He was one of the boys I was supposed to call family.
I was nine.
He was nine too.
I think about that sometimes because nine is such an embarrassingly small age to be doing anything remotely romantic. We were still children in the most literal sense. Sticky hands. Bad haircuts. Running around outside. Whatever the fuck nine-year-olds did.
And yet he had decided he liked me.
I don't remember liking him back.
I remember the chickens.
He killed them.
There were a few of them. I don't remember how many. I remember feathers and blood and the stupid horrible fact that something that had been wandering around the yard that morning was now dinner.
Then there was the heart.
I remember it sitting there while we were cooking.
Small enough to fit in my hand.
He tried to shove it into my mouth.
I didn't want it.
Obviously.
I don't know what he expected me to do. Swallow it and suddenly fall in love with him? Hold it in my mouth and tell him he was handsome?
Maybe he wanted me to swallow his heart too.
That sounds stupid.
It also sounds like something he would have liked.
Tim did not raise his boys well.
Chicken-hearted bitch boy, was he.
I still think that's a fairly generous assessment.
It's strange what childhood leaves behind. I don't remember whole years. I remember stupid little objects.
A chicken heart.
A kitchen.
His hands.
My mouth.
The particular disgust of being told, without words, that something was supposed to go inside me when I had already decided it wouldn't.
And then there is the other part.
He was one of the boys I was supposed to call family.
That's the bit that never quite sits right.
Not because there is anything particularly complicated about the word family. There isn't.
It's just that he was supposed to be somebody ordinary.
Somebody I could have grown up beside and forgotten.
Instead I remember him as the boy who killed chickens and tried to make me swallow their hearts.
Maybe that's all he gets to be in my memory.
Chicken-hearted.
Nothing more.
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