By Alexander Fredman
The deer out there will still be eating when we finish. (We’re eating tomatoes on toast.) The fence of the garden is for rabbits, for show. Anything that wants can hop it. It’s a foot of chicken wire taut between wooden posts.
There are four of them. A buck and two does, one fawn. It is natural to wonder what happened to the other fawn. (There must have been another.)
Green stalks turned in, trampled. The buck’s antlers haven’t yet come to point. We’ve watched him for years. You’ve said Get the gun and meant it. So what if that was another. In crepuscular light on a cool morning, hungry. I picked the ripe tomatoes this morning. I prepared these plates for us both. It’s silly, I know.
It’s still too early to shoot, even if—let them have at it. See the pale juice bead their elastic lips. So happy they are to have a mealy tomato, undone. What would go well with venison? Recollection is sparse. When I last had it deer were still rare here, it was a task to hunt them, it was a succession of failures. Childhood was spare and sketched in places to hide. Or ways to see the world and forget you’re in it. You know it wasn’t hate, that ancient thing, perched on a platform on a tree, watching for something to break the stillness. Gun in hand. It was love, of what? You taught me, but I let the years crawl on.
This house has been patched on with fresh space in the time since. Sometimes I sit where the old floorboards give way to new. Smooth wood, lacking the gaps that grew with time. The gun is gone but what could be done there, there there, your voice–there are such things as laws in this country. Damn what I could do about it.
Outside a deer kicks at a post. The wood is soft and rotting, but it doesn’t give way. After the tomatoes, they move on to the zucchini. Our largesse. In the pall of a thicket just beyond the garden a fifth stands, its body slight and shadowy. The other fawn, but as a cloud ducks the sun and a young light comes I can see that it’s not, it is an old one, the early markings of this year’s larger antlers. A blanched face, he emerges shy for the feast. He stands on the edge of the dark overgrowth and in the white light he is particulated, smoke in the air. He watches his progeny gorge themselves. Get fat to get through the winter, if they get there. Season starts October 1. Licenses cost twenty-two dollars for state residents. He knows this, the old one. He is cautious, from a different time. Like you, I think. Eat your toast, I think, and look to where you would be, the seat that still wears the indentation of your body. The oak chair with a memory of you in relief.
By hunting season, the gourds will be in. Orange flesh melting on black dirt brings the memory of what you once loved. That pie that I made just for you. You did love it, I tell myself, insecure even in absence. With the shifting wind comes the smell of cardamom and ginger.
No gun, but there are still some unspent shells in a drawer. Somewhere. I could throw them on the ground and hope for a pop. At a campfire as a kid—I smile at that thought. No carcasses that day but bullets tossed like bullets. We were happy without. Even in lean times you laughed at that. The fire made the woods dark. Faces in weird clarity. The day was stripped bare. We tossed bullets like bullets, through the fog. Off to a good start but they hit without a bang. We threw and gathered them, us kids. Later I slept against your leg. You kept your hand on the gun. Your age then is now young. It has been longer without you than with.
The curtains feint in slack air. I push them aside. The deer eat on. I pick a fleck of black on the window, shut one eye, and aim. Get the old one right in my sightline. Cock my head, pop my tongue. Then I laugh. As long as I watch the deer they can’t leave. That was my trouble with you. I let my sight slip, then and now. My eyelids soften here on the leather chair facing the window. Dreaming, the man of the house waits patiently for the past to arrive.
Alexander Fredman lives in New York. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Post Road, Heavy Feather Review, and Hobart.