When the beast deer came out of the forest, we were mostly indifferent at first. Then we got scared. The beast deer looked like normal deer from far away, but close up we noticed that their eyes glowed like taillights and their antlers ended in tiny antlers that ended in tinier antlers that went on and on forever. The first time the beast deer took a child, he had a generic, old-fashioned name like Billy or Johnny and the news showed his school picture so often we began to resent his bowl cut and buck teeth, the gradated blue background. The mothers organized sweeps of the woods, but found only mounds of recently-dug earth with nothing inside. It was later established that the beast deer slept in these, underground, which was the third sign of their beast-like nature. The fourth sign was that they took children and turned them into beast deer. If there was a fifth sign, no one discovered it. In every other way the beast deer were just like normal deer, only some of them, when confronted by the fathers’ hunting parties, would attempt to raise their front legs in a sort of surrender gesture. Deer can’t balance on two legs, though, so they toppled over and the hunters shot them anyway.