Stag

by Karen Russell

We people were the monsters crashing their party, weren’t we? The creosote bush scrub, the gypsum outcrops and alluvial fans, the bighorn sheep and kangaroo rats, the chuckwallas and the Gilas with their seething orange-and-pink backs, the twisted junipers and the woolly Joshuas, the burrowing owls and the raspy cactus wrens—this was their home, and we were trashing it. Intruding on an open marriage of species that had survived the Ice Age, but might not survive us.

Tragically, ironically, outrageously, indefensibly—choose your own modifier, in the end it’s all veneer and our species keeps on killing, don’t we? “Developing” property, to use that especially cursed word. “Reclaiming” wetlands. Bricking up the desert with chlorine-blue infinity pools.

I was not surprised that my species had so efficiently destroyed, in two generations, an animal that had lived under the winged shadows of pteranodons.

I’m hedging a little, I will confess, because more than anything I want to believe in a God who loves my daughter and saved her. A love that envelops this world and extends beyond it, an eternity of love inside of which my baby now exists.

Now answer me truthfully: Is there a love alive that death cannot part? People talk about heaven as if it’s a sort of haunted mansion suspended in embalming fluid, but this is not the eternity I imagine. I want to believe in a heaven of red and living blood. A heaven where I will know my daughter.