White Tail Season

by K.P. Mooradian

I’ve known people who think hunters are callous towards animals. I think they assume we feel nothing when we take our shot, as if the sudden and whole death of a deer has never hurt us. The truth of it is those people will never feel what I felt when I sat by the back door, taking some time away from the abrasiveness of home to feel the cool grey wind, to watch the dry leaves clatter together. When I noticed her, the fawn was already closer than I’d been to a deer without a gun in my hand. Her spindly legs stepped so carefully around the patches of hard snow, eyes big and feathered with lashes, watching me. I held my breath, of course. No animal mother or siblings in sight, just the one young spotted deer making her way inch by inch closer to me.

The matte black knife I had been fidgeting with still rested in my hands, but it didn’t feel right to have the blade exposed. Without taking my eyes off of her, I slowly folded the knife back into itself. A few more feet and I would be able to touch her. To feel the bony velvet head, to pat my hand gently behind the satellite ears. I imagined what it would be like to give affection to the thing I might kill in a year.

The dog barely scratched at the molding when my grandfather, memory wiped by sickness, flung open the door for him. My grandfather’s gleeful laughter twisted my stomach. The dog hurtled into the woods like a bullet. The fawn could still just barely be seen, the white underside of her tail a shrinking speck in the matted woods. Boscoe came back, panting. His hot, foul dog mouth licked my face and arms, and I pushed him away. Inside, my father was oiling a butcher block. He saw my face when I came in and sighed, for I was his daughter.

“There was a fawn,” I said, quietly. I almost touched her, I thought, but couldn’t share aloud.

“Let him do what he wants. He’s old, Kim. He likes letting Boscoe out. Don’t take that from him.”

********************

I looked for my little comforts: my time alone, my academic interests, a soft armchair. I was cast out by my siblings primarily for being too bookish. We all hauled wood, had rounds on the woodchipper or the snowplow, helped our dad bring twenty-five pound bags of salt in through the back door. The fact that I was better and stronger than them at those things was not the problem. The problem was that after the chores were done, I would sit by the window or out in the woods to read. They could not understand this, and therefore they were angry. When Benji and Dad came by with a bucket to collect sumac, they shouted at me to join. I was in the tree stand. All the way down on the forest floor, Benji and Dad were the size of apples. They were insistent that I had had enough time alone.

“‘Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?’” I read from my book aloud.

My father looked up at me through the branches. I’d learned to dampen my anger, but being all the way up in that tree meant they couldn’t do anything to me till I got down. I’d stay up there forever if I could.

“‘God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image—’”

Sure, it was an intellectualizing and awkward thing to do, to read out from the page as if it had been written for me. Sometimes awkwardness is all you have in anger.

They were walking away, shaking their heads at my being—the fact that I continued to be.

I am that I am, I thought to myself, over and over till the words lost meaning.

“‘But my form is a filthy type of yours.’” By now I was yelling. “‘More horrid even from the very resemblance!’”

********************

After I came down, we prayed over our Hamburger Helper for God to heal Nikodemus’s cancer. When strangers made a comment about the fact that we lived in a town named Ick, no one, not even me, made much of a response. There wasn’t anything to say about it. It wasn’t the town name that described us—it was the streets. Around the cliffs near the shallow lake was Timbertop Road, where Nikodemus and his kids lived and operated the logging business. Of course, down closer to the lake was Maplewater Street, with old Irish Rita and the scab on her head. Near my family’s home was Hell’s Edge. That road was so narrow and rocky you couldn’t drive down it, but my brothers ripped their dirt bikes back and forth across the gravel all summer long. Ojibwe Road ran a straight line off the highway, across a wall-less bridge, between the hemlocks to an overhang. I sat there sometimes to watch the trees change color. Every man was red-faced from years in the sun, every boy kept his hair cut short. My sisters played softball and learned ice skating—hobbies appropriate for girls. Everyone had rules they followed. The more teeth a man had, the crueler he was. Elderly women who reeked of stale cigarettes could be trusted. It wasn’t because my skin was different from my family, in a twist of biological chance, that I knew these rules did not apply to me. I had always thought of myself as inherently other, inherently a different thing from them. Yes and no. In a way, it had more to do with the fact that my young, athletic sisters could shovel snow off the driveway for three months straight and end up more slender, but my own body grew like a tumor around me. It had more to do with the fact that Skylar from youth group and I prayed from the same Bible every night together, hoping to God He would show himself to us, both begging to receive a sign that would prove to us that finally, truly, Jesus is Lord. But when Skylar, with tears in his eyes, looked up to the popcorn ceilings of the youth learning center and thanked God for giving him a sign, I heard nothing. Whatever god spoke to him didn’t notice that I was there, too.

********************

The year I turned twelve, Sarah Grimshaw turned twelve, too. She sat at the head of the table in the bowling alley’s party room, pink paper crown on her head. Other than the strange boy, I don’t remember much else from that day. I knew immediately something was different about the strange boy that everyone, even Sarah, even my parents, seemed to dislike. He was older, maybe fourteen. He had a shaved blond head and fake dog tags. When it was time to split into our bowling teams, the boy—I can’t remember his name. Ty, Jed, Zeke, I’m not sure—sided with the rest of the boys as the parents handed out the rented bowling shoes. At first, it was a quiet whisper behind the hand of a mother, asking him to change teams. Then a few boys around him elbowed him, one blow landing somewhat painfully on the boy’s ribs. My memory is clearest when finally he was pushed out of the line of boys, and stood in the center of the room. I cannot forget the look of desperation on his face. Even now, I wince at my mind’s creation of his voice calling out ‘Please don’t do this’. In reality, I don’t think he said anything. For years, this was just a memory of unusual unkindness towards a stranger. It was only when I was in high school that I realized the nature of his sin.

In that realization, I understood that there were other types of people in the world, living types of lives that seemed mythic in my hometown. There were concepts of personhood—who you could be and how you could be—that I had never considered. I was not the only thing that should not be. Though the parents, and even many of the children, understood that boy as something adulterated by a secular society, something that only just barely looked like a boy, I had seen the holy return. The non-believers would cast Him out, but those who knew God would recognize His face.

Jesus had been born a woman.

When deer realize you’re watching them, they freeze as though they have been caught doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. Standing among the beech trees that tremble orange leaves—leaves that hang on with desperation after the maple, birch, and oak have all let theirs go—grazing from the muddy ground, itching the skin infected with a thousand ticks. Caught, yet after the killing and the dressing, it’s me who is red-handed. The nameless strange boy at Sarah’s twelfth birthday party, playing and eating doughy pizza and forgetting to wipe his mouth, caught. Frozen in the center of the pack, witnessed, watched. Myself, as my father spies me from the kitchen, taking my hair out of its braid, turning a page, receiving a text message from the girl who works at the gas station.

If I aim the barrel of my love at a woman, what good can come of it? She survives the shot and escapes, and will never again trust the stench of hair oil and gunpowder. Or, she will be shot down. The object of my desire, caught, singled out in the middle of the crowd. The other deer will run from her, afraid, and then they too will know to avoid my kind before I am able to approach. And she will bleed out for me, alone as I am alone, and I will warm myself with her blood. My hands inside her, and later, her flesh inside me. The final option is to deny my hunger, and pack the gun away.

About the Author

K.P. Mooradian lives in the suburbs of Philly and writes queer Americana. They have been published in ANMLY, and their work can be found on Substack, Tumblr, and Bluesky — @horseradishpost.