Seeds

“Have you ever shot a .22?” Liz asked, a Marlboro dangling from her lips, an orange tuft of wiry hair shooting out from under her armpit. I desperately wanted a camera. “Yeah, when I was young. In Boy Scouts.”

“Well, let me refresh your memory. First thing you do is grab yrself two bullets incase you don’t hit the pigs brain just right and he goes apeshit on you or runs off. One bullet in the chamber, one bullet in the teeth, like this...”

As she explained the mechanics of the rifle and the importance of waiting for the perfect shot, my palms sweated in anticipation.

Soon, I found myself on the thick knees of my Carhartts in the back of a Mitsubishi Fuso, staring at a 200-pound Berkshire hog through the crosshairs. I waited. And waited. ‘Til finally the animal looked me dead in the eyes.

BAM!!!

In that split second after I pulled the trigger, the hog nerves spurt blood through its eyes, ears, mouth and bullet hole. There was so much blood, and the sound of the rifle so deafening due to the confines of the truck, I thought I had died: maybe I’d missed and the bullet had ricocheted off the metal support beams of the Fuso and hit ME between the eyes? I dropped to the ground, and looked up at Liz in terror, who was laughing her ass off as I screamed at the world, ‘oh FUCK I am DEAD!’

…

Up to my thighs in leggy Vashon grass, I thumb a long steel knife to check for sharpness. Satisfied, I glance at Eddy and Ed as they somberly hold the lamb steady on a wooden table. I pierce the lamb’s neck at the jugular, and in one swift movement cut in, then out, and crack the neck deftly. Iron-heavy blood flows into the ground as the lamb kicks and seizes with muscular spasms. I feel like I have been here before, among the grass, harvesting the sun.

…

A first memory: at the age of six I planted watermelon seeds in the Alabama clay soil of my parent’s backyard, and come full summer the vines had produced one sizable, lizard-green melon. In the South, the ritual of watermelon picking is high art, and no one has an eye for a knife-ready melon like the old, tobacco-stained men that work in the fields. Luckily, my step-grandfather grew up on a farm in the Mississippi backwoods. A short phone cal was all that was needed. He and my grandmother drove forty-five minutes from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham that weekend just to see it: “Yep, sure is a goodun,” Papa Gene muttered, as he methodically tapped the fruit with his fleshy thumb. My entire family sat entranced with his silent proceedings. An expert in action, watching Papa Gene was like watching the Crimson Tide play ball in their prime! At last, he determined it ready…We sliced and salted the watermelon, so delicious, to wash down the pork and corn.

...

Christmastime. My family is having a dinner party. While finely dicing an onion for a chestnut-lentil soup, the lysergic acid I’d dissolved under my tongue that morning flits around my brain space. Between the discussions of how much this bottle and from where comes this Pinot, I recall a discussion in my Japanese Religious Traditions class about Amaterasu, the Shinto god of the sun. Suddenly I am merging with the carefully prepped ingredients before me–carrots, roasted nuts, sprigs of parsley and thyme, tomatoes. Our cells interact as they have since the primordial soup bubbled in a rocky trough on Pangea. I am reconfigured solar energy, a permutation of the sun.