CHICKEN KILLER

I had decided, after Byron stood me up, again, that I wanted no part of him, and that I would never answer his calls. If I softened and did pick up the phone, I’d tell him I didn’t wanted to see him anymore.

He called, I answered. He was on his way. He could spend the night. My intention transmogrified into “yes,” as I thought about the sex. Which was great; aggressive, intense. Above the river, unseen, but heard, surely, from the midst of a bamboo thicket. Underneath us, smooth hardness, the raised wooden meditation platform, perched on a precipice.

His age matched his ACT Score. Young and bright. And educated, confidently insinuating “Wahhabism” -the strict interpretation of Shia, -into my ”Studies in Terrorism” white paper submission, for the Department of Defense. He was at home with the works of my favorite late nineteenth century Russian authors, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Even Turgenev.

I further queried his knowledge of spiritual avatars from the same period. He didn’t know Ouspenski, but recalled Rasputen. I spoke of Gurdjeff.

Byron was blond and slight of frame, but had been an effective tight end for a north Louisiana high school football team, during a stellar season. He had evenly distributed musculature, like a boxer, not a lifter. Bantum weight.

He had a beautiful, perfect…everything. It made me sing and squeal. I discovered what I’d been missing that other women thrilled to, being on top. He went so deep in me, hitting my g spot, mind blowingly.

Anxious for a replay, in the morning, focusing my breath, and resting in his arms, images from the previous night gripped me. I anticipated, tremulously, how he’d roll me over some way and enter me and just rock my interior, my psyche, making me weave and weave and weave.

I’d trip; our sex opened chambers, rock face split suddenly revealing hidden passageways, treasure troves spelunkered along neural pathways not consciously known. This morning’s stimulation ignited parts of my brain decidedly distinct from the Jeopardy-esque category of “Russian authors and avatars.” Now, unveiled, dancing like gumdrops in my hippocampus, were scenes from the unvented laundry room of my childhood home.

I remembered with such vivid clarity, chickens, baby chicks, one black and one yellow, in a shallow rectangular Easter basket in the cold washroom. It was a bright cold Louisiana April morning. My father took my hand in his, and led me to a dry cleaning slip he’d “found” on his pillow. The marks, blue ink in loops, glyphs, were instructions, from the Easter Bunny. ”Look in the laundry room for your present.” The Easter Bunny.

I tore down the hall in foot pajamas and found an Easter basket, neatly woven strips of thin light beige, chartreuse faux “grass,” hard boiled eggs (I never knew why anyone would eat them) dyed sky blue, and these two tiny chicks which fit, one at a time, in my four year old palm.

They lived in a box in the wash room, and then were ensconced in milk crates, one inverted on top of the other, in our back yard. Beyond our yard lay a ravine, a Shetland pony farm, and beyond that, fields studded with pecan trees, that extended to the levee between the Red River and the Cane.

One evening, there was a sudden, terrible racket in the back yard, punctuated by gunfire, and then, silence. My mother’s gaze was riveted, staring out the kitchen window, as the salmon croquettes began to burn. A dog, a wild dog, a mongrel came in our yard and killed my chickens. We called him “Chicken Killer” and, even though my father ran outside and fired repeatedly at the dog with a shot gun, the threat, terrifying and delicious, was there, that any evening, at dusk, Chicken Killer might appear.

He was lean, a hound dog, brown, with spots that belied his lack of breeding, and a large skull, ravenous. Incisors, maybe foam. In my child’s mind, rabid. Wild.

I lay in Byron’s arms, he is so still, and I see these chicks and feel the fresh cold that made me shiver and am aware of the scent of Tide, boot leather and saddle soap. It hits me like Flaubert’s petit madelines in Swann’s Way.

How was this part of my brain stimulated ? by his scent? His sex? My response? Hyperbole aside, did the sex or the attendant weaving equal the thrill of racing down the linoleum floored hall in foot pajamas, rounding corners, touching and turning the brass knob, revealing baby chicks delivered to me, from the Easter Bunny?

What part of the weaving is unearthing of memories? Is the weaving part of natural selection? What does it mean when it is this potent, pheromones or limbic system bingo? What part reality, the reading of another’s heart energy, or of one’s own, long buried, and what part wishful?

It is the most powerful thing I do, the weaving, bringing its essence into awareness. It is where my babies came from, energetically, beyond birds and bees. It is who they are, the essence of the DNA I did read and combine, strand upon strand. I wove it; I continue to weave, entwining that which I discern, with my own, and that knowledge filters through my awareness when there is potency.

My friend Jane says she is just hopeless. Hopeless. She says all she wants is to be at home with *****, to wear an apron and bake for him, and for him to deftly undo the apron strings, and have sex with her in the kitchen. Everywhere. All the time. We love to weave.