Late last year, my childhood best friend killed himself in his childhood bedroom with a cheap shotgun from the sporting goods store. When I got the phone call, I was walking in the woods behind my mothers apartment. As I listened to the details of his death, I saw a deer watching me from within a bush just five feet away. I instinctively grabbed my camera and photographed it. When I developed the film a few days later, there was no deer in the photograph.
Rusty called me a few days after and told me that his beloved dog Jake had died. He said that on Jake’s last day, while they were out walking the fields on their farm, a deer came out of the woods and approached Jake snout to snout, and teased him to give chase. He said that the deer was playful and without fear. Later that afternoon, Rusty looked out the window and saw Jake dead underneath an oak tree. He said that the deer was an angel who came to take him to the other side.
Rusty called me a few days after and told me that his beloved dog Jake had died. He said that on Jake’s last day, while they were out walking the fields on their farm, a deer came out of the woods and approached Jake snout to snout, and teased him to give chase. He said that the deer was playful and without fear. Later that afternoon, Rusty looked out the window and saw Jake dead underneath an oak tree. He said that the deer was an angel who came to take him to the other side.
I live behind an abandoned field that used to be a landfill. It’s a massive fenced in area that over the past few years has had a burgeoning deer population that have outgrown the field and are beginning to venture out into the city.
Earlier this year I watched a young buck die in an apartment buildings backyard about two miles away from the field. It seemed the deer had ventured too far into the city and had lost its way. A group of neighbors gathered around the backyard watching the deer take its last breaths as white foam spilled from its mouth.
I had spent the previous few weeks following this young buck around and he let me get very close to him. I would feed him underneath an overpass and my neighbor and I cut holes in the fence for him to walk through.
I recently visited a friend from high school who I hadn’t seen in nine years. After graduating, he joined the Marine Corps, and for the first time in his life felt alive amongst the savagery of war and the brutality of that fraternity. Finally his youthful rage had an outlet and a direction. He said he lost his fear of death, feeling calm in gun fights and while driving through IED minefields.
Towards the end of his second deployment, he ordered in a missile drone strike on a Taliban member that he had been tracking for several weeks. Sitting behind a computer screen in a base in Afghanistan, he called in the missile and watched the man explode into dust while working on the farm behind his house. After the missile struck, his four children came running out of the house to find nothing left of their father. He said “in that moment, I knew I created four more terrorists out his children.”
After coming back from that second deployment, he tried to kill himself, but failed.
A middle aged woman walking down tenth avenue was watching her reflection in the glass skyscraper windows as her short skirt was sweeping up with the wind. She took pleasure in peoples reactions as they noticed that she wasn’t wearing underwear.
A block away, she walked by a man who was stabbing a needle into the raw flesh of his leg as he struggled to find a vein. His blood was dripping onto the hot concrete and pooling next to another mans head that laid next to him unconscious.