Sophia Ross
Sophia Ross (she/her) is a writer, editor, and educator from Ottawa, Canada. She holds an MFA in Fiction from George Mason University, where she also served as editor-in-chief of Phoebe Journal. Her work is forthcoming in the Santa Clara Review, and has been shortlisted in contests by Room and the late, great Ruminate.
Granger, NY
Before the snow, Western New York was dull brown: the fields, the roads, the trees. I laid at the bottom of the hill, flat on my back, waiting to be filmed. I could see oncoming cars if I lifted my head slightly, but I imagined I’d hear them first. There was hardly any traffic anyways. When I looked up between takes, all I saw was two rows of power lines and three wooden crosses on a hill. The crosses were painted a fading white.
We started filming in October, when Ava returned from fall break with a pair of deer antlers as inspiration for her short film assignment. She enlisted me as the star and Elyse as her co-director, and ever since we’d spent our weekends out in the countryside that surrounded our rural Christian liberal arts campus, often in the places we were told to avoid. One shot followed me as I trespassed through an unknown farmer’s field and into the stone well of what might have once been a grain silo. Another had me spitting fake blood in the sink of an abandoned farmhouse and spinning on a wheeled chair while flies buzzed around the decaying room. One Sunday, driving home from church, I spotted a deer carcass in the grass and texted Ava the location. That night, the three of us navigated back to the deer for a shot of me sitting a few feet away from its corpse on the side of the road, staring straight ahead as headlights illuminated us and then flickered off into the distance. Elyse held the antlers behind me, and I looked blankly at the camera, as though when the deer’s spirit died, mine did too.
Normally, I was not the sort of person who sat next to a dead deer on a highway or wandered in fields without knowing who owned them. I was on a full scholarship that I was terrified of losing and had consequently spent the last two years saying no when friends asked me to join them for a night of covert drinking at the local bowling alley or smoking weed from vintage pipes in the woods. But at every turn of filming, I did what Ava asked because I wanted to. I wanted to be outside, away from the river rock buildings of our small campus and the strict rules of its covenant. I wanted to lie on the ground.
The farm next to the road was owned by a college employee, a sweet woman who brought her baking to campus and knew our names when we visited her desk. She was delighted to host us and insisted on a full tour of her home. We petted goats and held piglets and watched as the woman’s husband left for the fields on his tractor, two big black dogs following behind him. The piglet in my arms could have been an illustration, blush pink with short bristles of hair. Her small cloven hoofs dug comfortably into my breast and she made soft noises when I scratched behind her ears. Her trust only made me feel guilty – this was a working farm, and one day she would be slaughtered by this family or a family like them. Maybe her meat would be served at the diner ten miles away, where we all went for rounds of bitter coffee on Sundays before services.
Ava had not come to film the animals, but she obliged our host by shooting the piglet in my arms, eventually focusing her lens on the infrared light that kept the rest of them warm next to their mother in the stall. That frame would appear in the final product: a mother pig breathing heavily as her offspring suckled. I placed my piglet in the hay and watched as she became just another one of them, small and mother obsessed. Then, I was asked to go lie in the road.
In Ava’s vision of the film, my character, this woman who roamed a rural landscape for weeks with fake blood painted on her face, was the victim of a car accident. Instead of dying, she became possessed by a deer. There were deer all over our county, and Ava had already filmed many of them from afar, the living and the dead. When I laid in the road, it was because I had just been in the accident. I was waking up. Ava applied the tacky mixture of cornstarch and red food dye to my face, let it drip down my chin, and I was placed in the path of oncoming traffic.
The first few shots were close-ups, but even as my friends moved away, I knew they were filming. I remained still, eyes open but unseeing. Every so often, a car tore past me in the other lane, but if they knew I was there, they didn’t betray it with a honk or a shout. They just carried on up the hill towards the crosses, onto the next town.
It was peaceful in the road. I loved this bleak, half-bright landscape, the smell of dead leaves and manure, the dull knife of cold that coated the winter months. On campus, we gossiped in hushed tones about the locals, the farms and the meth labs, the religious enclaves that could be death cults. I wanted to sink into this earth, let it saturate my bones and stay there when I returned to the city for Christmas, and eventually, for good. I wanted to be swallowed whole.
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Image by Julian Bracero from Pexels
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