“Why would you want to kill deer?” we argued. “A deer is the last thing that needs to be killed.” “There are too many of them,” my father said forcefully, as if any day now the deer would realize their advantage and stage an uprising, herding all of us into empty prisons and gently licking the salt off us. “Too many of them,” he repeated. “Also, they eat people’s gardens.” I promise you that my father had never even looked at a garden. Flowers registered to him as very small bitches, far off in the distance.
