I was driving home from work around 11 P.M. on a somewhat foggy but beautiful October night. There were no stars, but the streetlights shone down on the roads as the moon watched dully. I had one hand on the steering wheel and a cigarette on the other, mingling with the already-thick air a car has naturally, but today I felt particularly empty and the suffocating cigarette smoke made it feels like there was something inside me other than organs. My eyes were half-closed and hazy, but fortunately the road was empty aside from animals that usually crept around at this hour.

I sighed deeply, so deeply that I almost felt all that smoke and ash completely leave my body for a moment, leaving me fully hollow for a fraction of a moment. My apartment was about twenty-five minutes away with no traffic, and so far, I was still on the somewhat rural road that’s somewhere in between these two areas, but closer to my workplace than my apartment. I call this road “rural” because in our fairly suburban town in Indiana, this almost-abandoned road lined by a mountain on one side and a dominating, savage forest on the other is considered wild.

I’d been working full-time shifts at a warehouse for months on end since I moved out of my parents’ home, and it doesn’t pay much. Most of the money goes to rent, and then food prices keep getting higher, and no matter how much I save, all I really have is a few cents extra at the end of the day. Of course, that doesn’t mean the managers go any easier on you; quite the opposite. They whip you around as if they were paying you enough to go to luxury hotels in Europe on whims, and saying the hours are terrible is an understatement, but I have major trouble finding jobs elsewhere…

Today, especially, it was Friday, and usually on those days, I get to go into work a little later than usual, and if everybody finishes, we might even end up leaving earlier than usual. However, most workers called out today because it just happened to be Friday 13th of October, and they had Halloween-related plans with their friends or kids, and I happened to be just the man to call in to cover everybody’s shifts, so I actually worked many more hours than usual.

In the middle of the road I stop. I feel so exhausted that my entire body feels broken. I pull over to the side of the road to really catch my breath with the windows open, rather than drowning myself in here until I come just a little closer to death just like every other day. I lean my head onto the wheel, being careful not to press it on the honking button. I just need a moment. The fresh air swallows the car and cold brushes against the back of my neck and exposed arms.

After spending five minutes like this, I try to sit up and keep driving, but I find that my hands are so fatigued I can’t even lift them onto the steering wheel. I’m so tired I can’t even lift my neck. While sitting there, half-asleep, I consider sleeping in the car, just for tonight. Even if the road is empty, at this rate there’s a much higher chance of me getting into an accident than not.

For what feels like a long stretch of time as my mind fades out of thoughts into half drowsy, numbing static, I hear a loud bump against my car. I tilt my head up just far enough to see it was a deer. Upon seeing me tilt my head, the deer backs up into the headlights in fear then freezes, almost as if on command.

A strange situation is the only thing aside from adrenaline that can counter the heavy, falling blanket of somnolence descending onto the mind like a strong poison, slowly but surely making its way through the body and putting it to rest. I jolted up to look at the deer. Its long antlers thrusted out of its head and pointed, like accusing fingers, towards the sky. It stared right through me. Its eyes were large, with a red glare in the middle and white light engulfing most of them because of the headlights. The rigid figure of deer, struck by light, almost looked photoshopped into the landscape that in comparison was dark, moving with the soft wind.

More accurately yet—the deer looked like a corpse compared to the land that was so alive. It was hard to believe the creature in front of me was a living creature and not a vessel puppeteered by an external soul; this paranormal process mutilating its body into something ghostly and uncanny. I realized my body temperature had shot up, and I was sweating.

As the deer stood there for in the dilated time passing between our gazing at one another, something started sprouting from its side, which looked at first, like some abnormal birth to some bloody, white organ coming out of its side; that “organ” started pointing upwards into a small angel wing, like some horrific pegasus. I remember an extreme sensation of fear where my blood had run cold, and I felt like I was about to puke and faint before I did, all of a sudden, faint.

I woke up in my car, the same place as I had stopped. It seemed as if I had parked in front of a crime scene; the space in front of my car was covered by crime scene tapes and an outline of the victim traced in white chalk in the middle. If I had tried to explain this to anybody, I thought, they would surely think I had hallucinations from exhaustion after stopping my car in front of a crime scene without noticing, aside from thinking I’m a freak from the overall strangeness of the situation and falling asleep in front of a crime scene. If what I think I saw last night happened, I don’t know anymore.

That morning I had opened my phone to check the time to find out I was at least 3 hours late to work; 11:11 A.M. I’d gotten a call from my boss in that moment telling me I was fired with no good explanation whatsoever, almost as if fate had mandated it.

With such a peculiar morning and everything happening at the same time, I was in a strange space. I remember I’d got out of my car and went to the forest, wondering if fate was punishing me for being an ingrate. I walked until I didn’t know where I was anymore, and kept walking still, until I reached a small stream. I sat down and dipped my fingers, letting the cool water run past them. Long, wild grass brushed against my arms and the sunny blueish-gray sky shone down on the sparkling stream. When I looked to my side, a deer had appeared. In the middle of nowhere surrounded by nature, there was no smoke weighing down my body out here with all the fresh air, and everything seemed so small. Losing my job and the crime scene and the warehouse seemed like they were all part of a distant, dreamt-up world.