I visit my father in the afterlife in his own personal stretch of heaven, a vast prairie not unlike the one where he had been born in our lifetime together. He stands with an elegant silver bow in his hand, preparing to cock an arrow in the direction of a towering, gargantuan twenty-point elk.

The true spirits of the Earth’s elk are far from humans with bows and rifles and pellet guns, in Elysian fields of their own that defy human description. My father shoots simulacra, which bothered him once but he has grown accustomed to the give and take of this new game. He could provide a world for himself where he wins the prize every time; one thing I have always respected about my father is that his greatest happiness necessitates the possibility of failure. He does not care for hollow victories. He needs the elk, on occasion, to win.

I am thinking, I tell my father, whose heaven I drift into on occasion to make sure that he is still the same consummate presence, about beginning another lifetime.

My father’s face does not change, though he rests his bow against his side rather than continuing to go through the motions of the hunt. The elk, a thousand yards away, cocks its head, paws the ground, and continues majestically in the opposite direction. My father may have to stalk him through the clump of trees to the west, but this is no great hardship to him. He has all the time in the world.

Where would you want to go? My father asks. A rare personal question. In life, he never quite puzzled me out; my activities and interests were so foreign to his sensibilities, an upright rural Midwesterner to the core. It is much the same in death. He did not visit me in the city in life; he does not visit my personal stretch of heaven in death. You can’t get it much better than your last life.

I have a life and a death’s worth of practice not rolling my eyes and scoffing, though I do concede to him that yes, it would be hard to beat, but I would still like to try again. I know there is more to learn about human existence, more to experience there, before I can reach my full potential here.

You always did like school, he jokes, but his expression remains serious as he crouches on the ground, touches a hoof imprinted upon the dirt with tender care. I wouldn’t want to go back. The world is only getting worse. I don’t know what I could do to make it better.

My father is uninterested in the secrets of the universe. He is interested in this stretch of land, these copies of elk and deer and rabbits and foxes, though even he must know that eternity is a long time and soon he will feel the itch, the urge, the need to explore beyond this prairie full of camouflaged Midwestern men whose greatest joy lies in the howling wind and bright sun and piercing arrow of the kill. I am one of many daughters who visit many fathers in stretches of heaven just like this one.

You’ve never imagined who you would want to be? If you tried again? I ask, knowing that in life he would have dismissed this conversation as silly, trivial, outside of the gates of reality. Here, he’s aware of the possibilities, even if he remains tied to this tract of land. My father’s afterlife looks much like his life did, although even he feels the pull to visit his father’s fishing boat, his aunt in the casino, his grandmother’s garden. He knows there are other heavens outside his own.

My father’s expression does not betray him; he picks up his bow again, turns sharply in the direction of the elk’s massive retreating horns. He pulls the bowstring taut, cocks the arrow with expert ease. His shoulder no longer gives him trouble. His vision is 20/20. His knees do not shake or buckle.

I’d imagine I would need to come back as an elk. He snaps the bow back. The arrow flies in an arc through the hazy blue light of a perfect sunrise, and even from a distance I can tell that he has hit his mark, the hide of the creature my father respects more than any single entity in the known universe. To see what it’s like from the other side.