It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time.
— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
The adults brought me to the backyard to watch my grandmother and aunties kill chickens. With a twist they snapped the necks and cut the clucking; with a bucket they collected the guts. A metallic smell hung in the air, so heavy it suspended feathers.
I stared at the goldfish floating on the surface of the water. The inside of the tank was green with algae, the only thing alive in this microbiome. “Move,” my mother said, and started scooping the fish into a garbage bag. Red, yellow, gold, into the plastic coffin.
The robin was stiff and slightly warm in my hands. I stared at its dark orange chest where there once was/no longer was a heartbeat. We were two hot spots in thermal imaging, one losing heat and one absorbing it, and I thought: dead birds are the only birds you can touch.
There exists an alternate universe where my grandmother didn’t say no and my mother opened her legs and a doctor sliced me into bits and sucked out the bits, the bits that were me/the bits that were going to be me, with a plastic tube so that I wouldn’t exist, deposited into a space-like vacuum of nothingness. There exists an alternate universe dedicated to my nonexistence, where my mother went on to becoming a manager/teacher/someone else’s mother, and I hung in the air with feathers.