Feeding On Ourselves

We ate the small dogs first. Their owners understood, I suppose. The neighborhood got together and held something like a funeral for each one. We’d gather around the weeping owner, giving our condolences, while someone tended the coals and roasted Gizmo and Max and Buddy’s tender ribs and thighs, rubbed with whatever kitchen spices we had left. Somehow it made things easier to pretend we were just having some kind of block party. The smell of roasting meat, crisp edges bubbling with brown sugar and garlic, wafted through the cul-de-sac and made us feel something close to normal. 

Just nine months earlier, Boa Chemical announced their revolutionary product, a powdery formula that could rid our properties of ants permanently. How were we supposed to know that it would work so well? When has any product worked exactly as advertised?

Zeke was really the only neighbor I felt close to. He’d been an investment banker before this all started–I guess our circumstances were really the only thing we had in common. We were both in our mid-30s and moved home to Ohio to care for our aging parents. He was good looking, and you could tell he was kind of smug about it. Like he’d groomed his unshaven face that way on purpose. Like we weren’t in the middle of the apocalypse.

At the first BBQ, Zeke and I stood on the fringe of the gathering, arms folded, watching the grill smoke curl into the air. I was disgusted with myself—the rich, savory smell of tender roasted ribs filled my mouth with a rush of saliva. Most of the small crowd watched as Mitch from the corner house occasionally lifted the lid to turn the meat, while a few stood next to the dog’s owner, Carmen, rubbing her back as she clutched a photo to her chest and sobbed about her sweet Petey. They nodded while she told them about her Pomeranian’s friendly disposition, but every so often you could see them turning their heads toward the grill, sniffing the air with hungry desire.

I shook my head. “I don’t know what to do with my hands.”

Zeke smirked, “Look at them pretending to feel sorry.”

 “You don’t?”

 “We haven’t had meat in months, Tony. It’s time.”

He wasn’t wrong. If we were lucky, a meal consisted of a small pile of mashed grains, one or two vegetables from the neighbors, and maybe a bite or two of a canned peach on a special occasion. 

I shuddered. “I just don’t know why she has to watch the whole thing.”

“Self-preservation. Has to make herself believe this is natural. Watch, she’ll have some just like the rest of us. What does it matter if the dog had a name?”

Sure enough, when it came time to make our plates, Carmen grabbed one of the legs. The drumstick? I didn’t know what to call it. My stomach clenched with dread. Were we really doing this? My fears dissipated with the first bite. Crispy char on the outside, fat melting in my mouth—it was the best thing I had ever tasted.

            ***

My Ma lived in a little blue house at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was just her and Einstein, her African Gray parrot. When I was a kid, I learned to be some combination of a perfect son and surrogate husband. My father left us before I learned to walk.

I thought moving back home would be a temporary thing. I’d moved to the city to work in graphic design. Logos for new apps, mostly. I don’t know, I guess I had this idea that I could live an artistic life. Like art would matter forever, endure the ages. Crazy how fast it all went away.

After all the ants were gone, the livestock died quickly. Entire fields of crops withered without ants to aerate the soil or cull the plagues of other insects. There wasn’t enough grain to sustain the large-scale factory farming we’d grown accustomed to. It seemed like overnight we were hoarding canned goods and trying to turn our yards into viable gardens. 

At first, our whole neighborhood worked together, the small suburb now like a hippie commune born out of necessity. Each house on the block was responsible for a different crop each season: the Browns grew squash, the Garcias grew green beans, the Johnsons grew tomatoes, and so on. We gathered in the streets to share tips on how to coax our sad little vegetables to grow, then divided each harvest—bartered half and shared the rest.

I grew peanuts. Learning how to keep them alive was my new full-time job. Without the ants, we had to dig spikes into the ground around the roots to keep the soil from getting compacted. Populations of aphids and other insects exploded, but we were afraid to use any more pesticides, so we watched the stems for miniscule eggs to scrape off and rubbed the plants with garlic.

In her old age, Ma was needy. She clung to the last of her liquor bottles like a baby with milk. Einstein would sit on her shoulder, cooing into her ear. If I tried to get close enough to take the booze away, he screeched and flapped his wings at me until I backed off. Most nights ended in a staring contest between me and the bird, his eyes pinning with agitation while I waited for Ma to pass out. Once her head drooped into her chest, Einstein allowed me to brush her stringy hair, half carry, half drag her to bed, and wipe the drool from her chin. 

When the alcohol ran out, Ma didn’t last much longer. The night before she died, we sat in front of the fireplace, our clothes hung on racks to dry. We barely spoke, just watched the flames snap. I heard her start whimpering, then she began to wail. I tried to shush her—we didn’t need to draw the attention of the neighbors.

“Ma, what’s wrong?”

She sobbed, “I just didn’t think life would turn out this way.” 

“You just need to calm down–”

As soon as I reached out to touch her shoulder, the parrot shrieked and clamped his beak shut on my finger. I yelped and wrenched my arm away, pulling the bird to the floor in a tangle of angry feathers. It squeaked and flailed as it hit the ground. 

“Don’t hurt him!” 

She was talking to me, not the bird. I clenched my bleeding fist. She treated that parrot more like a child than I had ever been to her. She sniveled as she lifted Einstein to her lap. The last time I saw her, she was stroking his neck. The next morning, she was gone, the bird still perched on her corpse. 

***

Einstein tolerated me. He might have been more devastated than I was when Ma passed. I just couldn’t bear to let the neighbors know I still had a pet in the house. I was relieved not to have to worry about Ma anymore, but the bird was like my last connection to her. Sort of like a surrogate brother. I kept him a secret.

He sat alone on a single wooden perch for weeks, his toys long since shredded to pieces, plucking the silvery feathers from his chest one by one until he looked like a Thanksgiving turkey from the front.

One day, a perfect imitation of Ma’s voice came out of his beak: “Hey there sweet bird.”

He had always mimicked things: the sound of crickets chirping, the turn and click of a doorknob. I reached into his cage and his eyes flashed at me, but he was too weak from hunger to attack. He stretched his neck out and let me ruffle the feathers, closing his long-lashed eyes with the pleasure of being touched for the first time in so long.

He gobbled up whatever peanuts I could spare, standing on one foot and holding the nut up with his other. It seemed so human. And then, between whistles and clicks I’d hear Ma’s voice again:

“Don’t give me that look!”

“You gonna get a girlfriend, Tony?”

“Hey there sweet bird.”

***

The problem started when the Browns noticed some of their squash missing. Everyone took stock of their own crops and found that their yields came up short. Accusations flew. The teetering building blocks that held our neighborhood together toppled. Trust had been the only tenuous thread connecting us, and it had been severed.

Back when I was first learning how to grow food, Zeke helped me rinse the leaves to rid my plants of aphids. He said to me, “The most successful parasite is the one that causes the least damage.”

I wondered which of my neighbors was the parasite that had caused our breakdown. 

People stopped leaving their houses unless it was absolutely necessary. Those lucky enough to have multiple family members took shifts patrolling their backyards. We didn’t speak if we saw one another in the street; our eyes rolled like panicked horses as we darted back inside. 

***

It was mid-summer. The peanuts I had stored after the last harvest were running low. I couldn’t live like this much longer. I held out my hand and Einstein climbed up. He clicked his beak, purring contentedly as he shuffled up to my shoulder. My mother’s voice echoed in my ear, “Hey there sweet bird, you gonna get a girlfriend?”

A knock on the door made me flinch. Einstein beat his wings angrily. I crept to the door and opened it a crack to find Zeke on my doorstep. He smiled and held up a small bag. “Hey man, we’re getting pretty sick of wheat at my place. Came to see if you’d trade a bit?”

My heartbeat slammed against my temples. “Let me grab some for you. Just a minute.”

I shut the door quickly and rushed into the basement with Einstein. Zeke couldn’t know that he was still alive. I lifted him from my shoulder and set him down. He picked up my distress and paced back and forth, clucking. I tried to shush him, but birds don’t understand silence—silence means danger. I scooped a handful of peanuts from the cache for Zeke before I hurried to the top of the basement stairs and closed the door, leaving Einstein in darkness.

I paused to take a few calming breaths, then cracked the front door open and thrust the peanuts out to Zeke. He pushed his way in. “How are you doing? I can’t imagine it’s easy being in here alone all the time. I’d lose my mind.”

I forced a smile. “I’m getting by.”

A bang and a muffled screech from the basement jolted us. My hair stood on end while Zeke craned his neck around my house like a wolf picking up the scent of prey. I nudged him back to the door. “Damn, I knew that thing was going to fall over, I have to go check on that. Thanks for the wheat, I appreciate it. I’ll come by soon.”

I scrambled back to the basement. Einstein flapped his wings in distress while a skinny rat ran through the room. It had knocked over a fire poker. On instinct, I grabbed the poker and slammed it into the rat. Its tiny bones popped and a few entrails leaked out of its abdomen. At least we wouldn’t go hungry.

***

I kept Einstein in the basement more often. The darkness simulated night and he would keep quiet. The house became a jail cell for both of us. I didn’t keep him caged anymore, but what was this house if not a cage of my own? I was certain every shadow that passed by my windows was a hungry neighbor, foraging and prowling.

Einstein grew weak and despondent. He plucked more of his feathers. The guilt filled my belly with searing heat every time he blinked up at me and Ma’s voice croaked out of his small body. I tried to assuage it by giving him the last of my canned peaches. He eyed me while his tongue flicked at the syrup.

Einstein sat on my shoulder in front of the fireplace as I watched the flames hiss, sucking hungrily at the wood. Then we heard a rustling sound coming from the yard. My whole body tensed and Einstein let out a growl. I crouched low, picking up the fire poker, and crawled to the window.

Someone was rooting through the peanut plants. I sat momentarily stunned, but then I began to seethe. I had spent months digging and turning that soil, fighting with those plants as they threatened to wither. Shielding them from harsh temperatures, killing aphids by hand, digging irrigation channels, hauling water by the bucket—they were everything. All of the injustices in my life converged in this one moment. I gripped the fire poker. 

I bolted into the garden and the intruder barely had time to react. When I whipped the fire poker against the side of his head, his skull cracked with a sound like a thick egg being crushed into wet splinters. I slammed the poker into him several more times, all rage and adrenaline, while Einstein flapped nearby.

The pent-up energy unleashed in that moment spent all of my strength. My legs went out from under me and I took a few shaking breaths, staring at the body. His hands were still gripping fistfuls of my peanut plants. I peered into his face, swollen and blood-soaked, and my heart jumped.

I had killed Zeke.

***

That was it. The line had been crossed. Weeks passed. In the quiet, still room, Einstein would talk to himself, parroting the sound of that horrible moment: 

“KACKrrrshlp”

The sound of iron breaking bone.

“KACKrrrshlp”

The wet sluice of brain matter.

“KACKrrrshlp”

Blood sloshing up the side of a fire poker.

It was like he enjoyed watching my reaction every time he made the noise. My flinching

became his new toy. He bobbed up and down, throwing his head back like it was his favorite sound in the world. 

The noise became so repetitive that it felt like my own heartbeat. The sound of Zeke’s skull shattering echoed throughout the empty house. 

I tried shoving Einstein back in his cage in Ma’s room. I even threw her blanket over the top, hoping it would calm him down or put him to sleep. Somehow it made him even more insistent. He needed to get my attention.

I shouted at him to be quiet, but you can’t yell at a bird to shut up–it just makes them excited and they scream louder. They think you’re part of some bird gang in a Central African rainforest, screeching together in the trees. 

“KACKrrrshlp”

The dull thud of metal meeting scalp.

“KACKrrrshlp”

The crack like a gunshot, the squelch of the flesh.

I tried drowning him out. I sang the national anthem at the top of my lungs. He looked at it like a challenge. His mimicking grew louder and louder. I covered my ears and shouted the lyrics while Einstein danced. 

“KACKrrrshlp”

The thwack of Zeke’s head splitting. 

“KACKrrrshlp”

It got to the point where I couldn’t tell if Einstein was actually making the sound anymore, or if I just had it playing on a loop in my head.

I whipped around to the bird, howling “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” until he cowered in the corner trembling. I grabbed him and threw him into the dark basement, slammed the door, and heard Ma’s voice, thin and weak through the cracks: “Hey there sweet bird.”

By the time I calmed down enough to check on him, his small body lay on the floor, curled and stiff. The torture was over for him at least. I didn’t have it in me to bury him. I cradled him in my arms and took him to the fireplace, placed him gently among the logs and lit the flames, watched his remaining feathers blacken and crisp.

As the smoke drifted up through the chimney, I couldn’t help the rush of saliva at the scent of a broiling bird. The brother I never had. I couldn’t do it. I shut the fireplace gate and turned my back. There was barely enough meat left on his tiny hollow bones anyway.

People would start to swarm soon as the smell of roasting poultry wafted through the chimney out into the neighborhood. Better to get ahead of it. I flung open the front door and called down the street to invite them to dinner. Might as well foster some good will.

The remaining neighbors began to gather. Our numbers seemed to have dwindled. Mitch stepped into the yard with a few fresh-picked squash, Carmen brought green beans. I had a few spices left and I put them on with a boiling pot of water and the last of my salt. Good old-fashioned boiled peanuts would do the trick. 

Carmen asked about the lump in my fireplace, but I told her a stray crow had fallen through the chimney and I hadn’t noticed until it was too late. Such a shame. As we sat at the table together, sharing a meal like old friends, we talked about feasts past. Our favorite recipes, the foods we missed the most, and almost cracked a smile at the memories.

The night wound down, I showed my guests out, we waved and said “let’s do this again soon.” 

When the door clicked shut, and the silence closed around me again, I went down to the basement to sate my whetted appetite. Luckily, the smell of the boiling peanuts and charred parrot had masked the heavy scent of old blood where strips of Zeke’s flesh hung from hooks in the cellar to dry out like jerky. After all, what does it matter that he had a name?