The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bad Animal by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer

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content warning for animal violence

Murder Theory

               “Image: a meadow and then a meadow backwards.”
                              —Bradley Trumpfheller

In the clearing, the calf can only make
a wide circle around what it does not know.
Its mother somewhere close, lowing and chewing
grass, the tags through their ears reflecting sunlight.
They have been assigned a number. They have been
given a purpose. In the clearing, a man with a knife,
advancing on the calf. It is out of the way. No one
will guess what he is doing. The man is starving,
but that doesn’t mean you should have sympathy
for his situation. He is about to kill something living,
and close to its mother. For years, I cleaned my plate
of meat. I divorced what I saw from how it got there.
At a farm once, I was taught to kill a chicken. I put it
in the kill cone and watched another person cut
its throat, watched the blood come ribboning out.
The knife, sticky and feathered and sharp. People need
to eat. But—indelible is the squawk, the panicked flap
of wings. I remember saying no. I remember saying stop.
And then my mother, with her bowed head. It’s not
that she didn’t see. It’s that she wouldn’t.