"I scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the rails, idly chucking cinders between my feet, in no hurry to wake the others. At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share.
Morning came on apace. The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the shadows under the trees and bushes evaporated like puddles after a shower...
"I don’t know how long I sat there on the rail, watching the purple steal out of the sky as noiselessly as it had stolen in the evening before. I was about to get up when I looked to my right and saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from me.
My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand in my mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with a hot dry excitement. I didn’t move. I couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to. Her eyes weren’t brown, but a dark, dusty black – the kind of velvet you see backgrounding jewelry displays. Her small ears were scuffed suede. She looked serenely at me, head slightly lowered in what I took for curiosity... What I was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling.
"It was on the tip of my tongue to tell the others about the deer, but I ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself... I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life... I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail...
"The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them - words shrinks things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out."
- Stephen King, The Body
