Cathedral
by Kelan Nee
I have a lie I like to tell myself.
Once, I walked up a hill, fog-crawled,
early spring. Beyond the electric fence
where we kept them, a chicken
in the grass with dew on its feathers.
Its head was gone and so was its blood.
My boots found another, then another,
until I counted seventeen. All headless.
All dry. Vacant. It was a weasel, dug in
beneath the fence. It sucked the blood
and took the heads. We ran a line along
the ground, that snapped electric
when the grass was blown into it
by the wind. I don't claim to know
where the weasel went. I know we lost
some more. Broilers gone to disease,
some drowned looking up in the rain,
though no animal got to them before
we could kill them ourselves.
But that's beside the point.
The point is it wasn't winter, but the trees
were bare, and my mind was filling
in the space where there ought to have
been leaves. There were seventeen bodies
on the ground. It was a mess made not
from lust or anger, but made from something
more than hunger. The weasel wanted
violence and got it. Made it. Then went
to wherever weasels go to sleep it off
while we threw the pale pink carcasses
into a compost pile big enough, hot enough
to turn what they were into mulch.
The weasel slept and wasn't sorry. There's a lie
I like to tell myself: The day came up
and got brighter and brighter.