Imagineers

“We are imagineers,” he intoned, upending the chicken carcass onto its knobby pimpled back. “You and me both. We imagine each other within this space,” he swept his arms to either side, a knife in his left hand. “And we hope that through our intellectual prayers, not that we want religion to factor into it, even tangentially so, we hope that we will eventually become in each others eyes what we have yet to be ourselves. Are you sure you want to do that at the counter?”

She had been listening across the island, half to his latest dinner prep rant, half to the televised concert playing near the kitchen’s dividing wall. The studio on screen, a terrarium filled with dusty light, housed the medieval music quartet like lizards in a fourth grade classroom, housed in an artificial habitat. She imagined herself there, and wondered if the stale air was really just the churning self-consciousness of the uncommon instruments, recycled like captured acoustics. She turned her eyes to the knife in his hand, now pointing at the sewing in her lap. Grinning as if just waking from an afternoon nap, she closed and opened her eyes in an exaggeratedly dreamy state.

“Maybe we should switch places. Your knife to my hem, my needle to your bird,” she said, deepening her voice to sound threatening, but playfully harmless, like a previews voice-over, or the hero of a spaghetti western. Their play had these buffers, these screens, the effort of translating to hide behind. They remained distant and knowing within certain limits. “I’ll hem where I damn well please.”

He raised an eyebrow, then tensed his shoulder muscles into a knot at the base of his neck, wadding them up into the newly freed space in his mouth, frozen in a mock “O” of surprise. Then he let the muscles go, sending ripples down each arm and a pink drop of chicken juice to the tiles below. The oven beeped, surprising him.

“Now look what you’ve gone and done” she said, shaking her head in disappointment. “You’ve gone and held up the chicken! It’s not going to quarter itself, not if those months in the stockyards taught him anything.”

He nodded. “You’re right. Now’s the time for it to really start fighting back.” He grabbed the bird by the tip of both wing, and held it up standing. “Chickens of the world unite! Poultry is death!”

She smirked and started to formulate a witty retort, something having to do with making a red sauce, but she wasn’t able to fit the words together and gave it up. This hiccup in their banter froze her in a burp pantomime.

He dropped the bird and went at it with his purposeful cuts. The tip of the knife stretched the skin, breaking it in all the right places, opening up the space between the thigh and breast. Each joint split from its desired part with a sickening, muted crack that would have easily ruined her appetite if it had lasted longer than a split second, but she still felt it in her own thighs and breasts, where her wing would attach to her side. A red vein, or bruise or blotch, she was unsure, glared out like a no vacancy sign in a darkened hotel window. As a child, she once watched her mother dismember a chicken, accidentally puncturing a hidden tumor in the bird’s breast. A bloody spray fanned across the white kitchen wall, and despite several coats of paint, the stain remained, peeping out from behind a coat track. She would parade her friends by the spot on their way to Dr. Peppers and afternoon cartoons.

The chicken lay separated, now a tray of tiny selves. He dipped his hands in a tub of softened butter that had magically appeared at his side. “Now,” he said in a heavy Southern accent, “we add just a touch of butter.” His fingers flayed around the undersides of each piece with such precision, spreading butter as if out from the most miniscule crevasses in his finger tips.

“Was this sensual?” she thought. “Is this the moment when I slide an arm around my lover’s waist, wrist deep in edible lubricant, and kiss his neck passionately while the Righteous Brothers began to play softly in the background?” This was the result of endless sleepover screenings of that early nineties romance. Every fantasy turned into slippery love making on a pottery wheel.

He looked up at her as if reading her thoughts. “You really want to make out with me right now, don’t you,” he deadpanned. She could see the edges of his come-on under the sarcasm, which tended to be the case with men, or at least the men she’d been with. So far, it was unclear whether these ironic dressings added or took away from the impact of her love making. It was obvious to her that she and the men liked it, but who more, and who out of necessity? A lute took a solo in a spotlight downstage.

“Did you know that food photographers glaze their hams with motor oil,” she asked. He stared at his hands, contemplating licking them clean or washing them in the sink full of dirty dishes, and nodded absentmindedly.