Under the stare of the bulb strung on its cord to bear witness, my father, skinning his sleeves to the elbows, lays out a killed, scalded chicken on sports pages on a wooden block. He fastens a fist round the neck and rips out the feathers, singes off quills with a taper close to the skin, plunges bunched fingers into the body and pulls out the short black eel of the liver, the rugged heart-ruby, the truffles of kidneys, the squiggle intestines, the bowel and the golden baubles of eggs in their translucent sacs.His elbows are raw, his muscles tauten like hawsers, his jaw is an axe, his frown like the knife blade that severs the head with its shrivelled eyelids and the claws hooked in rigor mortis.
His knuckles and forearms shining with mucus, he loops string and trusses the emptied-out carcass, opens the back door to let out the stink of feathers and offal, parcels the waste, hurries it out into darkness, and comes back shivering, shadowed by moonlight. He swills from his instruments bloody secretions, scours forearms, each finger, each fingernail under the hot tap. He seasons the mauve-white pillow with parsley on its china dish, unlocks the wire-mesh door of the meat safe, shoves aside tails and trotters, a wet slab of calf’s liver, ripples of tripe, dark steaks collared in fat the colour of butter, and slides in the chicken, slams the door with a punctual smack.
My mother comes in to drench and scrub death from the table.
In the garden, no more afraid of its shadows, my father lights his pipe. It glows like the pulse of a calm and satisfied heart.
John Wheway writes flash and poetry. His full collection A Bluebottle in Late October was published by V.Press in 2020. He won the International Wigtown Poetry Prize in 2023. His most recent flash fictions were published in 2023 in Fictive Dream and Ellipsis Zine.
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