chicken gore (not for the weak stomached)

I watched three very alive chickens become lunch.

First, I carried the squawking meal across the village by their scaly legs. My arms achingly perpendicular to the ground- the chickens hanging far from my body to avoid the sharp poke of a beak. Relieved to arrive at the house, a knife was quickly sharpened and sliced along three struggling feathered necks. They didn’t run in the wide circles I imagined, but their posthumous dips and dives left a bloody battlefield of struggle.

Boiled water dumped onto three soft and still chickens. Immediately, they look smaller. Am thinking that there can’t possibly be meat on this fist-sized of an animal.

We pulled the feathers out, leaving little holes and bumps in their wake. Long feathers on the wings to tiny puffs on the head, I yanked until the flesh looked at last familiar. I could picture this in a squeaky Styrofoam container covered with saran wrap and a bar code.

I gripped the slippery rib cage as Ballyl pulled out strings of organs. The heart, stomach, and intestines, Ballyl said, as she tossed them into slimy good and bad piles. I worked bits of fat off the meat, plopping the yellow chunks into the bad group. I cracked apart joints and hacked off the feet. We cooked the head and the broken neck and as we ate, I easily identified it all.

In all this gore I waited to feel disturbed. How clearly I recall the repulsion caused by the cold and sterile Styrofoam, the bloodied tissue tossed into the trash and the slimy chicken legs my mother rinsed at the kitchen sink.