Primeval queen

Before I kill him, I hold him.  I am careful not to squeeze him too hard. I don't want to harm him, or worse, scare him. 

I can feel his heart beating.  I like the warm weight. 

His feathers are soft and glossy, fading from  deep, terracotta red to iridescent green-black.  Beautiful.  I think about the earrings I am going to make with them later.

I stroke his back and look into his yellow, darting eyes.  I project calm.  Although my heart beats hard, I do not want him to feel my nervousness. 

We hang him up from a tree by his feet and leave him there for the blood to drain to his head.  I apologise to him for the situation.

I put my hand over his chin and beak, covering his eyes.  I don't want him to see the knife.  Hanging upside down, wings open out like an inverted umbrella, he is so helpless that I have a sudden urge to save him. 

I feel a pulse in the artery underneath my thumb.  I think about how he is alive.

I slice the knife across his neck. Warm blood spills over my hand and drips onto the grass.  I don't know why, but the temperature surprises me.

For a moment, the chicken is still and I am left with a brief silence, during which I can almost hear the liquid falling from the knife and my hand.  Then he starts moving again and Jimmy takes the knife from my hand, hacking his head completely off.  It falls to the ground like a discarded toy.

The headless body starts to flap its twisted wings and cluck, as if the soul of the bird is echoing its life as it leaves the body.  On the floor, the head twitches.  The movement of the body is so violent that I stand bewitched, watching the blood fall to the floor as the carcass tugs and swings on the rope.  After two minutes it falls still. 

"Ya," says Erica.  Enough.

We pull feathers from the body to save for jewellery.  If I pull too hard, skin comes off with them.  I will need to wash these.  When I've taken what I want she dips the whole thing in boiling water, loosening the cuticles and enabling us to pull the remaining feathers out in wet handfuls.  They lie on the compost heap in soggy balls. 

She toasts the naked body on the fire to burn off any last hairs.  I scrub it all over with a soapy scourer.

I tell them I would like to butcher as well.  The family gather around the stone sink to watch.  I think they find it hard to believe that this twenty-six year old girl is not only unmarried but has never killed or butchered a chicken.  I am not sure what to tell them, other than, "things are different in England."

But I want to do this.  For years I have wanted to do this.  I have always felt very uncomfortable about the fact I had never killed anything.  How could I be happy eating meat when I was not happy to kill it myself?  The food we buy in Tesco is so far removed from its origin that it is hard, sometimes, to remember that it was once a living, breathing thing.  In some twisted way this process is a token of respect to the animals I have eaten.

Erica holds the legs apart as I cut around the anus. 

I must be careful not to contaminate the meat with the intestinal contents. I slice down the left hand side of the spine, opening a cavity through which I carefully pull the innards.   I wonder how machines carry out such a delicate job.

When I chop the feet off at the lower joint, I am left with something barely resembling the chickens I'm used to buying at home.  I wonder what they must pump them with to make them so rounded and white.  This one is wrinkled, thin and bright yellow.  The flavour will be impeccable.

The whole job has taken almost an hour.  I have turned a bright-eyed, beautiful creature into food.  I am hugely aware of the significance of what I've just done, and the inappropriateness of the usual indifference we have for meat.  But I feel relieved. 

I hadn't realised how much it bothered me that I had eaten meat most of my life and yet never killed an animal with my own hands. I feel slightly less of a fraud. 

I whisper a promise to the chicken soul; to always be thankful for the life of the animal that I'm eating.  I am a strange, yet conscientious cross of a primeval hunter and a privileged hippy.

I sit at home, cadaver in the fridge, and twirl silver wire into earring springs.  Time to adorn myself with my kill.