Krys Malcolm Belc

I Made Spatchcock Chicken

I bought it this way, de-backboned, splayed out before being vacuum sealed in the package. It looks too much like what it is, Anna said, making room for it on the bottom shelf. I can’t even look at it.

Neither of us has ever killed a live animal to eat it, not even a lobster. When my children were small and days were endless, I would stand them by the lobster tank at the grocery store to pass time. With their shoulders pressed together and still, I could rest for just a moment. Once, before I had children, I hit a deer with my car, but when I pulled over to see if it was dead, it was nowhere.

Living in the Upper Midwest for three years, I never once ate venison. I want to say it was because I have no interest in game, but really I was never close enough with anyone who would have shared some with me. There’s an intimacy to that sort of thing. Wanting something you don’t even know for sure you want, that’s loneliness, right?

That night I hit the deer I was on my way home from a graduate school class just outside Philly. It was my first time in graduate school. I was getting a teaching license. It was one of those afterschool classes with rows of teachers trying to stay awake. We tried to learn the theory, to stick to the readings, but in the end all we could talk about was our own students, all the ways we were failing them. We were in our first year in the classroom. That evening as class let out, it was snowing. Philadelphia snow is never beautiful to me, all wet and slippery. The city never cleans itself up well after. This was before the years I lived in Michigan, and I had never seen radiant snow.

As I skidded out into a deer there it was again, the snow inconveniencing me. In front of my class, I was this selfish, too. I started at twenty-one. And I guess some people are mature at that age but I wasn’t. My students were teenagers, high school kids, and I wanted it to be about them, but really I could not move on from me: how ill-suited I was for them, how some of them were only a year or two younger than I was. The misery of those early mornings, five o’clock and there I was in the middle of my living room grading their homework and planning enough, by God please let it be enough, to get me through that day. I wasn’t ready but I couldn’t quit this job. I had to pay rent. I spent Saturdays stunned on the couch watching reruns. The laundry, the dishes piled up around us. How could I be good, be loved, if I was so bad at teaching? I wanted to be gentle, but to get through each day required a hardening of my face, of my body, a steeling. What I really wanted was for someone to teach me to be kind and to do this well.

The deer caused no damage to my car, and I saw no blood, and though my car spun out there was no one else driving by. What if it walked a hundred yards and died over there in the woods? I stood on the shoulder looking out into the distance. I wanted to think it would be better if went out and found it, if I’d cut it up and gave it around to friends., but no one does that sort of thing here, and besides, I have none of the tools or knowledge required.

When I was in high school, I had a group of friends. I was as surprised then as I am now that there was more than one of them. I felt I was the least deserving of belonging in the group, the awkwardness of me, the boyishness I had not yet learned to hone. They were beautiful. They were women already, in their way, they had a sense of how they were supposed to look and act, they courted older men, they were on their way somewhere I knew I’d never get, though I didn’t know where else one could go. There was no one in my life to help offer that direction. We went to all-girls school and were cultivated to be strong but not too strong, to think for ourselves but never too much.

One weekend afternoon, a bird smashed into one of their backyard doors. We gathered in her kitchen, watching it flopping around on the patio.

Can I say how electric it was every time we were together, even watching a dying bird?

What was inside me was what made me ask for a shovel. I knew that I had a brutality in me. Something apart from them, long before I had the language for what it was. Back then, I was a vegetarian. I would watch my mother take off her rings to mix meatballs, hear the thick squelch of meat and fat, and feel sick. The red of it.

My beautiful friends watched through the glass as I smashed the bird twice. Once to do the job, a second time for emphasis.

Small mercy. Brutality. Masculinity. It was a beautiful day, sun everywhere. 

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child (Counterpoint, 2021) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet.) He is the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine. Krys lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children.