How to Kill a Chicken
Oliva Cheng
He wanted me to teach him how to kill a chicken.
I’m not sure when his lurid fascination with killing a chicken first began. Perhaps my sister had pressed him to spend more time with me and he thought this would be an interesting story to add to his repertoire.
The spring air had the light sweat of humidity, but a breeze still wafted through the trees. On his way over, Moondog texted me that he was bringing beers and sushirritos. I chose the two chickens we would kill, sharpening my knife against the cool black of the whetstone. The first chicken was fat and large and white, and the other was small with brownish spots on its feathers.
When I first met Moondog, I didn’t like him. He had been dating my sister for two years and was the third boyfriend of hers I had met. He reminded me of my mother’s new husband and my third-grade bully and a girl I had hooked up with in college. Moondog got his name from how he used to streak at night.
He had asked me whether my sister called me “Oppa,” because he knew, from watching Korean dramas, that this meant “brother.” I told him that “Oppa” meant older brother, and younger brothers weren’t called anything.
Moondog wasn’t a bad guy. He just wasn’t the right guy. My sister had a type: blond, blue-green eyes, taller than six feet, and pale. These guys tended to like women who looked like my sister. She was pretty, but not too pretty.
We lived about forty minutes away from each other in Virginia, I farther out in the mountains and she in Richmond. Surprisingly, we spoke every other day on the phone. My sister and I liked to practice Korean to stay in touch with our culture but could rarely get beyond discussion at a third-grade level. Our mother was in Texas with her husband. Our father had sold his restaurant and moved back to Korea after I graduated from community college. He always said that I had his broad nose and narrow chest. When I looked at photos of him in his twenties, I recognized his face in mine.
I glanced at the clock; I had some time to clean up. Moondog would be here in ten minutes.
When my sister first began dating him, I figured they would probably get married. She texted me every day about him, how she was going to ask him out, how she loved the way he kept his hair long, how she thought he was bold and handsome. They were both medical students pursuing pediatrics and shared passions for Asian cuisine, books by Haruki Murakami, and reality television. The other men she’d dated were boring and unambitious, but Moondog would do wild, charming things, like swim in the ocean in the middle of winter or wear my sister’s clothes in public without embarrassment.
I had asked my sister if she cared what her boyfriends looked like, and she had denied it, saying that what mattered most was their personality. But I knew that whenever she wanted me to meet a new boyfriend, he would look exactly the same as the others. When she recounted to me how her best friend from college, another Korean man, confessed that he loved her, she wrinkled her nose and said, “He looks too much like you. I don’t want to date a guy who looks like my brother.”
I stopped seeing her best friend from college around after that and wasn’t sure if I resented him or admired him. He would not be second-place to someone like Moondog.
I began to wash dishes and scrubbed the grease off plates that had been in the sink for at least a week now. I wanted Moondog to think that I kept a clean house.
He and I had never really gotten to know each other, but he had tried many times. He would always greet me with bear hugs and sometimes even hold my hand. Before I met Moondog, I had not held another man’s hand for seven years. My sister called him affectionate; she loved how he knew himself.
I went to his family’s Christmas party in Virginia Beach last winter. Even though I had been hesitant, my sister persuaded me to come along; she didn’t want me to spend Christmas alone again. I arrived at six with a bottle of red wine that I thought would be good because it was expensive. I liked the long columns that stretched all the way down the front porch and how the lamps were gas-lit. The family loved Chinese food and had ordered a few dishes for dinner. Moondog told me that the place they had ordered from was a hole-in-the-wall; it was authentic.
His father asked me what I did for work. His mother patted me on the back. It was odd to me how his parents also called him Moondog, even though they were white and liberal. They didn’t care if he never cut his hair.
I let the warmth of the home and the spirits engulf me until my vision began to blur a little bit. His stepbrother also had an Asian girlfriend, and I thought about what our black heads looked like from above with all the blonde and brown ones.
I exchanged glances with his stepbrother’s girlfriend and asked her how they had met. She said they had matched on a dating app and that the rest was history. I wondered if she only swiped right on guys like him or if she had ever gone on a date with a guy like me. She had eyes that crinkled when she smiled.
Before dessert, I went outside to smoke. He came out after me and stood close behind me so I could smell his sweat. When I turned around, our faces almost touched but he didn’t move away and instead laughed and asked if I was enjoying myself. I pulled back and said, “Yes, the dinner was fantastic, please thank your parents for me.”
He was much taller than me and rested his hand on the back of my neck, letting it linger there before he went back inside. I felt the warmth of his palm on me, like it was pressing into my back, like it was pushing me, until it seemed to dissipate into the cold air.
I found his previous girlfriends through his Facebook photos, and his romantic history disturbed me. All his other girlfriends had been Asian, and how could he expect me to not notice that? I wondered if my sister had noticed and chose to ignore it. She had been the one to ask him out, after all.
When I heard Moondog pull up in my driveway, I accidentally dropped the dish in the sink. It cracked into three pieces. I went outside and waved hello to him.
He waved back and came in with the food and beers. I noticed the polish on his thumbnails — he often used red. My father would have killed me if I had ever used nail polish.
“I think you’ll really like these,” he said. “Your sister and I go to this food truck all the time.”
He handed me the paper menu that came with the sushirritos. It had a little red dragon on the front, and the food truck owner’s story:
Kwei Fei was born out of love. Tom and YY met while Tom was traveling in Asia. When they got married and he brought her to America, they realized they needed to share their culinary adventures with friends and family.
“Cool,” I nodded. “I’m not hungry right now, but I’ll put these in the kitchen.”
After many failed business attempts, my father had finally found some success in owning an Asian restaurant, although he had served only Korean food: warm bowls of soft tofu and scallion pancakes and little platters of banchan before every meal, and he would never call it “cuisine.” He would have looked down on the food truck, said “Why are people making food in a car?”
On the other hand, my stepfather would have loved the food truck from the start. He would have tried everything on the menu and placed a few singles in the tip jar. He would have tried to meet Tom to tell him how he also loved Asian food. But my stepfather didn’t know anything about what made a restaurant good or bad, right or wrong. He worked as some type of financial analyst. I still wasn’t sure what he did.
“So, are you going to show me how to do this?” Moondog asked. “I love that you know how.”
“You’re the medical student dissecting bodies,” I laughed. “I’m just a guy who knows how to kill a chicken.”
My sister had seen me and my father do it, but she would always watch from afar. She hated it, but she would watch, her eyes transfixed to the stump even after we had dragged the body off.
I showed him the motions. He would hold the bird tightly in a towel with the breast facing the sun. We would place the chicken’s head on the stump in between two nails stretch the neck out, then I would take the knife and chop right below the chin. I had boiling water running in the house so we could dip the body in right after it was dead to ease the plucking process. Moondog had a calm smile on his face and looked down at the dried brown bloodstains on the stump. I would kill the fat one first and then let him try the one with brownish spots after we had gutted it.
When I pulled the chicken out of the coop, I stroked its feathers and held it in my arms like a baby. Moondog fetched the towel and wrapped it around the chicken’s body in a swaddle. He petted its head lovingly, and we exchanged an almost confidential glance.
“Was your dad into doing this sort of thing?” he asked me.
“We used to kill a chicken from our coop once a month. Always on a Saturday morning, so we could have the fresh meat for lunch. I mean, Korean people love fried chicken.”
Moondog laughed.
The chicken nestled comfortably in my chest. I had taken it out multiple times in the past, and it knew no reason to fret and fear me today.
I had Moondog place the body on the stump and stretch out the chicken’s head so that it faced me.
“Are you afraid?” I asked him, and he looked straight at me, his face full of excitement and childish glee.
“I’m never afraid,” he said.
I brought the knife down in a quick, sharp motion on its throat. In that moment, I saw the chicken’s eyes staring at me, panicked and betrayed and not the glittering silver that would soon decapitate it.
Blood spurted onto my clothes. Moondog held the writhing body until it stopped moving.
“Holy fuck,” he said. “That was cool.”
I took the swath from him and went into the house, the blood coming down from its neck in cute pomegranate-colored droplets. I dunked it, neck first, into the boiling water until it was all submerged except the yellow, lifeless legs. When I took it out of the pot, clear, red water dripped off.
He noticed the broken dish in the sink but didn’t say anything.
I instructed Moondog to begin plucking the feathers and thought of how I used to do the same for my father when I was a child. I had kept a collection of feathers from each chicken we killed in a small box underneath my bed. My father and I both loved the exhilaration right before you killed a chicken. How you become tired after the stupid amount of energy you exhaust once the knife comes down and you feel the soft wood of the stump.
Once the chicken was naked, I held my hand over Moondog’s to show him how to cut a hole around the anus. I carefully guided him until he was ready to puncture the skin. We were close and the hairs on his neck straightened when I breathed on him. I thought of how our faces had almost touched at Christmas, and my chest tightened.
He asked if I planned to take the feet off, but I told him no, I would take them off later and braise them with oyster sauce and garlic.
I slowly pushed my hand all the way inside the hole to feel the warm entrails, letting my fingers linger in the heat for a second before putting them into the plastic garbage bag. I felt a sick sort of pleasure inside my chest. How intimate this was, moving methodically so as not to burst any innards.
When I washed my hands, I let the water run over them until they were cold and pale again. Moondog was examining the chicken, peering into the black hole that smelled like blood and feces. The odor permeated the room.
I had him pull up his sleeves and reach into the body as well, to clear the contents as if it were a blocked pipe. Moondog creased his eyebrows as his hand went in. I admired how he moved in a smooth way, as if he was familiar with it, friendly with it, and he pulled out the heart and lungs. It had taken me years of experience to learn how to move like him. I dug my fingernail into my palm until a small crater of skin surrounded it.
My sister told me that each medical student was assigned a dead body to dissect. I wondered if Moondog thought about the cold formaldehyde of his assigned corpse while grabbing the rest of the intestines.
As he cleaned the table, Moondog asked me about my dating life. “Your sister told me that you and that girl you were dating recently broke up. You okay?”
After some hesitation, I told him that I was taking a break from dating so that I could focus on myself. I picked at the rough skin around my nails. He smiled down at me. My girlfriend had dumped me a few months prior, and our friends had told me she was already dating again. I had never found her very attractive, but Moondog would have thought she was pretty. I tried not to think of her, but memories would sting me in those light and vivid moments just before sleep.
We walked out to the coop so that Moondog could kill the chicken with the brownish spots. He looked through the wire cage but shook his head and said that he probably didn’t have time to kill another chicken, that he didn’t realize that it took so long to kill it and get it in the freezer, but that he wanted to try next time we hung out. He held my hands in his and thanked me for teaching him.
I remembered my hesitancy to kill a chicken for the first time. I was ten. How many times had I held the body in the towel before? My first time was messy. I didn’t have the strength to kill it in one swoop, so I had hacked at the neck until the chicken seemed to die not from decapitation but from exhaustion. My father had held the twitching body and put his hand on my shoulder when I finally dropped the knife. I can still feel his palm on my back sometimes.
I had hoped Moondog would struggle similarly with his first time, how he would be finally unconfident, how he would have to desperately swing the knife until everything, the body, the neck, his arm, all of it stopped moving. I wanted to see the echo of my childhood fears on his face.
Instead, we sat in my backyard, facing the woods, and sipped our beers.
“I want to make sure we’re ok,” he said and patted my head. “I love your sister.”
“Don’t worry. I’m happy she’s happy,” I wiped my lips on my shirt sleeve.
“I’m trying my best.” He seemed earnest whenever he spoke, and he downed the last drops of his beer. I imagined smashing my fist into his face to stop him from looking at me the way he did.
“Look, I really want to try it next time. I really do. I’m just wiped.” I understood but turned away. “I should probably go now. I have to study for an exam, and we have a date tonight,” he said before standing to wipe his hands on his pants. I wasn’t sure if this was some secret code for I’m smarter than you, I’m better-looking than you, you don’t matter but decided not to press.
“I’ll come back, and then it’ll be my turn.” He winked and got into his car.
After he left, I placed my hand on the stump and raised the knife. The air still smelled like blood. I didn’t swing down but stood there, letting the breeze cool me.
The chicken with the brownish spots would live a few more months, and then I would kill it myself. No rhyme or reason had distinguished it from the chicken that was lying still in my freezer now. Tomorrow I would remove the feet and neck until it was bare like the raw bodies you pick over in the supermarket.
