Origin Story

                            after (and with a phrase from) Tara Bray’s “Memoir”


Once, I watched my dad kill a hen we’d reared for years; 
watched my brother carry its small limp body. Why?
I cried. Her neck is bleeding now. Everyone laughed.
I refused to eat its meat. I could not fathom the betrayal.

A friend at school loved his sheep so much that once 
when he called home to ask about them, all of a sudden, 
he jumped up screaming, Twins! Twins! We all thought 
his mum had put to bed. But it was just his pregnant ewe.

Once, my cousins named their goat Champion,
and it grew up to be that—stubborn, reckless, proud, 
and so smart it knew to answer its name. We talked 
of the future, of time, of the marriage of the goat.

We were only boys with bushy hair and eyes so kind
they glowed. Ravaged and gritty as a stone, we played ball 
barefoot in the sands. What we didn’t know
of consequence will someday come to break us.

I was that boy, so quiet he got a book for it;
too soon learned in the art of escape; half the time I spent 
was inside my mind, the other half in no mind at all,
my mind so blissfully blank I mistook it for heaven.

The pain I feel at every kill has remained like a wound—
the blood, so red, so wrong it carries the stench of sacrilege.
A body, so full of life and then, at once, stiff. The blade 
is a dangerous thing. I killed once and never forgot.

At a family reunion, we ducked beneath the hands
of our parents and ran, laughing, into the streets. On the ride 
home, we held hands and danced, the scenery wafting past 
like a slow song. We thought we could dance forever.

Now, we wake up to new music. Failed children,
we wear our gray suits and ties and stare at one another 
across the table, each of us too busy with the business
of his mind to see the beetle quietly chewing away at time.

I still remember that morning, the call, my cousin’s 
voice breaking as he said, We killed and ate Champion.

Read more from Issue 20.2.