by Maya-Gawonii Shabazz-Saleh
My grandmother was four when a rooster lunged at her face.
She lived on a farm in Kansas in 1947, small enough that some animals stood taller than her, loud enough that very little startled anyone—except the way the rooster chose her. Wings first. A violent bloom of feathers and air, the dry click of a beak snapping where her eyes had been. The sound stayed longer than the fear. She screamed because there was nowhere else for that much terror to go in a body that small.
Her mother came outside immediately. No questions. No shouting. She caught the rooster by the legs and broke its neck with a short, practiced turn, the way you might wring a soaked rag over a bucket. The body slackened at once. My great-grandfather removed the head cleanly. Blood darkened the dirt and vanished. The yard returned to itself.
A threat, alchemized into dinner.
My grandmother helped clean it. The body was still warm, heat lingering where motion used to be. Feathers came away in clumps, tugging back before releasing, static snapping against her skin. They clung to her fingers. Beneath them, the flesh was pale and puckered, faintly damp. It wasn’t frightening. It was just there. This was what came next. Nobody explained it.
Nobody asked where the fear had gone.
By evening, the rooster had been reduced to parts. The violence ran its course and changed form. What had been a threat broke down into calories. The house filled with oil and salt and heat. The day collapsed inward, becoming dinner.
My grandmother told the story like it were the most reasonable sequence of events imaginable. Attack. Response. Supper. The only part she lingered on was the speed of it—how fast something could move from dangerous to handled, from screaming to chewing.
When she told it to me decades later, she laughed a little. “We didn’t waste food,” she said.
I think about that rooster when people talk about farm life like it’s gentle. About how quickly meaning rearranges itself when you don’t hesitate. How fear doesn’t get the final say—only the first.
Some threats don’t get remembered.
They get consumed.
Maya-Gawonii Shabazz-Saleh is a Black, Indigenous, and Egyptian writer whose stories live where love, grief, and imagination meet. She lives on Ohlone land, known as Oakland, California, where she tends to her writing, her community, and the small everyday magics that keep love alive.