She wants to open a window. To hear the crickets. She wants to feel the evening cool. Smell the rain coming and going.
She’s dying; she doesn’t think it’s a hell of a lot to ask.
There is music in the other room and someone is cooking. She hopes it’s her daughter making chicken soup with barley and carrots. Maybe some potatoes, too. Russets, though. Not those skinny purple things that turn the broth gray.
***
“For you to live, something has to die,” this from her grandfather as he handed over her favorite hen, the one that laid the blue speckled eggs. “Do it fast,” he said, helping her stretch the bird’s neck over a tree stump far from the chicken coop. “Don’t make her suffer.” The hatchet, which had looked small in his hand, felt enormous in her own.
With one whack, she took its head. Its body wriggled free from her grandfather and went careening around the yard, thick strings of blood spurting from its neck. She dropped the severed head and hatchet in the sticky dirt.
Finally, the hen collapsed.
Her grandfather finished bleeding it over a bucket, “Take it in to Grandma.”
A
giant pot of boiling water waited in the kitchen. Her grandmother
dropped the bird into the pot for a minute, then plopped it into the
chipped porcelain sink. “Here,” she pulled up a step stool and they
began to pull feathers.
When the bird was bare, her grandmother pushed
back her tear-matted hair. “Wash your face and do the carrots,” she
said. “We’ll let Grandpa gut this one.”
There would be no blue
speckled eggs to collect in the morning, but tonight there would be
roasted chicken with carrots and potatoes from the garden and maybe even
cornbread.
Tomorrow she and Grandma would make stock for her favorite soup.
***
Her daughter comes in with a tray.
She asks her to open the window.
“It’s raining,” her daughter places the tray over her lap. “You’ll catch your death.”
Her
death has already caught her, but saying so would only antagonize her
daughter. She tries begging. Can’t she open it just a crack? For a
little while?
“Fine,” her daughter lifts the window about an inch. “Until you finish your soup.”
In the soup are the things that had to die so she could live today.
Soon
she will go into the ground--unembalmed if her wishes are observed. Her
body will feed creatures who will die to feed other creatures and so
on. She sips, liking the thought.
Aromatic steam rises in the cooling air.
She wonders if her daughter would mind looking for some blue speckled eggs at that farmer’s market she visits every weekend.
Or if that would be a hell of a lot to ask.
Originally published at Medium.com.
Photo credit: Natalie Rhea on Unsplash
