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Chicken and Dumplings
Ma lets you carry the rooster over to the chopping block.
It’s yours, and she knows. Not even four months ago— when this compact weight of gleaming feathers was only a jumpy bundle of shedding down, and its leg twisted between the wood board and the chicken wire wrapped around its corner— you were the one to bundle it in dish cloths and warm it inside. You were the one to splint its fragile bones and mend them. You were the one to love it until its leg grew strong once again; scarred and marred, but healthy and whole.
As you carry it, you carry that love, too.
Dad takes the rooster from your hands when you reach the block. His hands are much bigger than yours. They blanket your bird— broad, warm, sturdy. Your rooster blinks at you from within its embrace. You blink back, smile, try to show it kindness in these final moments instead of the distant confusion you feel inside. Dad smiles kind, too, but not at the bird. He looks at you, instead. His eyes shine the same brown topaz as yours and the rooster’s do.
You step back and watch it all. You watch Dad flip the rooster upside down and hold its long-clawed feet, watch the knife open layers of thin fleshy wrapping, watch the red stream out of its throat like the wine at church, watch downy feathers congeal in scarlet holiness. You do not once close your eyes.
After everything stills, Ma makes you clean the body with Dad. It’s warm and sticky, despite all the blood that has already abandoned its chalice. Your fingers twitch at the strange reversal of sensation, as you hold your bird from the inside after only ever stroking its smooth exterior before. As you carefully pull apart what you once carefully pieced together.
Dad tells you the name of each part that you clean and separate, gives you new words with which to understand and appreciate that once-life you hold.
Each piece of the body is torn apart. And it is named. And it is held. And it is loved.
When you are done, you and Dad bring it into the kitchen. You go to chop the carrots and onions, Ma cooks the chicken and gravy, Dad rolls flour and butter into dough. All three of you put your work into the pan to simmer. You all talk, and you watch heated metal hold those separate bodies of food and melt them into one bubbling form. One homemade dish of effort and life and death.
The work is difficult. The loss stings more.
Yet, you do not shy away from it. You know it is necessary. Watching the ugly mess of feather and guts shape into something clean and whole, watching the sun catch in the steam that rises from the pan of dumplings, watching Ma and Dad smile down at you as you smile back— you believe it is also beautiful.
Once the food is done, you set the table and Ma serves up three plates. She and Dad and you all sit around the table with the sunset streaming through the window to join you, too.
You look down at the plate in front of you. It is white, ivory, cream, the only pops of color the few pieces of orange carrot scattered throughout. Your rooster— once a mural of green and bronze and black and red and gold— sits somewhere on that monochrome palette. You cannot find it with your eyes. But perhaps you can find it with your tongue. And so you try a bite.
The meat tastes like love. Like dedication. Like months of tender care and a boy and a bird traipsing around the yard together. Like hours of hard work and a meal made by three pairs of hands that clasp each other over the table in prayer for another day together.
You lick the plate clean.
Fresh Cherries
The cherry trees carry as much of your childhood as your best friend does.
When the sun catches on their grey, scaling bark, you can see shadows of memory cradled in the dark space between each grain.
Early mornings spent walking the couple miles out of town with Ma, to meet Noel and his Ma on their porch, to work through the patch of trees behind their small home, to pick bright scarlet drops shining in the sunrise until your hands stain pink and soft, to carry buckets that nearly overbalance your toddling forms as you head back home.
The trees look the same now as they did then. You, not as much.
You are older now, a man (well, a boy pretending to be a man). Work keeps you busy most of the time, but it cannot steal the time from you and Noel. Friends born attached at the hip, the ladies at church used to joke, and they were right— they still are, more than they know.
Noel sits at your side, thigh warm against your own, eclipsing even the brilliance of the sun which shines loud overhead. His hair glows gold, like a crown adorning your most precious king.
It is a weekend, and you both have come to help his dad with the farmwork on these days away from your jobs. The small herd of cows have been taken care of, fed and milked and tended to. The cherries out back— all the ripest and healthiest ones— have been picked and stored. Now, it is only you and Noel, leaning against a young tree with grass caressing your legs and a bowl of ‘borrowed’ cherries shared between you.
You pass the cherries quick, placing them between your fingers, then placing between each other’s teeth. Your lips close around them with haste fired by the terrifying knowledge that anyone might pass by and see you sitting too close to the wrong body.
The fruit moves quick, but the taste is savored. Your mouths memorize the bright pop of tart sweetness. Your eyes memorize the sight of soft pink lips twisting into a smile only inches from your own grin, of a tongue pressing up to lick sugared pulp from between teeth. Your hearts memorize the fresh coolness of fruit in the midst of all the heat that streams from the sky above and radiates from the chest within.
Noel says something that you will not remember. You laugh, and he laughs, and that you will remember.
As conversation and the day drift by, you each lean closer into the other. At some point, after the bowl has been emptied and your stomachs filled, he lays his head upon your shoulder. You will remember that, too.
Words are spoken, none of them that terrifying string of three words that you each ache to speak. It doesn’t quite matter, though, does it? Not when every shared bite and touch and laugh says those words louder than any voice could.
Later— when the sun starts to fall over the horizon in a golden flood and you share your first kiss, when you pass love between each other’s teeth and lips— it will taste tart and syrupy.
Chowder
It is summer, but you only feel cold. It doesn’t make sense, not to anyone else— but it does to you.
After all, how could a planet not freeze over once its sun had dissipated in a gore-strewn supernova? Earthly physics may say you should be warm, but cosmic physics remind you of your frozen, barren place in the universe. Of your infinitesimal mass frosted over with arctic oceans of grief.
It is summer and it is not the season (and it’s a little sad), but someone is making you soup.
You sit at the flimsy table inside of the apartment that dually acts as your office, watching a set of broad shoulders move in front of the stove. The man stands sturdy— like always— unwavering even as steam floats in his face, even as the spoon sticks to burnt bits glued on the bottom of the pot. He knows of your frost and has decided to stay over for the evening, resolutely insisted upon it, even though this is not his home.
It’s not your home, either. Nowhere is, really. You left home for a war, and returned from a war to someplace that looked like home, but felt… wrong. Ma and Dad were there, and they were familiar and kind. But everything else around was not, everything was merely a shadow of itself. All the gold had faded to cold grey, all the sun had burnt out. So you left again. Only, the cold followed, tied to its true source, and the city that you hoped would save you feels just as wrong as Harper’s Hill did, but without any of the small familiarities.
The man does belong in this city. The man has a home, a pocket of comfort and warmth to share with the person he loves. Yet, the man is not there tonight. He stands here, with you— in an apartment that you both share during the day, and that you alone occupy at night, and that does not really belong to either of you at any time.
It is not either of your homes. But tonight, just maybe, it could still feel right.
Tonight, just maybe, you can work to make it right.
Roland cooks, and talks to you, every word warm and casual. You take that warmth and press it into your own words as they rise from iced waters. It does not remove the glacier creeping over your surface, but it does thaw the edges enough for now. For one night, one conversation, one step.
You talk of work, of radio shows, of books, of anything that is not sad or empty. He speaks to you in a way that makes you feel… normal. You like that. You have always wanted normal. Always craved a simple survival, an easy life of work and family and love. For many reasons, you know that perfect family was never possible to begin with, but you had always hoped to carve out a version as close to that dream as possible. For new reasons, you also know that life is even more faraway than you thought.
Nonetheless, Roland talks to you like a friend— like family— and you wonder if you can’t still create something adjacent to normal.
Slowly, the outermost layer of ice melts, and the assorted food in the pot mixes into something resembling chowder. Roland pours you a bowl and hands you a beer. He sits down across from you at the table and tells you to eat. You do.
It’s not good, clearly made by someone used to another person providing the dinner at home. Too much salt, pungency and blandness equally fighting for a handhold on the bowl. It’s terrible, nearly reminding you of the slapdash concoctions you made across the ocean— though admittedly a little less rancid and gun powder-filled.
Still, it tastes like love. Like dedication. Like a gruff voice and a kind heart reaching to steady a grieving boy pretending to be a man. Like hard work and a demanding reminder to make one more fight to survive one more day.
Roland asks you how it tastes after you wolf through half the bowl.
You lick drops of fat and salt off your lips, smile, and tell him good.
Scraps
Some days, you think that you and the hunger become one and the same.
Days when there is nothing in this cell besides the beast stretching its limbs and unhinging its maw inside your stomach. Days when all there is is the yawning chasm of nothingness. Days when there is no you. Or, will be no you, if you do not work to prepare your survival. If you do not do what is needed.
In these days, you know what will happen. It has happened before, and it will happen again, and again, and again until you finally, horribly, wonderfully die. (you are not allowed to die)
In these days, you wait, stroking and murmuring to the beast that churns in your stomach. It demands to be fed, and you are nothing if not loyal to your companions. You whisper patience to it, assure it that you both need only put in the time and suffer the wait, and you will earn yourselves another chance to fight. You must be the bearer of that patience, for the beast does not, cannot, understand patience. It only understands itself— that lonely, gaping chasm desperate to be filled.
It takes forever and no time before that patience earns you your reward, your chance. Too long and too soon, you and the beast wake up to find a new creature sitting in your cage. It looks like you. But you know that it cannot be, because nothing here is what it is, what it should be.
The beast inside you writhes, stretching its yawn into a howl.
You watch the thing sleep in the cold night, fingertips trailing lazily over the small, blunt, heavy rock sat beside you.
What is it you wonder.
Human? No, nothing here is.
Innocent? That does not matter.
Alive? No more than you are.
Food? Yes. No.
Not yet.
Food is earned. Food is worked for. Food is fought for. With teeth, hands, love, hate, trust, fear. With the ferocity of the beast inside you. With the hungry beast that is you.
The thing sleeping in the corner is not food because you have not made it so yet. You must. More than the hunger demands it.
Your survival knows that if you do not make the thing into food and greedily eat, then you will die.
Perhaps not right away. But there is no life in this cage besides the breath in that thing. No warmth in this frost besides what courses through that thing. You have no life and no warmth besides what can be chewed out of that thing. And if you have no life and no warmth, you will have no way to work, to fight. And if you have no fight, you have no tomorrow (whatever that means anymore).
You must not die. You must fight. You must gorge.
Blood pounds inside you colder, louder than it does in that thing as you stare at it.
The beast screams writhes claws wails demands craves wants wants wants.
You stare shake salivate.
The thing sleeps taunts tempts.
The thing is on the chopping block.
The thing must move so the block can be filled again.
The thing may be the last thing you ever eat— but only if you let it.
You are not one to shy away from the work. From the loss. From the painful.
From the necessary.
You curl your fist over the rock and stand up.
Steak, Rare
You have been consumed.
Someone cracked you open, over and over. Someone sucked out marrow, over and over. Someone ate life, over and over. Someone consumed, over and over and over and over.
You think of your rooster from another lifetime. Ma and Dad taught you to use up every part of the animal then, to treat each piece of a life as useful. Have you been useful? Have you made every part of yourself something worthy of consumption, of butchering? Or have you only earned the privilege of scraps tossed out the back door for the animals to fight over, of melting into nothingness and rotting sickly sweet like cherries?
God only knows, and you no longer know God.
God— whatever it is to you— died a long time ago. God is as dead as you are. It is as dead as a body in a prison and blood in the lines of your palm. As dead as meat.
Maybe more dead.
The steak sitting in front of you is uncooked, cold, still. Alive. Or, containing something like life. Something itching under the surface, squirming hidden in the red.
You saw that something when you bought the steak, when you passed by it in the store and for the first time in these weeks of freedom you did not see death in meat. Instead, you saw that twitch of life. You saw that something that you are missing, and you bought the meat without thought and brought it home, to this small box with only you and your control. You want that something, but you must trap it first. You have learned that things must be fought for, must be imprisoned and broken to be consumed. So you heat the skillet until every inch of its being is burning burning burning, and you lay the steak down upon its iron pyre.
It screams. They always scream. They stop screaming as long as you do not stop working.
You hear the meat scream scream scream, and you let it burn burn burn, and you watch it slowly fade into silence, save for a few death-throe pops of fat.
When it is earned and made into food, you pull it from the stone it lays upon. You make sure to leave most of the red inside the meat. The ‘something’ still squirms in there, you know. The thing hoarding life still twitches. But now, it is trapped in burnt edges. Now it will be made yours.
You cut the steak open, break the skin cage and let the life inside pour out. It oozes, hot and humid. The give of its flesh is familiar. Too familiar. Not familiar enough.
In the back of your head, you can still hear screaming.
You? The beast in your stomach? The sleeping thing in the corner?
It doesn’t matter. You must eat either way.
You wrap your teeth around the meat.
It tastes like hope. Like survival. Like the only drops of salted warmth to be licked from cold stone. Like hard work given to earn one more precious chance to make it one more day.
You lick the plate clean.
Leftovers
With a headache chewing on your skull, you stare into the refrigerator. More than just the chilled interior freezes you in place.
The walk home was freezing, despite all the layers you had wrapped over yourself before heading to the grocer. Shirt, jacket, trench coat, gloves, scarf— none were thick enough, warm enough to make up for the coldness that arose when you peeled back that single, tender layer at your center. The skin underneath was raw and aching, pleased to be seen for the first time by anyone outside of yourself, scared to be exposed to piercing golden eyes.
You try to staunch that shivering wound. But it has reopened after spending years sewn shut, and its blood is oozing thick and cold and sticky over you. It is dredging up clots that you thought were forever buried and pushing them to breach the surface, where they escape and gasp for space and air and light.
The wound is surfacing— and in its thrashing, it kicks you down. The past is crawling to a final sickly survival. Yet it does not matter, because the present is drowning.
Your mind screams as it tries to declare an answer that does not exist. Water rushes into its mouth, a torrent of impending reality replacing the air in lungs lurching toward their last breath. Every question thrashes and falls into murky depths.
What does one put into a stomach that will no longer be alive in just a few hours? What does one give a quivering acid to hold in its last fearful moments? What does one place over a hunger’s eye to shield it from seeing the oncoming explosion?
Staring into the fridge, the only answer you have is the unassuming half-eaten containers stored on the shelf. Nothing more than the left-over food that you always make sure to buy as a constant, reliable staple. Everything that will sustain and warm your body before it drains and runs cold.
With surprisingly steady fingers, you grab the chicken soup and put it in a pot on the stove.
Did the stove always click like that as it turns on? Yes you know, because you have memorized every sound of the world since you lost that world for years. Still, you strain to understand that pebble of mundanity before the avalanche comes crashing down.
The soup swirls and shifts as the heat pushes its edges, moves from stillness to stirring to bubbling to storminess, then back to stillness when it finally pours into a cool bowl.
Is it the same soup it once was when it sat undisturbed in the fridge? Or did the heat remake it into something different? Was it even itself when it sat in the fridge, in a retirement from its original conception at the stovetop? Yes. No. You don’t know. (you have never known)
(you will never know now)
You eat the soup, let the salty broth and chicken coat your dry tongue. It is warm, and cutting. It is home, and not quite home. It is safe, and sickening.
It is everything, all the life that is has ever been. It is nothingness, held within a carapace of its own death.
It is an empty bowl.
You finish the soup, but you do not feel finished. You do not want to be done yet.
Looking up, you try to find one more chance of normalcy in the kitchen. There, on the counter, a shallow glass dish sits, resting there since you made it yesterday. The cherry pie inside calls to you with the rustle of wind through trees out back of the porch. Its crust shines with the soft gold of a setting sun over blonde hair.
You walk over, cut a thick slice, and sit back down.
The table you return to is worn, scarred with scratches and the erosion of a solitary passing body. Your arms slot into subtle grooves that you alone know of. It is almost like greeting an old friend for one final time. You are glad to at least be able to say goodbye this time.
Plenty of thought is given to haste and worry, the desperate need to rip the wheel back from the million hands that have controlled your life before, the hands that are steering it straight for the rocks right now. Nevertheless, you eat the slice of pie slow, and take the time to carefully lick every syrupy drop of cherries from the plate.
It may very well be the last thing you eat, after all.
Breakfast
You are alive.
You are safe. You are free.
You are in your kitchen. In your apartment. In your home.
The rising sun reaches from across the room to rest on your cheek. The coffee pot bubbles gentle and playful in the morning air. The radio crackles with music that sounds less like words right now and more like the sleepy flow of breath and blood in a relaxed body.
One man stands to the left side of the stove, pulling eggs from the carton. Short, dark curls surround his head and shine rich and deep in the rays of sunlight, a halo of golden night. He stands just slightly taller than you, one of the few people to ever make you feel like you could fall into them and they would catch and lift you every time with ease, with devotion.
He asks if you want your eggs scrambled or fried. You tell him fried, though you know that they will end up a jumbled, undefinable mess no matter which direction you give. You will eat and love them just the same.
Another man stands to the right side of the stove, measuring and pouring out batter from the bowl. Flecks of gold shine in his brown eyes, points of radiant energy that still somehow pale in comparison to the passion of a sharp yet kind smile. He stands shorter than you, though he exists fiercer than you, one of the few people to ever make you feel like you could sit at their hearth and never again have to fear what exists beyond the orange glow, cradled by their fire.
He gets distracted rambling on about the poem he read last night and accidentally burns one of the pancakes. You tease at him, and he kicks you without heat, and you both smile. You ask him a question about the poem, making sure to tell him when to flip the next pancake.
A third man— a man that bears your name and face— stands in the middle of the stove, between two pillars, cooking bacon in the pan. You are different than you used to be, and that ‘you’ was different than the you before, who was different from the you before even that.
You wonder what that all means.
You think maybe it doesn’t mean anything. You think maybe it means everything.
Maybe it doesn’t truly matter.
Maybe you will survive and live on either way.
Maybe you will wake up in a warm bed wrapped around two sanctuaries, and you will kiss and laugh and talk in the kitchen with sleep still hugging your smiles, and you will sit down at a rickety table bathed by the sunrise, and you will eat breakfast.
You do.
The food is ready, and John and Arthur and you all sit around the table with a disembodied presence of love at your sides, too.
You look down at the plate in front of you. It is simple— a plain, messy, cheap breakfast.
Nothing important say your eyes.
Only food says your stomach.
Maybe more says your chest.
Eat—know says your tongue.
And so you try a bite. Then another one. Then every one.
The food tastes like love. Like dedication. Like a lightning strike of a day illuminating a thrice-reflected soul, and months spent fighting to return to that mirror. Like a morning of easy work and a meal made by three pairs of hands that clasp each other over the table in a promise to live another day, another year, another life at each other’s sides.
Between each unhurried bite, you smile, sip your coffee, and speak of kind, simple things with the two men who sit at the table with you. You move at a pace that you yourself decide, in a life that you yourself own. All of your focus is given only to the warm food and hearts sitting at this table, not a single thought wasted to haste or worry. You talk together, and you laugh together, and you eat together. As slow as you want. As happy as you want.
It will not be the last thing you eat, after all.