Blake HC Mihm
Fallow
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Image by Patrick Bigelow from Pexels
Blake HC Mihm is an emerging writer who lives in southwestern Virginia with his two dogs. His work has been featured in Lilac Peril, OUCH! Collective, and Dishsoap Quarterly, and is upcoming in Short Reads. He was selected as one of the poets for DC Pride Poems 2024. You can read more of his writing at: blakehc.wordpress.com.
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I needed a new name and a flat chest so I migrated south to a fallow deer farm. The flowers down there bloomed in ulterior colors though I recognized them by name: jewelweed bursting butter-yellow, columbines red as bleeding hearts, ferrum-rich and dangling. The deer, too, were foreign to me. Some heritage breed from Europe, perpetual fawns on prim legs. I told the farmer to call me Brent or, failing that, Mr. Furrows. Her eyes settled on the cumbersome lumps underneath my hoodie but she didn't give me any trouble. Never did call me sir though.
The set-up was part farm, part petting zoo. Children fed coins into gum-ball machines full of corn, hung off fence rails while the deer approached, timorous, taciturn, soft knowledge of trust battening with each mouthful. Mrs. Lilac wrapped yarn scraps around their necks so the kids could tell them apart by name. Kansas, Banana, Fire Truck. That summer Beesting ate a girl's hat and made the local paper. On his celebrity status he grew fat and brazen, took to propping his hooves against the fence while adoring fans caressed him by velvet antlers. Business boomed.
Bumping down route 81 with a trailer full of hay, Mrs. Lilac saw a PETA billboard that said "Meet your Meat" and got the idea to label each cut with the deer's name. She thought it was the funniest thing. Laughed when she told me. That autumn, delighted dads would pull hunks of those hand-fed bodies from a humming chest freezer, vying to bring home a piece of what their children once loved.
I shoveled tiny pellets of shit, picked vegetables, chased deer, flapped my arms and shouted to herd their scampering bodies in and out of the barn. I fed myself on seconds and worked alone in the garden under the flitting gaze of bucks. My arms began to fill out but my overalls stayed loose. I spent scant moments shirtless with the hose, scrubbing the sweat that dried between my breasts, knocking over my thin ribcage as I bent over. Once a week I took a hot shower at the local gym and skulked around near the largest man I could find. I squeaked out my request, left with a tiny vial of testosterone in my pocket.
On the first morning of frost I awoke to fog basted with the brash scent of nicotine and gunpowder. The gunshots were enormous. I found Mrs. Lilac on the porch and asked for my pay. I had never seen her smoke before. She caressed the cigarette in her lips and cradled a tussle of my hair. Told me it was getting long. Would I like her to cut it before I left? Cicada song vibrated through her fingertips as she buzzed my skull with a set of sheep shears and did not flinch even as another bang cut through the farm, the air startled by gun-smoke. I figured she would be behind the trigger but she can't stand to see them fall. They come to her table skinned, disemboweled. Nameless creatures. But she will fill the chest with cuts labeled Beesting that winter. Everyone should have a chance to consume what they love.
The first surgeon said no way, not without a fixed address. The second changed his mind when I told him I would pay cash. I wasn't allowed to shower for a week afterwards. I parked outside the library, read and slept and ate painkillers and refilled my scripts and slept more. On day seven I spent the night at a drive-in movie, swaddled in a cast of cotton gauze, watching the double features as dry lightning shook the clouds. I fell asleep to the thin burnt sizzle from the ensemble of portable speakers. The attendant tapped my window and told me mister, it's past closing time.
I cried during the first shower. Pale in the locker-room at three am. I thought I was alone but a bear was huffing at a squat rack. I watched until he asked me to spot him. I told him I wasn't allowed to lift more than fifteen pounds and he said that wasn't what he meant. He did not know boys like me existed outside of pornography. I asked him, would you like to see the scars? In the sauna he ran his fingers across my chest, taut and tender, my pecs freshly carved by a well-honed bone knife. I did not need to tell him to be gentle. His tongue fluttered on my nipple grafts as if he were lapping dew from buttercups. I was soaked. His thick belly dark with body hair, the swinging weight of his gorge, the way his towel dropped without a sense of shame or the need to explain. I cupped my hands under his asscheeks and mumbled that I would die to look like him and he told me buddy, you had better start eatin'.
Mrs. Lilac welcomed me back in the spring with a frozen tenderloin labeled BEESTING and acted as though I had not changed. The new batch of deer had that same look of fear about them, some apprehension about the eyes; even as they ate from your palm there was a part of them fleeing. But they would approach, hand-fed and soft-muzzled, fattened on corn and sticky-sweet sorghum. I laid prone in my tent with sunlight blazing through the red polyester, waiting for my steak to thaw. The silhouettes of hawk moths flitted past, there one moment and gone the next, looking all the world like hummingbirds. Wild, delicate, pollen-soaked. Like no moth I ever saw.
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