The following story was chosen by Carmen Maria Machado as the winner of the 2024 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. The prize is awarded annually by Selected Shorts and a guest author judge. Subscribe to Selected Shorts wherever you get your podcasts to hear this story performed by an actor in the near future.
What I Could Have Given
My mother—your grandmother—taught me about animals. Every day, we woke with the sun and had fresh eggs before starting our chores. Be patient when cooking eggs, she said, even when you’re hungry. Never let the pan smoke. Another important thing: keep your hens from going broody. At the first sign of this instinct, stick her in a wire dog cage and only let her out to eat. The broodiness should break in a few days. Watch for this even if you don’t have a rooster. I once got pecked bloody by a broody hen that had plucked all her breast feathers to better warm a clutch of rocks.
If you do have a rooster, and he is mean to you, dunk his head in water.
When you slaughter a pig, use every part. Back for sirloin, ribs, pork chops; mid-cuts for bacon; hock and jowl for stews and chili; hard fat for pastry; soft fat for soup; ears for the dogs. Everything but the oink, my mother would say. My mother believed that pigs feared mirrors. They knew something about reflection, something about the soul. Some babies are also troubled by this knowledge. My mother told me that I used to scream at my own reflection. Maybe, as a baby, you also knew what the pigs did. Have you forgotten it as I have? Or are you still startled when you look into mirrors? Sometimes, I am taken by how awfully wanting my life looks reflected back.
My father sent me to a home in Columbus when he saw my belly swelling. There, I was told to write on one side of a piece of paper all the things that a proper family could give a baby. On the other side of the same paper, I was told to list all the things that I could ever possibly give.
In fly-season, spray your cows with vinegar and dish soap. This should do the trick for their faces and their rumps, but their udders cannot be spared from biting insects because calves will not suckle on vinegar. The one time I nursed you, alone on a hospital cot, I sang the only thing I could think of—a silly rope-skipping rhyme that determined who the skipper would marry. “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief! Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief!” I was never good at skipping rope and rarely made it past the first verse. Poor men, beggar men, and thieves were all I was destined for. After you were gone, I could only sleep with a hot water bottle on my chest, and the warmth and the weight against my breasts made my milk return and return and return.
My mother died four days after my fourteenth birthday, two years before you were born. I should have known that her death was coming—I heard a hen crow. But I killed that crowing hen, and that should have saved her. I snapped her feathered neck. When I dropped the motionless bird on the wet lawn, I recognized her feather-plucked chest. I have killed six crowing hens in the years since you were taken from my arms, out of terror that they were warning of your death. I know I sound cruel, but please forgive me. Superstitions are all I have to protect you.
I read that it takes a week for babies to recognize a mother’s face, but they can recognize her voice at birth. Surely it has been too long now for you to know me. But I wonder . . . Would this stranger’s voice stir up a familiar warmth? Maybe the wind will carry me to you.
I have no photo of you. Somehow, nobody thought to take one. Sometimes, I think if I had a photograph of the six slain hens, I could stop imagining their snapped necks. And, maybe, if I had a photograph of your father, I could determine if he were rich man, poor man, or simply a thief. Maybe, if I had a photograph of you, I wouldn’t have to see you in the grocery store, in the park, in my sisters, the hairdresser, the butcher, doctor, mirror.
The specificity of your wrinkled face has faded from my memory. Sometimes I fear that upon seeing you, I will remember what the pigs know. That your beauty will somehow reflect all the true ugliness in me. What do you see? Tell me, are you also afraid?
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