The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck

there was a pile of grass and other leafy things pitched in the middle of the yard. I crouched behind a Wych elm ( Ulmis campestris according to its own label) and waited, and when the buck poked his nose through the shed doorway I felt a thrill race up and down my spine. He was real! He was so close to me I could practically hear his inhalations as he sniffed the air and, limping slightly, one of his hind legs wrapped in a splint, he walked into the pen. Like me, he looked back at the shed, and a moment later the doe joined us. She was as real as he was, smaller than he but sturdier, a white bandage taped around her head like a compress wrapped around a toothache sufferer in an old cartoon. Slowly, stopping with every step to sniff the air or look around, the deer made their way to the pile of grass in the middle of the yard, and when they got to it they took turns eating, their heads bobbing up and down like targets in a shooting gallery. They bit, chewed, swallowed, bent down for more: they ate. They were real. They ate and they were real and they were one other thing as well. Though the sun was down the light wasn’t fully gone yet. The western horizon was the color of a strawberry the day before it’s ready to be picked, and so were the deer.
    The deer were red.

    THE FIRST TIME she called my name I opened my eyes. The sun was up, so bright it seemed I floated on it. But then I remembered: I lay on my mother’s desk. The marble caught the light and held it like a puddle.
    I closed my eyes.
    Then, like a wave washing over me: hunger. It seemed larger than I was. I curled myself into a ball and felt as if I were moving inside my own stomach, as if, if I could, I would digest myself to make this gnawing go away. I tried to remember my dreams but all that came were visions of tunnels and rivers, trains and sharks, timbering trees, bottomless wells, falling falling falling. But then I remembered: the deer. Not just their brilliant vermilion coats but the nearly inaudible sound of their chewing. The vision was so palpable I could taste the grass they ate. I turned then, saw the sun glancing green off the tops of the ailanthus that grew outside my mother’s office windows.
    “Jamie.”
    I opened my eyes again, raised my head. The first thing I saw was my reflection in the marble of my mother’s desk—saw my face, I realized, in the oval of sweat where it had just lain. I’m not sure I would’ve figured out that my reflection hadn’t spoken if Nellydean hadn’t called me yet again. “Jamie,” she said one more time, and, rolling over, I saw her in the door. She seemed smaller that morning, less threatening, but maybe she was just becoming familiar. I was so hungry I thought I might eat her .
    I tried to speak but nothing came out of my dry throat. I closed my mouth, swallowed, and tried again.
    “Why do you call me that? My name is James.”
    “It’s how your momma called you. Can you walk?”
    “Can I walk?”
    As Nellydean shuffled toward me I noticed a gray roll of newspaper tucked under her arm, but I was distracted from her body by the OSHA orange insistence of my own. My arms and legs splayed across the desk, barely covered by the tattered remains of my jumpsuit. The fabric was snagged, torn, slashed, the left leg ripped open from thigh to ankle, the zipper sealed at neck and waist but wide open in between. The skin that showed through these gaps was stained with dirt and blood, pale white in some places, scratched pink in others, and the jumpsuit’s fabric was similarly stained, as if a map of the previous day’s journey had been stamped on my body. But where I’d gone was as yet a mystery. I couldn’t remember anything about yesterday beyond the deer—and, given the way their fur glowed like a Christmas bulb in my mind’s eye, I had my doubts about them.
    “Your feet are a bloody mess,” Nellydean said then. “Best to get them cleaned up.”
    Suddenly one pain replaced another. My hunger