Day 29: Write a story where a human character has a physical characteristic of an animal.

I already had something from this fall that I used for this prompt. I tried to reblog the earlier post (September 29) but am having difficulty with that function. And somehow in cutting and pasting from an earlier post, a paragraph was dropped though I copied and pasted from elsewhere. I am not getting along with the newer editor version. Day 28 of Flashnano will be out of sync. I am catching up a bit.

Ray Hennesey, unsplash

They had arranged to meet at the kitschy sandwich shop next to the used vinyl records store. He thought it might appeal to her with its eclectic confusion of chandeliers and stained glass panels suspended from the ceiling. He preferred simple and clean spaces with vaulted ceilings, no ornamentation. But for sure, she would like it. They would both wear masks, as agreed, what with the pandemic. They were new to each other though they had chatted on Zoom for months.

He waited for her in a church pew, another affectation of the place. For the first time, he worried about whether his antlers would become entangled with low-hanging crystals, whether they would smash into a stained glass window and bring it crashing to the floor. People were generally accepting of him, of his difference, but he found it inconvenient nonetheless to carry this weight around on his head, though of course, his rack gained him respect. Who could argue with a 15-point man-buck? She knew about him though he didn’t have the space in his apartment to get the full-screen picture of his singular crown. He didn’t care anymore, didn’t have the luxury of self-consciousness. Now, the second year into the pandemic, loneliness was beginning to gnaw away at him. She had said she felt the same way.

She was all freshness and sweetness and light, just as he had expected from their screen-time, and she laughed at the marvel of his Royal set of points. She gave him a hug and said how much she loved it. The first bit of trouble was, as he had anticipated, with a chandelier, though their waiter seated them in the most accommodating location. The height of his body had added to the difficulty so that he had inadvertently unhooked a chandelier with a point, but he shrugged and wore it while they drank their wine. This tickled her. The staff scurried around them for the tall ladder while they ordered.

The bigger trouble came with the meal. She had made him so comfortable that he forgot himself when he ate his salad. He had long practiced eating in the way civilized people ate but with the pandemic and the social isolation, he had apparently slipped back into some old habits and chewed with his elongated face in an exaggerated circular motion, much in the fashion of beloved deer.

He saw her staring at him, watching his mouth. She was no longer laughing and delighted. She had nothing to say to him to help him save face. She made an excuse to make a phone call outside and she didn’t return.

Out by the railroad tracks which led to the woods where his brother had died, where his mother had given birth to him, and his father had taught him to forage and fight, he wondered if it had been an overreach for him to be in this other world. He gave in to this likelihood and let his hands become hooves. He bolted through the empty city and out through pastures and orange groves, and up into lands farther north, familiar breezes, forests of berries and trees and acorns.