I remember.

I remember bone-white deer antlers in the back yard. I would carry them around with me, studying them, running my fingers along their smooth surface over and over again. These antlers were sacred relics to me. I loved their smoothness, the irregular ridges at their base, the rounded tips, and the sound they made when I scratched their surface or tapped with a stone or another antler. They were parts of creatures that once lived and that were wild. Wild and proud. Now they were gone. When my dad and I brought back the deer he killed in the wilderness near Corona, I asked him what he would do with the head. “I don’t know yet” he said. He had hung the massive carcass from the ceiling of the garage, its twig-like legs straining beneath the rope, its muscles still warm and bulging. The smell filled my head and made me dizzy. Musky blood, damp grass, and drying fat. I was afraid to ask him for the deer’s head, but I wanted it more than anything else. I watched it slowly rotate up above my head, attached to a neck that before had been stout and thick but now was limp and folded over grotesquely. A gray-blue tongue , almost as large as my arm, hung out of its black snout. The massive eyes, black and empty, stared down at me with indifference. Finally I asked him if I could have the head to bury in our back yard. I wanted to bury the head and wait until it became bone and then see it become as white as the antlers I carried around. It would be my project. I thought myself special, different from other kids my age because i was the kid who could wait for months (years?) for nature to remove the skin and fur and muscle from the head of a deer my dad had killed. I told him this was my plan, and he looked at me without the slightest amount of confusion or judgement. It made sense to him that this is what I would want to do. Perhaps he had wanted to do the same thing with the deer his own father had hunted. “Just make sure you take it as far away from the house as you can. I don’t want the smell near the house. And bury it deep. I don't want coyotes coming into the yard and digging it up. They’ll hurt Chuy, too.” Chuy was our small black dog. I said I would do those things and he then set about cutting the head away from the body. I was not shocked or disgusted by the sight of knife cutting through dead flesh, but I looked away while my dad worked out of respect for the deer.

I held the head by one brown, velvet-covered antler. It felt smaller than I imagined it would when it loomed above me in the garage. I ran my finger along the fur on the top of its head. I brushed its eyelashes lightly—they were so long! After I had examined the head to my satisfaction, I brought it out to my dad’s garden. There were squash plants with light orange flowers and tomato plants almost as tall as me, from which I would sometimes pluck the fat green caterpillars that ate away the leaves. I picked a spot near the corner of the garden and placed the head on the dry dirt. Using a shovel…