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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

_________

Vladimir Nabokov, Mary

When Dakota Tyree's mom, Lisa, who gave him the nickname Cody, was still alive, and his dad Teddy was still mentally well and they all lived and worked together happily on a strawberry farm right south of Plant City, nearer to Keysville, he had a friend named Aaron Cooley, a little rapscallion who, like Cody, was a native Cracker from an old family that had been there since Florida was its own Republic.

He was an incurably mischievous boy who spoke with that rare Dixie drawl that still haunts those obscure parts of Hillsborough County - he was a year older than Cody, but unlike Cody who adored his mother and never misbehaved, Aaron was always getting his hide tanned for this or that nonsense: trying to tip a cow, sassing his parents, stealing...he was a little hellion, a dirty whiteboy, a cocky redneck cutup. The thrill of being bad was too much for him to ever mind his elders.

He and Cody used to play in and around some woods that stood on the edge of the Tyree Family Strawberry Patch, and invent little games - Cody was an expert thief and Aaron was a brave knight, and together they'd fight for honor and justice and battle imaginary monsters and weird creatures that, as little boys often think, were just as real as actual animals, hiding somewhere amongst the trees.

There is always something unseen and lurking to the Florida trees, after all - a distrust, no matter what the signs at the entrances to the parks and the reserves say...you are never fully welcome, not at first. Trust must be earned. The slogan of Florida State Parks is The Real Florida, which should be taken literally and have attached to it an understood veracity which is both sarcastic and insidious.

But that particular part of Florida is still Hillsborough which means it is heavily influenced by the politics and money of Tampa, whose vast asphalt mazes spread out like a directionless spider's web, down to Sarasota, across the bay to Pinellas. In the urban areas it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell where one community ends and another begins - but going east, chasing the Sun, the madness and the carbon monoxide fades to trees, farms, and greenery: a beckoning, bucolic paradise.

The best time around here, where Aaron and Cody led charmed childhoods, is in the Springtime, for it is then that Florida starts to shimmer and hearkens back to being an Earthly Elysium, gives in to its own mythology, and births in ecstasy all manner of sweetness and bounty - there amidst the bursting white angelic purity of the orange-blossoms and the red-ripening strawberries and the newborn calves licked cleaned by their mamas in the pastures and the dripping-sweet honey of the beehives is the Florida that America, still, deserves...blessed, eternally, by the happy shine of the reborn Sun.

Cody and Aaron were both born in the Springtime, that most glorious period of the Floridian year, and they were both children of Florida, they were natives of natives and they were blessed for it, looked on favorably yet they could not know it. Both of them were originally born in a tiny town called Balm, which recalls something Biblically luxurious and tropically delicious, and indeed driving through that whole swath of Eastern Hillsborough it is hard not to see why, there is something expressly mythological in the terrifying Edenic purity of rural Florida, something that, indeed, could salve the horrid sickness from the life out of balance of the city-dweller.

As Cody and Aaron would play together they would see, every Spring, newborn fawns - delicate creatures attended to by their much larger doe mothers, with the spots on their flanks indicative of their statuses as beloved newcomers to their herd. And every time they would see them they would watch them, before they shyly ran off... Aaron would whisper to Cody about how his granddaddy, who drowned when Opal blew through a few years back, used to say there was a King of the Deer (with capital letters) way, way in the forest, bigger than any deer you'd ever seen, with humongous antlers that had all kinds of flower-blossoms on them: peach and cherry and plum and Lord knew what else. And even though Cody had heard the story many times from Aaron he always stopped what he was doing to sit and hear it again. Aaron loved telling Cody because Cody loved hearing it - a King of the Deer, whose antlers changed, like branches on the trees, with the seasons, that bore swollen fruit of rare juiciness for his harem-court of doe and fawn.

They were Florida youngsters who lived happily til Lisa, Cody's mom, died of a very sudden ailment of her kidneys when Cody was ten and Aaron was eleven - after that Aaron used to hear all kinds of bad things about how Teddy went crazy and blamed his son for somehow killing his wife, Cody never wanted to play anymore, after about two years had to ran away, and Aaron never saw his best friend, ever again. He heard something about him living in Orlando with some relatives, but a fella he knew who worked the Strawberry Festival said he thought he saw him bumming around Tampa somewhere.

Aaron never knew - the Tyree Strawberry Patch got bought up by SweetBay, the house had the things in it sold to remaining family members and then demolished, the fields went fallow. The woods started to creep in, year by year, growing where Lisa and Cody would harvest strawberries together, happy and laughing even amidst their hard work in the fine weather...there at the edge where Aaron and Cody, true knight, wily thief, would play together, in happier times.

But the tale Aaron used to tell Cody - the King of the Deer - lived on.

As Aaron grew up the allure of the story wore thin and then eventually vanished. He kept it close to him in memory but gone was the childlike wonder, the fairytale veneer. Now, all grown up - five foot eight, skinny tone to his hairless stomach, bright red pickup truck with a big FloGrown sticker on the window, beat up shirt tucked into dirty jeans, mouthful of chaw, near to no hair covered by a Gators cap with a fishing hook on the bill - he thought not of visiting this supposedly majestic creature, doing it homage, paying it respect... ...but hunting it, decapitating it, stuffing it, and becoming famous and rich and renowned everywhere as the best damn hunter in Florida. It would be like catching Bigfoot - or rather the Skunk Ape, his Florida tribesman, which Aaron had also tried to catch- only bigger, weirder, better.

He kept it firmly in the back of his mind every deer season - as it was now, at its conclusion, the third week of February - when he went down his family's favored path into the woods to hunt the elusive, antlered creatures that blessed him with free money and free food. To do so he would have to take time off from the job at his own family's strawberry farm which made money when it was out of season by being a cannery and an apiary, selling honey and jam all year round - but hunting deer was his way of making a little cash, too: rich yuppies from Carrollwood would pay big money for venison, and snowbirds would pay even bigger money for mounted heads at the taxidermist.

His favorite place to hunt deer was - a little irony that was not lost on him - the big woods that he and Cody used to play in, as time went by inexorably swallowing back his old best friend's farm and homestead. The woods got thicker and thicker the nearer you got to where the Alafia splits off into two branches - McDonald and McCollough, a little north of Alderman's Ford - and it was easy, very easy, to get lost. It made the ramblings of Aaron's granddad, doubtless inherited from his Hibernian ancestors with their fired Celtic imaginations and weird attachments to big deer, seem a little realer. He was a rowdy firecracker of a man with a broad, white, combed moustache that gave him the look of an uncanny dwarven smithy - Aaron's daddy had more than once remarked on the resemblance in the face between Aaron and his granddad, how the grandson looked so much like the grandfather, when he was a young man... There always seems to be in every town one particular forest, one particular set of clustered vegetation, which by some sort of accident has escaped the axeman's blow and the bulldozer's pummel. Here, trees are allowed to swell too large and grow too tall, blissfully undisturbed by the humans who have otherwise ransacked and razed its surrounding brethren...and nobody will be ever able to tell you why. For one reason or another the stand of woods Aaron used to play in and now hunt in, that were old when his granddad was born, was allowed to be in peace, shrugging off the intrusions of the colonizing naked apes around it.

Perhaps some nagging guilt or fear hung amidst those leaves and branches - perhaps some malign coincidence conspired to keep dreadful, decades-old secrets firmly hidden. This is, after all, Florida - inescapable Florida, history-haunted Florida, still the South as much as it tries to deny it, slaves died down here, their brown bodies contorted, like beautiful Daphne in faraway myth, into the twist-trunk cypress, the spindly-tentacled live oaks.

You think about this kind of stuff when you're in the woods by yourself - like Aaron was that day.

His pickup was parked and waiting at the head of the trail, and down he went, the path, strewn with long, flattened pine needles, just as his brother, father, granddaddy all had done, they had all made this place theirs, beaten down by their boots, year after year.

This kind of place was exactly where Aaron thrived. Even when he was Cody's valiant paladin he was acting out some impulse inside him to be out here and be overlord of some domain - and who better to rule and to reign than a hunter? No need for a King of the Deer when a man intrudes into the woods: humans are tool-users, who have no claws to rend or fangs to rip, so they use ingenious devices for stalking and for killing - Aaron's own tool was his brother's gun, the one he was taught how to shoot with. Aaron and his brother, Moses, had been hunting together, not just deer but also the big, nasty feral pigs that roamed with impunity around here, since Aaron was eight, and Moses was thirteen. He had honed his skills - learned, genetic - year after year, a modern Johnny Reb doing what his ancestors had done since they had first stepped foot on this green, sandy land, with his brother at his side: through all the times he had cut a shine and made a fool out of himself to his parents, he respected and admired and loved his brother as nobody else in the world.

Seven years later - hunting season again, Aaron was out in the woods as he usually was and missed the news when the family got it - a raghead in Fallujah shot Moses in the back, he died for his country and his coffin was shipped back with a flag draped over it with every honor afforded him. He was buried next to their farm - his baby sister, Rebecca, too young to understand, liked to play with the passion-vine flowers that grew around it.

Aaron, for his part, sold the gun he had bought himself - he hunted only with Moses', calling on him in silent prayers for steady shots, clean kills, guidance, protection...and patience. Though his brother's departure had forever wounded him he still had a good life, in spite, or maybe because of, being at all of twenty infused with an unquenchably rebellious spirit that expressed itself in everything he did: why else bother still trying to hunt for creatures that clearly didn't exist? He refused to listen to reason, even graduating high school his illogic was a guiding force. So though he was alone, down the pine-needle path, amidst the bursting ferns and the whispering palmettos and the tall sabals and the towering oaks. It was February so the mosquitoes were still hiding, but through the air cut the wailing song of the mourning dove, the noisy squawk of the squirrel. Aaron was in his lucky hunting gear, redolent of the masking deer piss, gun in hand - though he was alone out here, watched by the trees, and spied by the stray birdsong, he carried with him a legacy, in himself, around himself, that he barely understood, but that guided him, silently, watchfully, this native Floridian in the real Florida.

But whatever thoughts he had collapsed into concentration at the task before him: one last day to shoot him a buck, one last day until many months to find for himself the fame for finding and bringing down, if he could, the game he never expected and maybe never wanted to win, the Skunk Ape and his old colleague, the King of the Deer.

Not long down the path, noticeably cooler even in the humidity with the elder trees' shade, he detected something - a smell, very faint, but as he kept on growing stronger...and stronger...floral, perfumed, heady and yet delicate, blowsy in the Spring air.

Now he stopped - tilting his head back, trying to overcome his own ammonic, animal reek of disguising deer urine, he sniffed the air, once, twice - it did not smell like the rest of the forest, no amniotic curtain of leaf, pine, moss, and mud, but sprung on his nostrils like a trap: flowers, the bright, busy pungence of bees pollinating big, handsome blossoms.

He shook his head, trying to clear it...the phrase head in the game came to him and he tried to resharpen his focus, minding his steps to be quiet and muted, he had done everything right and he hoped - luck being the thing you could not prepare for - that a stray deer would come his way. Deeper he went, along the flattened path of pine-needles that was carved out from the rest of the tangled growth, on, on to a clearing where Aaron knew he could take a rest - his stance went from upright to hunched, lower, lower, until he was near-crawling on the ground, amidst the sharp grass that grew tall with the trees on the path's edge, hiding himself, letting the camouflage of his sprayed-on scent do its work of making him invisible amongst the untamed verdure. The smell of flowers - he had smelt it before around here, but never this strong - haunted him all the while, against the surface of his nose, effervescent, like a poorly-remembered dream. As he continued his slow, aching pace, they came, down to the ground, distracting him near to his field of vision - petals, white-pink, velvety, fluttering in the air like errant moths. Now he furrowed his eyebrows, sandy-brown, like his brother's, over baby blue eyes just like his brother's too - now he looked about him, scanning the area skeptically. Where were these petals coming from? He knew there was a very, very old peach tree up ahead, but it wasn't time for it to blossom - was it? As if on cue, there came still more petals, the same color - then more - then more again. Aaron stopped where he was, turning his head, slowly, all around him, his face revealing a bafflement he wished he could have hid. What was going on? Where was this smell of flowering trees - the petals - where was it all coming from? No sooner had he thought it, than he had his answer: In front of him, some feet ahead, near the distant clearing that Aaron knew this path led to, and solidifying in his vision, was a whole grove of trees - peach trees, small, but healthy and brimming with flowers. Bewildered, Aaron nearly forgot himself as he paced briskly, still crouched, to the clearing's midst - it only took him a minute, maybe less, but nearer as he got to it, the sooner it changed for the stranger. In the air, like a gentle snow, in the early humidity, and catching spare breezes that seemed to come into nowhere and go into the same, were petals - pink, white, pink-white, white-pink - it was a painful dazzle to the eye, an exclamation, a proclamation, of new life...feminine, dainty, yet abundant, illimitable. Aaron was still near to his knees and safely hidden in the grass - but in the clearing, encircled by these new trees that he did not recognize from last year, he was vulnerable, pregnable, easy to suggestion, for what he was seeing was so completely uncanny, that he almost didn't believe it was real. A sea of petals - an ocean of flowers - exchanged from tree to tree, borne on winds that had no source, and at its center the gnarled, twisted peach tree that had stood there for forty years...this was the area he knew well, so well, and yet it seemed like a foreign planet, the strangeness of the new blossoming trees twisted and strangling what he knew and understood and remembered. The clearing was the same, the woods beyond it were the same, but these fruit trees - peaches - they were not here before, or if they were, they were small, immature, maybe still sleeping in their stones...not ready to appear, dramatically and luxuriantly, like this. The floral aroma he had detected and that had tickled and enticed him was now strong enough to drown out anything that neared it - all Aaron could smell was the flower, delicate and deep, all Aaron could know was the odor of the peach-blossom, the mythic wind of this tropic South. Aaron took several breaths - he was worried, he was worried this wasn't real, that he was dreaming, or that he was really awake but he had been negligent in noting his surroundings last year, that the peach trees were there and he, a hunter bad at his job, hadn't noticed them... ...yes that had to be it. Some weird hybrid of peach tree, one that blossoms spectacularly and earlier than others, that had to have been it, Aaron might have been a good ol boy but surely to God he weren't no idiot... He heard something - a shuffling, a movement, in the grass, amidst the trees, and he stiffened, taking position, steeling his resolve. He could see it - the branches of the eldest peach tree, moving, shuffling, rustling, a hesitancy. Aaron watched - Aaron waited. Finally the branches parted, slowly, slowly - moving past the drawn curtains of the branches - it appeared. A deer - a giant, brawny whitetail with enormous antlers, a skeletal candelabra...crowned with beautiful fruit-blossoms all across them.

Aaron sucked in a breath - his eyes went wide. It was real - Jesus Christ it was real! Aaron started to rise, got his legs and feet ready to get up and greet this animal, the most majestic, maybe the most beautiful thing he had ever laid eyes on - he shot back down, deathly afraid of being seen. The King of the Deer. From the grove of peach trees all gathered together like a congregation of worshippers, through the blizzard of petals that was being blown off their full, heavy branches - Aaron watched it. Just as his granddaddy had said, just as went the hinted rumors amongst the oldtimers, just as he and Cody had always hallucinated in the far off fantasy-kingdom of their boyhood - it strode, undaunted, a gait so majestic it seemed to carry with it a nobility that preceded any notion of humanity, an inherited aristocracy from a time immemorial to man. Amongst other whitetails, amongst other animals, it was clearly royalty, its antlers rising to an impossible height, two, three, four_feet, and though Aaron was no expert like his brother was, he could only guess that it was thirty, forty, _fifty points, maybe more. For the antlers were, indeed, a crown of magnificence that shamed anything fashioned by any human - tall already, but up and down the bone, spaced out as though, again, they were tree branches themselves growing out of a cervid skull, were blossoms, with big billowing petals of different colors, white, pink, a little purplish - cherry,peach, plum, that would attract bees and turn, with the months, into sanguine, sweet fruit. It stopped - it ceased its lordly stroll, its morning walk amongst its dominion. Aaron's eyes could go no wider - and luckily they couldn't, for the thing, the creature, the king, the monarch, had arrested its long, stately legs, turned its head, all of Springtime and all of the New Year on its antlers, and looked dead at him. The beast stared at Aaron, and Aaron stared at the beast - their eyes were in perfect contact, matched, locked, peers of the woods, and in the glimmers of unreality that waxed strange at the edge of his consciousness Aaron knew that in another life, another world, he would lower his own antlers at this animal and charge, for the mastery, the presidency, the kingship, of this whole forest. Bright, black, haughty eyes. Staring at him. Aaron did not hesitate. He came here to find a buck to shoot, with this creature before him as a kind of unicorn, literal or figurative, whose ensnarement would enshrine him forever as the best, undisputed master of the buckshot, stalker of cryptids, downbringer of legends - he did not expect to ever see it, he did not expect to have his nutty grandfather ever be proven right, but his chance was here, and he would never have it again. The snow of peach-petals around him was stirred by a solitary, hushed breeze so that they flew up and around him, as though announcing his presence in the dreadful dénouement to a three-act tragedy, the villain, the killer, the role he had been born to play, for he had never learned respect, this one, he had always cut a shine to his elders, this one, and no god, no king, dared reign over this descendant of the upstart Confederate. Up came Aaron from his crouch and up came Aaron's gun, the ghost of his brother swooped down from the golden bar of Heaven, took the barrel and steadied it as he was prayed to do every night, and the kill was made, through the beast's thick neck, a spectacular hit, the spray of blood and the convulsion under its hoofed feet brief but devastating - flowered antlers and all, its eyes swimming up in a final throe, it collapsed, a tremendous, meaty thud. "Gotcha--" Aaron murmured. Then, at once - all was silent - all was still. The faint wind in the air, the breeze that moved the petals with it, died - they fell, each to a one, fluttering to the ground. In an instant, in the instant, everything changed.

It was as though by shooting, by killing this beast, he had killed the spirit of the forest itself - no longer could he hear the birdsong, no longer was there any air or wind, no sound of no insect...only immediate, dominating, silence. Aaron could hear the blood pounding in his ears, the scrape of his throat swallowing, dry, nervous - at last could he rise, set his feet to move, gingerly, through the grass...he was triumphant but he did not feel it, he was victorious but there was a nag, new, seconds-old but growing, that he did not deserve it. The shot had rang out and killed the master of this Hillsborough County wood, a mythic dream, the creature of his childhood - and Cody's too, wherever he was now, wherever he may be - and with it, ushered in an eeriness that made Aaron actually, physically uncomfortable. He let out a deep sigh as he jerked his head around for any signs of life, anything that would unmute the dread that had descended on these woods, this clearing, like an invisible shadow - he realized his hands were shaking, and he laid down his brother's gun as he continued the short distance it took to examine his kill. As Aaron approached the corpse of this creature, he did so tentatively, hesitantly, he did not know why but even reverently, every step deliberate and guided, as though he were afraid - weirdly, irrationally - to disturb the dead thing as it slumbered eternally. He found it, and knelt by it -him, the least Aaron could do, upstart though he be, was still put some dignity behind it with pronouns. He was laying on his flank, slain cleanly, as Aaron figured he had been, through his neck, the black, aqueous eyes registering no emotion, just blank, gelid mirrors of nothingness that saw the azure cloud-tossed sky beyond the dappled-shadow of the canopy above it. Aaron recoiled - the feeling of uncertainty that had coursed through him before, of being unable to truly celebrate this victory, this unthinkable completeness to his record as a hunter, now exploded into his foreconscious. He watched in amazed, hypnotized horror as the colored blossoms up and across the creature's once sky-reaching antlers each, to a one, wilted, faded, and died - falling from the bone of the antler to the grassy floor beneath. Winter had come to the promising warmth of Springtime. Aaron cringed - a wave of regret beset him, and he shook his head, taking off his hat to honor the beautiful thing he now wished he had left alone...like everything else he had not thought, he had just barreled in, no consequences considered. He swallowed hard, again - he tried to recollect his thoughts, tried to put normalcy behind it, as if this were just another buck and this were just another clearing where peach trees had appeared from one year to the next - now he would have to go back to his pickup, now he would need to get his phone out of the cup holder and call his daddy to help him haul this thing... He shook his head, shutting his eyes, the guilt flaring up again. "Dammit..." he murmured. Why did he feel this way? He had shot and cleaned and eaten dozens, if need be scores of deer, he had done twice that many to the nasty pigs running around in the fields - why this, why now? Aaron undid his gloves and threw them off, he took off his jacket - soaked with deer urine, he had really overdone it - and did the same, a small pile, his intent was to sit down and think about what he should do, and how he felt, and why... But his thoughts were banished with the blow he received - smashed into, without warning, by a soft object moving at a swift speed, it hit him hard enough that he was checked to the ground, his hat knocked out of his hand to fly away into some squat palmettos in the underbrush, never to be seen again. The wind knocked out of him, his vision blurred by the shock, Aaron jerked his head wildly around him, vainly searching for whatever had hit him - a bull maybe, he thought, or a deranged cow, not that he'd ever seen or known them to do something like this, but maybe - maybe... His vision cleared, bit by bit, the image becoming lucid. Now he could see - and he cried aloud in fear when he saw it. There, up close, mere inches away from his face, such that he could feel the snuffing of its muzzle, the wetness of its nose, was an unusually large, antlerless deer - a doe, with inquisitive, intelligent eyes, staring him down. Aaron's breath became strained with sudden, acute fear - he was totally bewildered, as to what this doe was doing, or trying to do - maybe, his mind racing, desperate to piece this together, if there had been a King of the Deer, then there must be a Queen of the Deer to go with him...and since he had killed the king, maybe they were out for revenge. They - he looked past this doe and saw them, a small herd, maybe seven, no more than ten, all female of different sizes and ages, a safe distance behind her. Aaron trembled - what had he done? What monstrous thing in the forest had he fucked with to make this happen? Back his eyes went to the doe, still observing him, sniffing him... ...and she shut her eyes. Aaron's breath barely registered, so full of apprehension, bewilderment, as to what was happening - then he saw it. From one of the doe's eyes it came...a single, perfect, crystalline teardrop, perfumed, Aaron could smell, with a floral smell stronger than the ambient one that still submerged them, like a magnolia blossom that had been left in water. Aaron could scarcely believe what he was seeing - a deer was crying. His heart leapt to his throat, the agony of guilt and regret turning into a consuming pyre. Now it was his turn to shut his own eyes, tight, and fight back his own tears as well. What had he done? What was he ever thinking to kill something so beautiful, to cause such pain to such a clearly intelligent creature? Why? Why...? ...once again his thoughts were interrupted, torn into, by an action that the doe took - a long, passionate lick, near to a kiss, with her tongue, from one side of his face to the other. Aaron started and moved back, his mind now a total blank of confusion - but the doe persisted, and again, again, licked him, laved him, until his face was uncomfortably moist with saliva. She lifted her graceful head back up and turned around to walk away - leaving Aaron to absorb her gift...and let the coronation begin. Her husband was dead, and her husband was the king - by a savage law of a savage place, a new king must be found. But who? The king is dead, long live the king. Although the forest was dappled with playful sunlight, and although it was February and there was only a pleasant humidity, a relief from the irritating dryness of what passes for the Florida Winter, Aaron now felt - uncomfortably hot. It was though some unseen hand had cranked up his internal temperature - he huffed, coughing, fumbling for his clothes as he undid his pants, his underwear, both pooling at his ankles atop his boots - he took off his shirt so the forest could see his toned, but still near-to-scrawny figure. His head was fuzzy - whatever judgment, whatever fear, whatever logic that may have worked inside him all this time was now dissolving into an indistinct pile of befuddlement. He tried to shake his head, to literally shake out whatever was in it to cause him to be so dazed, so quick - but all he could see, all that suddenly, immediately filled his vision... ...was the doe, turned around, presenting herself. Her folds were moist as though she was in season, suddenly, like she had been called to a duty Aaron could never understand - her head moved, left to right in a circular pattern, as though she was beckoning him. Aaron was a farmboy and he had all the strange urges farmboys are joked about having - but he was a precocious boy and he couldn't help how he felt. And when, ever, had he respected any law at all - either God's or nature's? He would get his thrill how he got his thrill and to Hell what everybody else thought. Maybe it was a miracle he had never acted on these urges, the way any cunt made him feel the need to be sly and charming. But even if he had, or even if he was never like that at all, and lived an upright life free from sin and the temptations of animal flesh such as this, he still would have not been able to resist. No man, however how strong in the Lord or in his own will - no man could deny this doe, this queen amongst deer. Some force - physical, chemical - was working against him, making his brain revert, parts of it to grow stronger and more robust, and others to fade. Aaron was helpless - this doe of his dreams, the most beautiful, desirous thing he had ever wanted - he was helpless to her. He needed her, he needed to please her, to - mate with her. He stumbled forward, landing on his hands knees, and crawled to where he could get the best view, the best taste. He pressed his entire face against it - the queen's cunt - and set his tongue to work. Back home he had done it many times, it was his perverse passion to set the girls squealing with his natural talent - but instantly he knew this was different, not just in shape, not just in feel...but taste. Maybe it was because they lived in a peach grove and could eat all the fruit they wanted, maybe it was just these deer for whatever reason, but the juices, the thin rivulets that showed the doe's readiness, tasted deliciously, almost unbearably sweet- like peach syrup, the fragrance of sugared fruit wafting with the small trickles. He found her clitoris amidst the moist folds and prodded it, teased it, eager - thirsty for the red-clear liquid that poured out, into his mouth, lapping like an animal at a stream. Again and again he licked, slurped, and drank, the queen-doe straining and moving with her own pleasure, for Aaron may have been a human with a tongue not as long as her former lover's, but still, his was a rare talent. Eventually she bade him cease by flicking her tail, taking a few nonchalant steps - Aaron, intoxicated, fell forward to face plant ignobly, shirt off, pants still around his ankles. He struggled to stand and as he did, pressed a hand to his stomach, the traced tone of his thin body slightly distended from his gluttonous feast of juices. He felt woozy - maybe he would throw up - but staggered a step forward, bending over, feeling his stomach churn and move with every drop of liquid he had drank...he raised his head to see that the doe had craned her neck back to observe him, her face looking almost mockingly at him, what he had done, what he was feeling. It was then that the mutagens, the pathogens - if they could be called that, for in matters of folklore it is perhaps best that science remain silent and watch as mere spectator - took hold, did their infernal work. Aaron collapsed to his knees, his throbbing penis painfully erect - abnormally swollen, changing color, first pink, now bright red, now crimson - with every beat of blood that coursed through his body, his flushed, feverish face dripping with the doe's fertile juices. He looked up at the doe's vagina, its folds swollen and glistening - ready, the fur of her rear slick, matted and wet. She had been a queen all her life and she was used to something far stronger, thicker, than the puny tongue of a human murderer - she flicked her tail, she dismissed him, her slender legs carried her away to the semi-circle of her sisters and her nieces, still careful, graceful...sexy. Aaron's heart pounded out a cadence of savage desire - nothing in his entire life he had ever wanted so much before. Not moments ago it was mere temptation, but now - now it was something he could not live without. What is good for the monarch is good for the people, and who could deny that, now, Aaron had slain his predecessor in the office? His brain was sickening and rotting, dying, yet death is never an end, only a renewal, in the forest when a tree ceases to live it then plays host to innumerable insects and fungi, and its children in scattered seeds carry the legacy on and on. Aaron was in the forest - he was becoming the forest. In his new consciousnesses the dulcet, dripping vagina of the queenly doe was his right, if not by birth then by inheritance, for the forest is a patriarchy, it is a place of abject inequality. He who reigns also rules - long live the king - and what is a king without a queen?

Ah, but first - what good is a king...without a crown?

He stumbled backward, jeans still pooled against his ankles with his boots still on - he felt as though his whole body had been doused in burning water, crying out defenseless, every inch of his skin sensitive and painful. Nearly blind from the overload of sensation, he smacked against the old peach tree nearby, the eldest of the new grove there in the clearing, and sunk down so that he was sitting upright against the aged bark. In a toxic stew of full-body excruciation he could no longer understand, they came - from his head, out of, part of, his skull, they came: With skin, hair, blood, flying down on him - his new antlers.

He screamed - he tried to scream, but his vocal cords were too strangled, and it came out as something wholly different, wholly inhuman, a bleat, a bugle, a call to the treetops that he was being rebirthed against his will.

Again and again he made the noise, his throat bulging with the sound, this boy now made a man, this man now made a king, his antlers framing an everlastingly youthful, human face - tears welled in his eyes at the pain that wracked his body, streaming down his cheeks which would remain eternally hairless, the redneck puckishness forever framed, though not now, not during this cruel yet absolutely just metamorphosis, when it was twisted with white-hot, febrile agony. Up and branched they came, a whole denuded forest atop his head, Aaron's antlers - cornonated in this savage way, they attained a height not quite so high as the slain incumbent, but just enough to make it his new heritage and his new destiny, more extravagant than any plain buck in his vicinity.

Now - horribly - the time came for him to be beholden to the worst, and yet also the best, parts of his station as the new king: he felt, in his hips, his whole pelvis, an urge, a spasm, irresistible, to thrust, to fuck the air with his penis, which had changed some, just some, but not fully...not yet appropriate for his new occupation. Within it, in the core of his cock, was forming his new baculum, the ancient bone of so many mammals which humans, in the infinite unwisdom of evolution, had abandoned in antediluvian ages - he felt it form, crystallizing out of calcium and collagen, giving the floppy, unseemly organ a proper rigidity that he could sway over every blade of grass, every tree branch, in this, his inherited realm. With it, and with each push forward, each scrape of his back against the aged bark of the peach tree, he found, he watched, his inhuman bugles changing to high-pitched panting, as his penis lengthened, then lengthened again, the crimson-pink color unchanging, but the shape, the size, adapting to the marvelous physiology of the cervine, with the power and majesty of a monarch:

It bloated at the base, a fleshy pillar as thick as his wrist, and as it gained length along the shaft it lost its familiar mushroom-shape to become tapered, sharpened, a glistening, living bayonet jutting out from him, stretching, the flesh extending and regrouping, again, more, more, until it was enormous, a full fourteen inches had any around him the capacity to measure...a virile, veiny, pulsing scepter of undisputed male fertility.

He tried to call out to someone, anyone, to help him, blood running from the scrapes on the small of his back, blood running down his face from his new antlers, yet all that came from his mouth was the sound of the stag in rut - earnest, yet vain, cries of derangement, as he slammed his head and his new antlers back against the tree, sending up a flurry of petals along with it...a naked boy-man with antlers that sounded like the strangled hart he had slaughtered.

To this - all of this - the fawns and doe watched him, arranged in their knowing semi-circle, watched him intently, their dark eyes never wavering from the scene of the morbid, necessary, remolding of this trespasser into something closer to their nature...as well as his own.

They must have appreciated this scene for the irony that it presented, for the hunter, chasing after crowns of antlers and counting their spikes as numeric prizes, now bearing the same thing he had so ruthlessly pursued - his throat, so young and so smooth, unmarred by errant facial hair, desperate to make the noises for his fellow humans to aid him...yet he had abdicated his own humanity, now he was something to hunt, some aberrance and some legend to be whispered of in the woods, for they would find his shreds of clothing, they would find his pickup, but they would never find him. Aaron's hands shot to the bony, ivory appendages that had appeared out of his head, and he moaned aloud the same kind of cervine proto-language that came from twisted, changed things his larynx and esophagus should have translated into human words - he could feel his antlers quiver, subtly, in the air, velvetless, yet so fresh and so new, so much a part of him and yet, still, so foreign. At their touch, skin to skull-bone, his cries died down, his eyes widened again, his wonder, at last, overtook his horror. Painlessly - a blessing, compared to the awful things that had heretofore befallen him so mercilessly - he could feel his legs carpet with new fur...brown, a hue darker than his eyebrows, than his near-shaved head-hair, it erupted from each follicle in turn, so starting from pelvis all the way down to his ankles his useless human body hair was replaced with a fresh, shimmering pelt, buckskin, deerskin, slim and sleek and pleasant to touch. As the hair travelled downward, Aaron felt a pressure build in his toes and in his feet, and he cried out again in a strange sensation he could not understand - his metatarsals, in line with the same infection that had overridden his formerly human biology, ceased their put-upon job as human evolution had dictated, and began to fuse together...in his delirium Aaron was spared the relentless gruesomeness of what took place, but he could see what fresh apocalypse was ripping into him: His boots writhed and convulsed in their leather, but even their sturdiness could not hold - what was forming and reforming and metamorphosing. Rips appeared, tears in the material of his footwear, until at last they burst, strips flung everywhere, as Aaron's new feet appeared, exploding out to the world: the king's new, imposing hooves, far vaster than what would be required of him and yet, again, a potent, almost superfluous symbol of masculine authority - larger than a man's, or even a bull's. His new hooves burned as though they had been freshly forged from a fire - and indeed, they had been. But as he lay, as he tried to catch his breath, still letting out his vain, plaintive noises...something else started to squirm in his brain. For all his newfound hirsuteness there was one aspect of Aaron's body which had not caught up - his testicles...still hairless, still barely the size of grapes, and still, abominably, human. But in another instant - as quick, as brutal, as the same instant it took to shoot the creature whose place he was taking - he knew, he understood, he learned, all there was to know about his new life, and what awaited him...his lungs gasped for air at the tyranny of the horror that awaited him. Aaron's whole being was filled and flooded with a rampaging, unquenchable desire - lust, the first and most ineloquent of animal feelings, the want to see the awaiting herd of fawn and doe watching him as his clearing eyes drifted toward them pregnant, all of them bulging with new life, taking ownership of their bodies and in doing so perpetuating his legacy forever. His penis was still firm, sturdy, erect...but his balls were not up to the task. Not like they were - not yet. All the females of his court, one after the other after the other, even the doe that had so pitifully mourned their polygamous husband before, turned their slickened rears to him so he could see... ...their swollen folds, dripping with lubricating juices and with noisome, aromatic urine, eager, waiting.

A whole row of awaiting, ready, fertile doe - all for him. Aaron let out a grunt, low and primal, smiling as best he could, standing up, slowly, still against the old peach tree, bending forward just slightly and with a wince to let loose a new pressure, his coccyx bursting out above his anus to give him a full, bushy tail, and his ears lengthen, and then thin, heartbeat by heartbeat, to be carpeted in smooth, brownish fur, to match his hair - but he was so intent, so completely focused on what was before him he could barely register any of these. His balls roiled, churned, quivered in their sack - as he stepped forward, the final remnants of his human clothing sloughing off like diseased skin, his testicles seemed to twitch, move about, as though they had a mind of their own. He paused to grunt again - like his legs, fur crept along the surface of his scrotum, covering it, the same color, giving it closure. But as Aaron tried to move, again, he was stopped, again, by something new. The same heaving, seething feeling in his balls grew, and grew more, until it became painful - his balls were bloating, swelling, as his penis had, but even more rapidly, even more grotesquely, filling, inflating, each second, each pulse of blood, sending directions to his glands to produce sperm, more sperm, still more sperm, so that what was above average at best for a human was flung into frenzied overproduction, swollen to a near-absurd size, plump, furry oranges hanging below his equally oversized phallus. Both were the symbols - resolute, unwavering - of his monarchy, his tools to fulfill his needs and spread his seed and keep watch and reign over this forest. It could not be helped - the invincible masculine power of Aaron's new genitals made him who he was, they looked so incongruous on him, an upright humanoid no more than five foot eight but they had to, his body was a slave to functional necessities...his penis, his testicles, even his naked, flowerless antlers. He grunted again, louder, then groaned - on his own, standing, his phallus hotly stiff, he could feel it, feel the wave of orgasm build, his body overloaded with hormone to expel the last of his pathetic human semen and announce to the forest that a new king had been made. Aaron's balls quivered once, twice, and then settled at the bottom of their plump sack to swell one final time, jerking up on their own. New ridges of long, shaggy hair snaked out of follicles from his wrists to his elbows, as his hands shot down, both of them barely enough to wrap around his own shaft, just in time to feel it fatten, and the cum roar out of his testicles - up the length - to spew, a cannon before him, his head thrown back to let loose a deafening bugle that his throat swelled to sing...his presence, his new life, nearing completion. It would not stop - his first orgasm was the most intense, indeed the most extreme, he had ever experienced in his life - it jetted out of his cock like a broken fire hydrant, gaumy globs of gold-yellow slime that poured from the tip in wet bursts, again and again and again, his triumphant bellow a resonant, ambient call to anyone would hear it. Would he come to this new station honorably? Would, indeed, he make a great king? Aaron stumbled backward, heavy in his own body, panting breathlessly, hitting the gnarled peach tree, older than him, older than his human ancestors, his penis out and pulsing, needful and erect - it was embarrassingly large, almost laughable by the standards of both of his species, either the one he joined or the one he left...and yet, it was necessary, every last inch absolutely right for its design and its need. A solitary doe-fawn, not nudged on by her relatives but a bold little thing by herself, briskly trotted over to lick Aaron clean, the full shaft, up and down, the fullness in Aaron's loins returned to spurt out more yellowish, gel-like cum, his penis belched it all over her, the innocent face now marred by the same strange seductiveness in her eyes that she, too, held within her...an inhuman intelligence, a desire, like the others. How young she was - older than a yearling, to be sure, old enough to be taught by her mother the nature of her sex to expand their little herd - yet she understood what had happened, who had been crowned king in this forest. Still - still, she would be first. He grabbed her roughly - he did not mean to, but inside him had been lit a blaze that could not be extinguished, a need so ravenous it made his stomach sick with it - but even with this he stopped, he paused, he let an anticipation build for the inevitable, for he knew the fawn was in season, yet she was a virgin, she had never tasted the almighty power of his superb phallus and so he lingered, he teased, the sharpened tip pressed against her opening, circled, dangerously close. The fawn bleated out a desperate cry, her folds letting loose a fresh dripping of her syrupy-sweet juices that Aaron greedily took his right hand to gather and slurp into his mouth. His foreplay over, he took his shaft and, although unused to how big it was, found its destination inside her - it eased in, the wet warmth enveloping him, his hot moan joined with her impassioned bleat. It did not take long - it took too soon, because he was inexperienced, because he still would have a full lifetime ahead of to learn - for the sensation to be too much, to overwhelm him, and try as he might, he could not hold it off: his loins went full, too full, and he groaned aloud that he should release so early, a groan that soared into a bellowing near-roar as his testicles tightened again, and his seed exploded in a cannonade into his new deer wife. She and he made noises of mating animals that echoed into the forest, from tree to tree, into the still late February air - Aaron's new, mighty shaft, still unwieldy from his inexperience in owning it, using it, at last ceased its pulses, its deluge of thick, rich, golden semen abating inside the womb of the pretty little doe-fawn.

His arms, ridged with the new fur, and his hands, strengthened preternaturally by the strange new testosterone coursing through him, relinquished the hips of the doe-fawn, in a moment of post-orgasmic weakness - she stumbled away, slurping off his engorged phallus with a little cry, near-limping, but with her graceful head held strangely high, as though, with a wordless intelligence that belied the look of a mere beast of the field, she had been satisfied as a complete sexual creature.

Aaron sank down, his new ears fluttering and then swiveling low in exhaustion, once more against the trunk of the peach tree, gasping for air - it had been the most intense release of his entire life, far eclipsing anything he had experienced as a human...but now he was not human at all, though his face and upper body would forever look the part, and as though to prove it, his body still in rut, a small little spray of sparkling urine emerged from the tip of his cum-slopped penis - not just a scepter and not just a holy tool to breed, but an aspergillum to baptize and bless in the ways of this deer-tribe, marking territory and identity with raw scent.

The little doe-fawn joined her sisters and aunts and they nuzzled and smelled her and groomed her with their tongues - they were deer possessed of brains and feelings far surpassing other herds in other, less secret places. And so they seemed like a real family, drawing ranks, giving her comfort as she laid down, the ancient alchemy of reproduction setting to work inside her - so rich and fertile was her new sire that it made her woozy, shaking her head dazedly, her ladyparts ablaze with new life.

At this, their leader, the eldest, the dowager queen, cocked her head at Aaron, the former human, now the new king. He watched her, in the broken twilight of his last humanlike consciousness, watched her as her eyes seemed to glimmer with something, something wholly foreign to what a brute animal should think and feel...pity. She seemed, now, to actually feel sorry for him, this boy-man who had not understood the consequences to his human actions, and now dizzying elevated, lay panting and still painfully erect against what she knew would eventually become his peach tree. As her children and her younger sisters gathered about her youngest daughter to comfort her in freshly lost virginity, the start of her doehood and, sometime after, her motherhood - as they did they did this, she, dowager, widow, approached him, Aaron, her husband's murderer, moving with her deliberate, regal gait. It was by the unwritten law of her kind and her kingdom that this gorgeous hind had to, indeed, forgive him - untold Summers ago when squalls would daily rumble the skies with thunder and lightning, an ancestress of hers had to do the same. A young buck had travelled too far afield from his own wood and challenged and dueled to the death the king at the time - and this victorious upstart had, all that time long ago, become in his turn the fabled, rarely-seen king who, today, Aaron himself had felled. And owing to the strangeness of their race, near identical to other deer yet different in mysterious and inscrutable ways, that same little hellion who became a king - just Aaron had been the same, and then was crowned the same - was rotting, disintegrating, skin and fur and sinew being taken back by the Earth in rapid putrefaction. Tomorrow at sunrise while King Aaron slept, she, her children, her younger sisters, and the new princess, soon to be a queen herself when she would give birth, would all hold high vigil over the dead king, bring leaves and petals and branches with their mouths to put atop his bones and kick up dirt with their hooves to there bury him, a royal tumulus which would entomb him in emerald Florida grass to sleep forever in Florida soil. That was the way it had been for thousands of years, since this herd of deer first made themselves strange and distinct from other deer - this was the way it would always be, undisturbed and unbothered by humanity and its follies. Still - that, all of that, was for tomorrow, the next day, the start of a new reign of a new king. For today, the widow-queen did both her duty and her desire, approached Aaron with his still-wary eyes, knelt down, and, using her dexterous, ruminant's tongue, licked his shaft clean. Aaron moaned out a high-pitched bellow, always to be less extravagantly baritone than his predecessor, but still a kingly, sonorous noise - he screwed up his face as hot tears of raw pleasure came to his eyes, his whole body shaking with each long, careful, passionate lick against his new penis, the deer's tongue against his sensitive cockflesh causing stars to burst in Aaron's eyes. Over and over he groaned, helplessly, taken over by unadulterated sexual need, as the dowager doe licked up every last glob of semen and cunt-juice that had slopped over his dick - polishing it, making it clean. He was too weak, his body too taxed from his transformation and his copulation, to stand, but when he would, his penis would still be stiff, for a little time, his body responding to the smell of sugary, delicious sex still rife in the air of an early Springtime - it would wobble before him, uncomfortable, unwieldy, entirely too large for his body, jutting up like a sacred obelisk, but he would learn to adjust his walk to keep it and he would, above all, learn to be proud of it, for no other male in the forest would be as richly endowed as he, capable of impregnating a whole herd in a single night, tended to by many mouths who would eat their herbs and fruit in the daytime and taste their king's seed come dusk and evening. His cock was his scepter, his symbol of authority to rule, his testicles fat and precious jewels...and all, all would kneel and bow - to him. Every buzzing honeybee and every snake, every wise heron and curious ibis and noisy woodpecker, every crawling or flying or chirping insect, every sneaky raccoon and mute armadillo - and, yes, every deer, whether in his herd or not - all would be subject to him, in this rambling, legend-haunted forest. Aaron - Aaron would evolve no further, his eyes would never change, he would always hold the look of a satyr, a woodwose, a boy crossed with a buck, kingly genitals wobbling and shaking before him always to be serviced at his will by willing and enthusiastic lovers, his propelled destiny that he could follow no orders and take no shit finally reaching its logical conclusion, with he alone in charge, he alone to make the rules. He had, all his life, been so much a part of Florida by blood and by birthright, and now Florida had absorbed him, now he had become, terrifyingly, transcendently, the real Florida himself. It was a new life that he would live but he would live it joyfully and proudly, giving up meat and adopting the way of his herbivorous, frugivorous sistren - gathering acorns from the live oaks, harvesting peaches, cherries, plums, and, deeper in the forest still, oranges for them to eat and enjoy. His brother's gun would rust in obscurity. His brother's memory, and his sister's, and his mama and his dad's and Cody's, too - all, all would fade, but not disappear, but thrown down into the shadows of suspicion that all his kind had, and rightly so, for human beings. His empty pickup would be part of a greater mystery that would never be solved - his reign would be long, his reign would be peaceful, the streaks of blood from his new antlers washed away tomorrow as he would kneel to drink the waters of the Alafia. Now the former queen, the doe, finished with her task, let Aaron, at last, rest from his sexual expenditure. She took a few more steps to nuzzle his cheek, half-responsive with his drowsy lassitude, a need to sleep and awake anew, as he had been made anew - nuzzle his cheek, and, her mouth clean from licking, bade him to kiss her. Aaron accepted her kiss - the sweet, satiny muzzle against his own lips, their tongues entwined, human face to deer snout, the only kindness and forgiveness she could afford him before she, too, when her husband was at last buried, lay down next to him, and die herself. They kissed as old lovers, as two who had known each other for years - so much so that Aaron's eyes grew more alert, and he grunted yet again, feeling a dribble of fresh urine trickle down his phallus to start to mark her with, to dominate her with, his loins stirring in latent excitement...but she ignored it. This gentle bestiality, this blissful zoophilia - for so it was that they had, indeed, met, many years before, when Aaron, then human and then a boy, had seen her, with Cody, tending to one of her fawns all those Springtimes ago, occasioning the legend of her now-dead husband to be whispered once more...a milder, more innocent time. Their mouths came apart, twin strands of sticky saliva breaking in the air between them - and through half-lidded eyes Aaron could see, then feel, her lick his nose, put her face to his cheek, and then withdraw...two more steps and she laid beside him, and the last thing Aaron saw before he closed his eyes was her seeming to beckon with her neck and head for the others, including his future wife, to join her, as a herd, laying down together to sleep the morning and the afternoon away. Now Aaron was taken by sleep - the gentle rustle of his harem seemed to stir something in the air, and the breeze picked up, swirling petals in dainty clouds of florescence, and with their crossing of the clearing to Aaron's elder peach tree came the renewed birdsong, the languid chant of the cricket, the gentle winds from nowhere to nowhere. Then - as Aaron drew his first breath, sleeping, as King of the Deer himself - across his antlers appeared, painlessly, a constellation of green buds, that opened to blossom in fresh fragrance...his first flowers of Spring.