the heel press

The gift is from my uncle; packaged with tight ribbon in brown paper, handle with care stamped onto the side. It is a long, thin, yet heavy parcel which I tear open with the unabashed glee of a young boy on Christmas morning.

The glitter of the metal in the sunlight of the winter Tuesday morning stuns my eyes. I stare down at the rifle with mixed confusion and apathy. What does it mean?

My reflection can be viewed in the shine of the barrel. The wood of the stock is smooth, polished down for a snug fit in the groove of the shoulder.

My uncle has sent me a rifle. It is my eighteenth birthday.

Father runs from the house; mother trails behind with her morning coffee, wearing her nightgown. She smells like she is sick. Her kidneys are failing, and her weekly trips to dialysis are not working. I have offered to give her one of my kidneys on multiple occasions. She has consistently denied.

Father is always smoking. There is a cigarette in his hand now, even though it is early in the morning. He sleeps with the pack on his night table. He is the only person I know who smokes unfiltered Lucky Strike, smacking the paper against his lips and spitting out loose tobacco strands that find their way into his mouth.

He spits one such strand now. "What's that, a gun?"

I nod. "Uncle Karl sent it to me."

"Your mother's brother?"

I nod.

He looks to my mother, disapproving. Mother arches her neck to look at the gun, shrugs, and coughs heavily. She walks closer, to put her arm around my father. My god, she smells terrible. It is as if the life is going from her body, and everything is shutting down.

When my mother's father, my grandfather, was dying, we would visit him in the hospital. I was six. There was a smell about him, in the thick haze of the hospital room with its IV drip stuck into the arm of my mother's progenitor. The smell was one that filled the hospital, sunk its way into his veins along with the fluids they pumped into him. It was a sterile smell of dead roses that floated its way up into the nostrils, mixed in with the alcohol that lined the hallways, alcohol and cheap ammonia used to clean the toilets. My grandfather was dying of colon cancer, and so he had a bag that held his excrement. It smelled too, but not like shit smells, more like a damp section of the woods. It was a musky, deep smell, which was ironically very alive, when everything inside of him was dying. Chemicals masked the smell. Chemicals that did nothing else but to further the knowledge that death was omnipresent.

I run my hands along the smooth stock and admire the hole at the end of the barrel. The rifle is a .22, custom built. My uncle has also sent me a scope.

"For Hunting, best of luck, love Uncle Karl," he wrote in his attached letter.

When I was twelve, I learned to shoot. My mother took me up to visit Uncle Karl, who lives alone in Northern Vermont, in a small cabin in the woods. He has never married. His only source of employment is hunting and selling whatever he kills. I asked him once, when I was sixteen, whether or not it ever bothered him.

"No," he replied. "Why would it?"

I level the rifle against my shoulder, aiming it at an invisible target. My finger feels cool on the trigger. I pull it. The dry click is soothing to my ears. It is a good gun.

My father shakes his head, disapproving.

"I suppose you'll be needing ammunition for that," he says.

I nod. "Could you drive me to the store?"

He hesitates for a moment, and then looks at my mother.

"Go," she says. "I'll fix breakfast."


We drive to the gun store, but as it won't open for another hour, we sit in a diner and eat breakfast.

"Mother will forget anyways," my father says. "She has dialysis today."

I stare at my eggs. They are flaccid and unmoving, and something about the feeling in my stomach after I eat them makes me sick.

The gun store is shadowed despite the morning hour. The owner is a man whom I have met before, at flea markets in town. He sells his old Vietnam trinkets; medals he has found or garnered over the years, old gun parts, helmets, pins from the anti-war protests he never attended.

He told me bluntly once, in a drunken haze as we negotiated the price of an anti-war poster from 1968, of his times in the war.

"They had them tiger traps, you know," he said, pulling the money bill by bill from my hands. "Tiger traps and those camps, where they made us do things to them, to each other, and we were scared man, that's all I remember, being scared. Scared I'd fall into a pit, 'cause I saw my buddy fall in once, and we could only hear his screams, till we had to throw in a grenade in case the enemy heard him."

He had laughed then. All his teeth were missing.

"And then they found us and I was in the camp for a very long time."

He doesn't remember me. My father and I buy a box of bullets for .22 rifles, and as I reach for my wallet my father holds his hand out.

"Happy Birthday," he says to me, as he hands the silent teller some money.

As we leave, I look back at the man. His hands are shakily opening a flask that he has pulled from the pocket of his tattered denim jacket. He looks so sad.

When we get home, I kiss my mother's cheek, breathing in deeply. She has showered now, the rose of her shampoo and her sandalwood soap masking her smell, and yet it is still there, lurking underneath.

"Father," I say, "I want to go out shooting."

He has lit a new cigarette. "Then go."

"Do you want to come?" I ask.

"You're 18," he says. "Old enough to go out on your own."

I nod, and get up to leave.

"Your birthday present is on the hanger," he says, from behind me, and I notice the coat hanging there.

"Thanks," I say, grabbing it, and leaving the house.


Gun in hand, my boots make tracks in the snow. The jacket is warm, fleece, and I know it must have cost them something. But the house was too suffocating, with the smell of my father's cigarettes and my mother's impending mortality. I had to get out.

I am walking towards an area of the woods where I know there are some stumps and a felled tree. I've had a gun permit for a year now, so it is no difficulty shooting the rifle. I just need to find a place to do it.

I am nearly to the spot when I come across the deer.

It stares at me, its eyes dappled with black spots, nose twitching slightly, ears perked up, waiting for any movement.

I am suddenly aware of the gravity of the situation. I have a gun in my hand, and the deer is there. Without thinking, I cock it, unconsciously relishing the smooth sound of the bullet sliding into the chamber.

Finger poised slightly above the trigger, I place the stock on my shoulder, and aim the scoped rifle at the deer.

Through the tight circle and mini crosshair I can see it gazing at me thoughtfully, but only for an instant. Then, it nuzzles around the snow until it finds a melted patch, and slowly gnaws at the frozen grass underneath.

My heart is beating fast. The rifle is growing heavy. Sweat drips down my fingers, smudging the barrel. I wipe the sweat from my eyes, letting the gun droop a little.

The deer is eating grass, and looks up again, as if aware intuitively of my slight movement.

I hesitate to raise the rifle again, but when I do, the thoughts of walking away have disappeared.

The deer begins to nudge at the grass once more, and I fire. The shot echoes through the forest. Birds scatter from trees. And then there is an overwhelming silence, and the thick smell of gunpowder that fills my nostrils and stings my eyes.

The deer lies in the snow, strawberry-blood spreading smoothly across the ground. I drop my gun in the snow and approach it, slowly.

I can only see one eye, open and staring up at me. There is a slight movement to its lips, its nose. It looks like it is smiling. Its flank is beautiful; I run my hands through the auburn fur, feeling its flesh, its bones. My hand traces its way towards the heart, where my bullet has passed through.

Its blood is warm and coagulated, thick with the quick passing of life. I rub a bit in between my fingertips, before wiping it away in the snow.

I am seized with an immeasurable sadness and sink to my knees next to the deer. Tears flow down my face and intermingle with the blood drying in the deer's fur.

"I'm sorry," I sputter. "I'm sorry."

The deer looks at me with that one eye, so sad, so peaceful.


I leave the rifle in the snow when I leave. I won't need it anymore, and if I did, I wouldn't be able to use it. It belongs with the deer now anyway. It is not a gift I deserve.

As I walk home, I don't think about what my father and mother will say. I don't wonder if I will tell them or not. Instead, I think about what Uncle Karl told me. About how it never bothered him, killing animals. I wonder if he ever looked them in the eye.