On
the farm,
we ate animals we had raised ourselves.
While I
waited for my death,
my body and I fought. It began to
reject the food I tried to feed it. I
ate more and
it rejected more. I
fell asleep on
the bathroom floor, my body tired from
vomiting and
dry-heaving for hours.
Behind
Grandma’s
house, there was a
clothesline between the
power pole and
the chicken coop with smaller strings attached, for
hanging chickens to slit their throats. We’d already
hung and chopped and boiled and plucked the hens this year. While
my younger sister in her room
smashed a pillow over her head to keep out the cries that carried
up the hill to our house,
the wives and mothers, my older sister and I, had ripped the
feathers from the new-dead flesh.
Past the power line, across from
the Brown House, a new cow hung on an old hook, dripping
blood onto the dusty ground, waiting to be
flayed.
My uncle knew the
places to cut, the names for the parts when they ceased to be animal and became, under the sawblade,
meat:
round,
shank,
sirloin,
flank,
ribs,
brisket. Parts would be divided, wrapped in
butcher paper,
distributed among our families and even to the Guys from the Brown House. There were more cows
to butcher, but this one had the privilege of a
public dismemberment.
Still,
I ate him, knowing that
my body was, like his, just meat.
from The Book of Revelation
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