by Shraya Singh
My mother never touches meat. She never dips her fingers in the sink where my brother soaks the breasts and wings and legs, where he washes the blood off each piece, still warm with waning life. She never carves her knife along the edges of the soft flesh–the same pink as the inner corner of rose petals–and never watches as my brother chops it up, as he caresses its supple divots with the pads of his fingers. And so, it marinates. In silence, in a mix of turmeric and garam masala and hing and salt and whatever else my brother has rummaged from the spice cupboard–it marinates in a space by the window beneath the ledge laden with spider plants, their leaves a verdant waterfall that falls neatly into the space above the sink.
My brother and I never ask her where she goes in the seconds, minutes, hours, as the scent spreads, of spices and eventually cooking meat, in the time that the chicken lays claim over her kitchen. We’ve heard her lecture before, her hopeless reprimands as she looks away from our mouths, our teeth tearing at flesh, tongues licking lips stained with golden masala. In the night we’ll hear her praying again, the bronze temple bell ringing in her hand as she chants verses for her gods, as she soaks her ring finger in roli and touches their foreheads with a gentleness she has never shared with us. In the morning she will tell us the chickens are our brothers, our sisters, our bodies in another life, another reincarnation. And we will shake our heads and say they are not our gods, they are not our chickens, at least not yet.
Shraya Singh is an ex-engineer, writer, and teacher from India and loves frogs, Lord of the Rings memes, and epic fantasy (in no particular order) and she is one of the co-founders of a frog-themed literary magazine called Croak! You can find some of her work in the Southern Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and The Spokesman-Review, amongst others.