Deer Road

This story comes from a place of conflict.

I’ve always found deer to be beautiful—quiet, watchful, almost gentle in the way they move through the world. There’s something about them that feels undeserving of harm. And yet, where I live, they are also part of a very real danger.

Driving at night, you learn quickly how fragile control is. A single movement—one step into the road—and everything can change. People are injured. Sometimes killed. Not because anyone intended harm, but because two lives crossed paths at the wrong moment.

That contradiction stayed with me.

The idea that something can be both innocent and dangerous. That harm doesn’t always come from malice. That sometimes it comes from proximity—from timing—from simply existing in the same space.

In this story, I wanted to explore what happens after that moment. Not just the impact, but the emotional and almost spiritual weight that follows. The instinct to fix it. To undo it. To make something right that can’t fully be made right.

But there’s also something older in the story—something harder to name. A sense that the natural world doesn’t operate on our definitions of guilt or innocence. That it keeps its own balance. Its own memory.

And that sometimes, when we cross a line—literally or otherwise—something notices.

This story lives in that uneasy space: between compassion and consequence, between accident and responsibility, between what we meant…and what happened anyway.