MEAT

I can’t live with these breasts anymore. I resented their size when they were considered an attribute, but after expanding and contracting throughout two pregnancies, and after breastfeeding two babies they’re not only big–they’re dead weight. My shoulders ache, my lower back is in knots. I look at the way my grandmother’s spine curves after 90 years of carrying breasts much too heavy for her small frame and I decide I won’t live with dead weight any longer than I have to.

Plastic surgeon offices give me the creeps. They offer champagne and glossy posters in the bathroom explain why vaginal rejuvenation will change my life. Women with globe-like breasts and pencil-straight noses come and go while I pretend to read a women’s magazine. I think I’ll want a female surgeon, but I’m wrong. I can’t find one I like until I meet a male doctor with a name I can’t pronounce. I ask him why he’s in the business of building boobs and he tells me he used to do facial reconstructions but the hours were terrible, so he started breast reconstructions, mostly for cancer patients. It’s so much more palatable than the offices with Instagram hashtags and he instills in me a sense of confidence so, after googling and Facebooking him (as though the appearance of a normal family with two teenage sons has anything at all to do with what kind of breasts he’ll construct for me), I put my cleavage in his hands.

The morning of the surgery my husband drops me off at the hospital. It’s 2021 and Covid policies dictate nobody can come in with me. Nurses walk me back, have me change into a gown and paper shower cap. I sit there, paper gown rustling as I tap my foot nervously against the edge of the bed, waiting for drugs to calm me down. Before I can stop myself, I’ve stress-purchased five pairs of underwear on my phone. Soon, the surgeon comes in. I open my gown and he takes a Sharpie, marking my breasts like my grandmother marks a dress pattern. Dotted lines, circles, angles. The drugs start hitting my bloodstream, but the surgeon told me I’d be conscious enough to get on the operating table myself even though I wouldn’t remember and I’m determined to remember. So as they wheel me I think, “There’s the hall, there’s a fluorescent light, now we’re going into the operating room, it’s cold,” and that’s where my memory ends.

When I wake up I’m groggy and I have too many stitches to count. I’ve been sliced horizontally from one edge of my ribs to the other, a vertical line up to and around each nipple. Over two pounds of tissue has been removed. I’ve watched the videos so I know what it looked like rumpled, pink, and white like the waves of ground beef under cellophane at the grocery store. My chest is a turnpike of separated skin held together by plasticized thread.

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When I order chicks from the internet (an online catalog with sunlit photos of every kind of chicken you can imagine), I don’t expect to like them. I want the eggs and the atmosphere of roaming hens, but chickens are strange creatures and I can’t imagine forging any kind of bond with them. Also, I eat chickens.

On a spring morning in April the post office calls to let us know our chicks have arrived. We can hear the chirping when we walk into the post office. I give my name and they hand me a box with a series of dime-sized holes along the top edge. Giddy, my daughters and I walk to the car before carefully sliding the top of the box open. The girls gasp; they can’t contain their excitement. Tiny, fluffy babies stare back at us, heads cocked, round eyes blinking in the light. My four-year-old daughter tells me it’s the best day of her life.

We put the chicks in our sunroom, adjacent to the kitchen and the living room. I haven’t done this before so I have no idea yet how wood shavings will end up everywhere, or the way accumulated chick poop will smell. But they are just babies and the spring snow hasn’t let up, so they’re in the house with us. I watch them skeptically. Their elongated pupils are strange, papery eyelids stranger.

Their tiny clawed feet feel like worms as they grasp my finger, perching. When I hold them in my hand they fall asleep, tumble-sized heads bobbing the way I do when I’m trying to pull a late night of work. Sometimes, when they’re really asleep you can roll them onto their backs and they sleep right through it, lying in the palm of your hand like a tiny, feathered person.

They grow quickly and are soon awkward pullets. They’re half-feathered and thank goodness the weather has warmed so they can move out to the chicken coop. By now we know their personalities and names. Pearl loves my younger daughter, will seek her out, snooze in her lap. Elsa is curious, Watermelon bossy, Starlight always hungry.

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After my surgery, I spend three days at my aunt’s house recuperating. I don’t want to be around my kids or my house and its corresponding duties while I’m on narcotics. They affect me more than I expected. I have to change the setting on my phone to make the type larger or else I can’t read it. The letters dance across the screen, animated by the drugs in my bloodstream. I spend all day and all night in a recliner, unable to sit up on my own or lie down flat, unable to lift anything heavier than a glass of water. By the third day I miss my girls and it’s time to go home.

I arrive home to find chaos. My husband has had three days of work and parenting and chicken-minding after a decade of run-away unmanaged stress and he’s in the midst of a breakdown.

His words come fast and garbled. He can’t slow down. Every movement is jerky and violent: slamming, thrusting, grabbing, bludgeoning his way through the daily chores of caring for a household.

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The chicks are six months old when one’s neck breaks. She doesn’t perish right away. I know she has to be put out of her misery but I don’t know how. YouTube tells me the most humane way is to rip or slice the head from the body. A man holding a live chicken describes the process. He assures his viewers that he understands any reticence and recounts his grandfather telling him that at age seven he was old enough to butcher one of the rabbits he raised for meat. The YouTuber describes how he thought he would vomit killing that rabbit. Don’t worry though, he says, you’ll get used to it. You can get used to anything, he says.

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My first morning home I need to shower but I dread it. The bandages cover more real estate than a swimsuit top, surgical tape closing the distance between the gauze and my skin, incisions still fresh with oozing blood. I can’t do it myself–shower and manage the wounds–so I will need to ask for help. My husband is in a state. Glasses on the kitchen shelves rattle as he slams drawers shut, muttering to himself. Against my better judgment, I ask if he can help me, even though I can see he’s in no condition to help anyone. But he’s my husband and I think, maybe this vulnerability will be a good thing.

I should have listened to my instincts, though, because when I ask he starts yelling. The kids crunch their Cheerios, accustomed to scenes, if not this severe, close enough that it doesn’t alarm them. But me, I’m alarmed. I’m scared. He is unreachable in his anger and I am incapable of protecting myself.

His voice gets louder, veins pop in his neck. He’s a large man anyway, made larger by fury. Fear pounds in my blood and my heart beats wildly under my wounds. Then he comes at me. I become the chicken on the chopping block, shrinking.

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In the end I can’t do it. I can’t sever the head but I can’t watch her suffer, either, so I find a vet who will humanely euthanize the bird for $65. It’s not cheap, but I decide it’s worth my peace of mind to find a solution that puts the hen out of her misery and doesn’t cause any additional harm. And also, one that doesn’t require violence on my part.

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My husband doesn’t hit me or push me. He doesn’t kick or slap me. He throws an iPhone sailing past my ear and not even the sound of it slamming against the hardwood floor breaks the spell he’s under.

That night in my recliner the scene loops through my brain. Fear saturates every cell in my body; it feels like it’s seeping out each 4mm space between stitches. I’m afraid for my husband to leave, but finally, in the silver moonlight I realize I’m more afraid of my children witnessing such a scene again.

My husband moves out. At first, daily life feels impossible in my condition. I can’t take out the trash, so the girls and I tie it to the back of my car and drive it down the lane. They cheer as it bumps over the gravel driveway, tossing bits of its load out here and there. I can’t lift a gallon of milk, so I buy pints and the girls are thrilled when they can pour the milk in their own cereal. Each day my husband is gone my incisions heal more. Eventually the bandages come off. Eventually my body absorbs the sutures. Eventually I begin to feel strong again. I can lift my children, run across our fields, sling hay.

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Four of the original crop of hens have survived. We since added more chickens, ducks, sheep, barn cats, another dog. Three other times I’ve paid the vet who works out of her RV to euthanize a chicken, refusing to accept that their lives aren’t worth the $65 if I can afford it. I stopped eating chicken and all other meat. I couldn’t forget the YouTuber, the way he felt slitting the rabbit’s throat, or his promise that it was something one could acclimate to. I couldn’t forget the way my own body felt, sliced from edge to edge. I couldn’t forget the way I almost acclimated to fear of my partner. I realized I didn’t want to be the meat or the executioner.

My husband does not live here anymore. The kids eat cereal without incident. The hens prowl the yard, and when dinner rolls around I pull fistfuls of greens, radishes, and tomatoes out of the garden.

I take care of this property and all of its inhabitants on my own. I lift weights, practice grit. When the sheep escape out of their pen or a gate needs to be fixed, my wits and my muscles oblige. And when the biggest feat of strength required is gentleness, I’m strong enough to give it.

Claire Bow is a writer, photographer, mother and steward of animals in the high plains of Colorado.