Roll With It Short Stories

Day Twelve

Word Count 15: 475

Prompt: You've been seeing a deer around your neighborhood but it wasn't a problem until it showed up in your office.

Deers are not common to my area, where I live it's a mix of suburb and city. I grew up here and even the times my dad took me camping I've never once seen a deer. The first time I saw Treehorns , a name he was given after I had embarrassingly forgotten the word for antlers, I was leaving for work. There was nothing strange about him except his horns, they were unusually tall overflowing with tiny offshoots, his head seemed bowed with the weight. I had to slam the brakes when I saw his shadowed form, he stared at me and then slowly moved on, his overburdened head swaying.

I told my coworkers about my encounter with Treehorns and all of them were surprised, as I said there are no woods for miles. They asked me to take a picture if I saw it again, but we agreed someone would likely call animal control before the day was out. Indeed I returned that night with no sign of Treehorns. I saw Treehorns again weeks later, coming home from the grocery store. I was getting off of an overpass when I saw his huge silhouette lift his head from the grassy median. I would see him three more times, around the area of my commute and once on my neighbor's lawn. I called animal control and did manage to snap a picture for all my coworkers who had begun to call me the 'boy who cried deer'.

None of this was particularly frightening or meaningful until this afternoon. Today I had looked up from my desk and in the doorway was the low hanging face of Treehorns. I froze. His face was narrow and his eyes sunken and clouded, there was something falling from his thick horns and the smell was awful. I watched his heavy breathes pass through his snout and felt my own breathes mirror his. My mind was filled with adrenaline as I tried to calculate if I could shut the door or if I should remain still. I never got to decide as Treehorns suddenly fell over, a bright orange dart sticking out of his neck.

One of my coworkers had called animal control and they luckily managed to tranquilize the thing before it had hurt anyone. Treehorns did not recover but I did learn some things that explained his behavior. There was something that had been growing on Treehorns. It's similar to that fungus that controls ants, but they've never seen something like this before in deers, and are currently studying Treehorns' body. In ants the fungus makes them leave their homes in the trees and eats away at the ant until it bursts, creating more spores to infect more ants. The implications of what this means are beyond me. I try not to think of why Treehorns kept appearing before me or what would have happened if it had continued.