The Selfie

It’s dusk near a forgotten lake. Crickets chirp aggressively, then they stop succinctly as if cut off by a dude running a television station audio board. A middle-aged suburban man walks down a wooden walkway with reeds and cattails taller than he is surrounding him on either side of the path. The doctor told him 30 minutes of exercise per day for his high cholesterol. 

A Pirate Looks at Forty by Jimmy Buffett is playing on his AirPods as he walks down the rickety boardwalk. The cheery robo-voice of Siri knifes annoyingly in and out of his musical trance by verbalizing emails, Microsoft teams messages and texts. The last of which states passive-aggressively:

“Christina, if you have a global ask for each team, could you please send an email so my Teams doesn’t keep beeping at me?” The transmission then ends abruptly with the verbal translation of a smiley face emoji. 

The man grunts and a slight curl of a smirk begins to form on one side of his mouth.

The tall reeds quiver ever so slightly in the curve in the path up ahead. A faint click clack of hooves taps benevolently on the timbered slabs directly in front of him. 

At that exact moment the shuffle mechanism on his iPhone 14 switches to Strawberry Letter 23 by Shuggie Otis. The man nods his head in time with the music. He remembers a different version of this song from Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film Jackie Brown and thinks about how much he still loves Samuel L Jackson. 

A single deer stands stoically a handful of paces ahead of him. The two beasts stare quizzically at each other for an uncomfortably long beat of time. The man carefully removes the cellular phone from the left front pocket of his cargo dad shorts. He attempts to take a selfie of himself and the deer who is now giving him the deer-equivalent of a 1,000 yard stare. He reaches his selfie arm high in the air like he’s signaling desperately for a ship to come rescue him from a deserted island. 

Without any sort of warning, the deer charges him at full speed like an angry flea-bitten bison. The startled man begins fumbling sloppily for something under his shirt. He pulls a 9mm handgun from the conceal and carry holster that for some inexplicable reason he brought with him on his relaxing nightly walk. 

The man fires wildly into the ether and then recoils comedically like it’s the first time he’s ever fired a weapon in his life.

A split second later, the deer’s head explodes like a cross between the JFK assassination and when Marvin accidentally gets shot in the face in Pulp Fiction. Blood splatters all over the man’s face, his foam mesh hat, his arms, his legs and his new gleaming white Pearl Jam tour tee shirt he waited in the merch truck line for 2 hours to obtain. 

In a mildly terrified, yet completely monotone voice he deadpans “Well, that’s not good.” 

Then the man gingerly and pathetically tries to pick up the carcass and dump it over the side of the wooden boardwalk into the reeds. God forbid any of the neighborhood kids ride their electric scooters down here and see his bizarre fuck up. 

The man gags and cringes as one of the poor animal’s antlers dangles precariously and falls off while he pushes its corpse into the marsh below. Just then the music stops again and Siri gleefully reads another teams message:

“Planning, please provide some key offers that will be priced at celebration for tomorrow. We don’t want to just show watches here.”

The man looks back and forth unironically, clumsily inserts the 9mm in his right tube sock and begins the long walk home. 

The garage door goes up dutifully after he enters his garage code. He takes off his shoes, removes his blood-speckled tee shirt and the still smoking weapon from his tube sock. His wife and kids are on their iPhones while sitting in various couches and chairs in his living room. None of them notice that he is covered head to toe in bloody deer goo.

The man takes his clothes, his tube socks, and the pistol and throws them all in the kitchen trash receptacle. He is completely naked now. He lifts the garbage bag out of the trash can and takes the refuse out to the even bigger trash can in the garage. Some sticky orange popsicle juice leaks out of a small perforation in the bag. 

When he returns, still fully nude, his wife speaks without looking up from the online puzzle game she is playing and murmurs “how was your walk sweetheart?”

The man replies robotically “those gnats are getting pretty gnarly down by the lake again.”

I’m 5 years sober today. Now what?