content warning: animal violence

 

 

 

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    The other day I saw fifty quail eggs in a can, boiled, peeled. Cheap, too. Eleven cents an egg. How crazy is that? I imagine sticking two fingers into an open can, like some sort of strange, cylindrical structure abandoned aeons ago, reclaimed by the rain, an empty silo filling up with brackish, unnervingly clear water. I stick my fingers in and swish them around, looking for a single egg to haul up. My fingers never touch the bottom of that can– I’m also careful not to touch the jagged corners of the rim, but I’m bound to make a mistake. I’ll slip and cut myself on the rim, and my blood will drip into the murky can like thick, red rain. I wonder if it would dye the eggs, or in some strange way nourish these barely-dead things. Then I’ll switch hands and be more careful next time. The thought of doing this again and again until I run out of quail eggs to pop into my mouth unnerves me, so I decide against buying it.

 

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    Birds gasp for air when they can’t breathe through their nostrils any longer, when they’re about to die. Picture it. My cupped, firm hands become a nest, and the birds are reduced to chicks, beaks clamouring for food. The first time this happened, I thought that the bird must have been thirsty, so I poured teaspoons of water down its throat until it stopped breathing altogether.

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    I want to tell you about something that I discovered when I was fourteen. There was this man that posted videos online in a language I couldn’t understand, but he would do odd little experiments that I couldn’t look away from. In one, he injects a few chicken eggs with some of his own DNA (his semen, I think), and incubates them at the perfect temperature. What follows is a progress log. Day after day I stared at those eggs, squinting for the tiniest twitch. They did. Some started shifting around early, violently rocking the egg back and forth in an attempt to escape. These first few he took into his hands in front of the camera, where they seemed to shake more violently than ever. Then he would crush them, and they would ooze reddish-brown. He would say something that was the tonal equivalent of: “No good.”

 

    There was only one left, and it moved the egg more gently, but with greater force, the way an underwater current leaves waves on the surface. It seemed destined for greater things. The very last video on that channel is unremarkable. It is Day 34, and the camera is trained on a single, remaining egg on a desk under a heat lamp. On its side it slowly rocks back and forth, like a child holding their knees, on their back. It stops. There is what looks like a tiny crack. There are no more videos after that one.

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    This one time, my cat brought me a fledgling. Fledglings are these silly in-betweens, too alive to die quietly, too pathetic to fend for themselves. You’re supposed to wait for its parents to come pick it up, but that didn’t seem very likely with my cat still on the prowl. So, I’ll tell you what I did.  I filled an empty shoebox with newspaper shreds and I placed the bird in it, then put the shoebox on the tallest nearby hedge, the one bordering the gate of my house. It made sense, you see. From this elevated point its parents would hear it cry and come take care of it.

 

    I tried to ignore the smell at first. Every time I walked past there was an inkling of an idea, a realisation that I wasn’t allowing to fully settle. It must have been at least two weeks before it became unbearable. Quietly, I got back on my tip-toes and gently cradled the shoebox down. It had become a hellhole. I will do my best to describe it to you. The rain had filled it almost to the brim with brackish water. I remember the shoebox feeling soft in my hands, and being deathly afraid that the box would soon give way, but I couldn’t stop looking. The fledgling was adrift in the middle of it all. I didn’t know maggots could swim, but they were swimming, so many of them, like schools of white fish diving through the ribcage of a tiny shipwreck. The water was so clear. I say this again because I remember being able to see my fingertips pressing through the weak base. I was trapped there for a while, a God watching the world he had created, cradling it gingerly in his arms in fear that he would destroy it altogether with the twitch of a finger.

 

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    This is the last thing I will tell you. It doesn’t seem important, after all that, but it is. Shortly after discovering the quail eggs, I found out about canned chickens. A whole, boiled chicken, in a can, preserved in some sort of clear slime. Curious, I bought one. A whole canned chicken. I went around the lid with a can-opener and upended it onto the kitchen counter. Pink and naked, it slipped straight out of the canal without so much as a squeal. I cradled the stillborn between my palms. It was already falling apart at the joints– how odd, to come into this world so poorly held together.

 

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    Do they want to die in my hands? Of all the places in the world to die, would you choose cold, alone on the ground, or would you rather stare me in the eye, gasping? It doesn’t feel fair for me to decide. I squeeze, slowly, firmly, pushing meat off bone, the flesh escaping from the spaces between my fingers.

I think this piece works well in NO THANKS BUT THANKS because I don’t really know where to submit it. It’s near and dear to my heart, but I can’t seem to find a comfortable home for it—the closest I got was with a journal of weird fiction, but even then they turned it away because the piece was too graphic for them to publish. I’ve received a great deal of feedback demanding clarity, for narrative through lines, but that’s feedback for short fiction. This piece sits comfortably with its discomfort, and I’ve put it away for some time, until now. I’m bringing this sickly bird to you in my hands, palms cupped.

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