The Fawn in the Forest Day

By Cynthia Beach

Published in the 2023 journal.

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The word Schwinn whisks me to the 70s when my throne was Dad’s red cruising bicycle with its upright handles. For Dad had affixed a narrow wooden platform between its chrome handles—handles that formed a wide-waisted U. After he swaddled the platform in padding, there I perched quite happily. Dad could do all things.

Until the fawn in the forest day.

Whenever we went camping at Big Basin, a favorite state park, Dad strapped the bikes to the

Volkswagen bus so we, as a family, could bike.

Then that day came. Perhaps Mom was heating up Spaghetti O’s, helped by Sis, because neither rode the forest trails behind the Schwinn. Dad labored over a bumpy path, and I clutched the handlebars. His breath came over me in gusts.

The woods doused the California day with cool green. But when we crested a small hill, Dad

panting, the trees gave way and opened not for a meadow or a valley, but for a strange holding pool beyond a high chain-link fence. I jumped down and stood uncertainly near the front balloon tire.

Like the canopy above, the pool’s surface wore green. Velvet green lawn—so rarely seen in our region—seemed to stretch across its top. Being a California girl, I understood pools. Being a young girl, I didn’t understand this one.

Dad tilted the bike and whispered, “A deer. Look.”

Across the pool and beyond the other side of the fence stood a doe. A wild animal—and she,

there still, unafraid. Magic careened. The doe remained.

Then she looked to the pool. Dad followed her gaze. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, no.”

Movement in the pool caught my eye. A fawn. Its tiny black hooves scrapped the pool side, its small head above the green. It thrashed. It struggled. It swam to one corner and then the next. The doe paced, her ears forward.

“Daddy!”

Daddy grimaced. He shook his head.

I looked to the fence. I looked to the fawn. Its movements were slowing. I yelled.

“I can’t.” His mouth was shaped in a way that I hadn’t seen before. He turned the bike. “Get on. Now.”

The ethereal green spot, the graceful doe, the failing fawn: we left behind. And with them, we left behind this, too: a young girl’s daddy.