Down-at-the-heels, weather-worn and frayed, a house in rusted, soot-caked Ohio—a dirt-scratch yard behind the house—another battered house beside that house, another dirt-scratch yard behind it—me in one yard looking through the ragged slats of a wilted fence into the other yard. Three years old, maybe—blank, smooth, unscored—old enough to totter dumbstruck on callow legs—and at that one moment my raw brain is finally willing to record experience for the first time, just then prepared to be pierced by the first barb of memory, and the barb does not deliver the shining, moon-shaped face of a mother leaning over the crib or the sifted scent of butter, flour and sugar. No. Just then I peer through the fence into the other yard where a man is killing brown chickens. Hair matted, undershirt sweat-soaked, fingers blood-streaked, he tugs another writhing hen from the wire coop, and the bird’s flapping body arcs through the gray air onto a tree stump as the hatchet comes down. With the hatchet blade the man flicks the detached head from the stump and tosses the headless body to the ground where it still writhes and wobbles, its wings twitch, it runs and stumbles blind, like what it is and nothing else—the antique simile enfleshed in its original spasm—until the barb on its heel drags over its own severed head and the chicken collapses, inert, a carcass now, ready to be strung up with other blood-speckled bodies to drain from the clothesline.

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