know how to process it.

She wouldn’t have the luxury of taking the time to process it, however, because the next day Terry was in a terrible car accident he didn’t survive.

Now what? was Lydia’s panic. The portent—Martha’s deer, Mark’s deer—was dead. How would she divine any predictions?

She and her son, Mark, relocated to a different state, to an apartment in an urban neighborhood. She wished to live in a place as existentially different from her previous rural home as possible.

The previous house was sold. The refuge continued, dutifully protecting the property from adjacent development. And Martha’s and Mark’s deer, left to rot in the deep, back brush, was forgotten.

Until one night.

Mark was now seven years old. Lydia had dropped him off at a classmates’ sleepover with his friends. He had been very excited because five of his friends would be there for the slumber party.

As she was returning home without him, that’s when she saw it. A deer in the headlights.

She slammed on the brakes and successfully avoided colliding with the animal. She immediately turned around to go back to his friend’s house to pick Mark up, because she knew his sleepover would not end well.

The morning news proved her right.

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Prompted by the second word on the challenge list, “Deer,” as we approach, spookily, the Halloween month of October.

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“Throw me somethin’, mistah” is a way to make a one-way tip. Or not.