Mrs. Mulkey pointed to the nearest desk, said, “Write your essay right now. You have 15 minutes.” Except I didn’t. Neither did Pac-Man when I watched my favored brother play him, terribly, last night, my shoulders aching from shoveling muck deep as my gumboots. The cattle only knew food and shit, so much shit I smelled above Mom’s creamed cauliflower, her potatoes whipped two sticks of butter yellow bricking me to the chair. I finished geometry, a mandatory pass or fail assignment calculating the curve a Barnes dehorner makes through a steer’s keratin, its hot blood in my mouth inspiring my essay, now titled, “Blood Is Life Until You See It.”
Its introduction describes the scene in the barn last summer, my hands sweating around the vinyl grips, but my dark half enjoying the power: the steer still, restrained in the pin, unaware until the crunch, then the spurts attuned to his quickening pulse filling my mouth, his cry of pain, for help, for whatever god the sun seems, I don’t know, it seems an apt metaphor for how tired I am of the death I’ve seen at 15:
dozens of stray dogs, careless cats napping in a wheel weld, squirrels, cattle, deer, good grief the deer strung up and drained, their blood gone with the next rain. Unlike the blood I swallowed, the dehorner an improper shield, red streams on my tongue, up my nose, across my face too. I ended the essay running to the ditch, rinsing my face, careful to not swallow a drop, to not always agree to the gruesome things we do to keep society going. My dark half suggested a different conclusion: Not every death has a purpose. Some things simply conclude. Like this essay. Its lesson to live like Pac-Man, to his last life, eating everything you can while your blood’s still inside you.
I handed Mrs. Mulkey the paper with my ending, my neat cursive on both sides, the truth nowhere on the page, but in my boots still stuck in the barn, my feet scrubbed raw after the walk out and home, Mom telling me to stay at the kitchen table for homework, to wear two pair of socks to bed, to do the math first, everyone else enjoying my brother’s constant encounters with ghosts: his boots on the carpet, his Pac-Man spinning,
the intercepted arc of the final proof eluding me until I realized my lips, not the handles, were the chords, the steer’s blood a sector in which I was inscribed. Trapped by circumference and circumstance. For now, my dark half whispered. One day, we’ll run free, horns out and hard enough to make our blood do as we want.