Stag

by Karen Russell

I flexed my toes inside my loafers, a trick for stopping thought.

lifting eons of evolution on her small back.

Nobody seemed to notice that a small dinosaur was wandering around their dress shoes;

Humans were her greatest threat, and yet she approached us with a shy gentleness, a forgetfulness that we surely did not deserve.

The God I still pray to is something like this: a night that wants us to inhabit it.