Chicken Feet by Andreea Ceplinschi

Alexandru & Andreea ca. 1987, photo from author’s family archives

I could only love you the same way our mother loved chicken feet. 

We weren’t rich, but our grandparents raised chickens and mother could make one bird go a long way for a family of four. She’d butcher it into drumsticks and thighs for paprikash, breast for fried cutlets, and the bones and scraps always went into soup, feet included. We only ever ate the soup after all the better cuts were gone. And while mother let us pick through whatever “good meat” we could find hiding among vegetables in the broth, she only ever ate the feet. She said she loved them, but I think that was just her way of showing how she loved us more, the only way she knew how. My love for you felt the same, like gnawing on cartilage, unnourishing, a deliberate self-deprivation to show our mother that by trying to love you I was actually loving her back.

You were barely brother for me. For the longest time I thought I was born into that feeling because you never wanted to become a brother. The truth is we came apart slower. The years of competing for an affection that wasn’t there unraveled us between having to share the last piece of chicken one too many times and deciding whose turn it was to walk the trash half a mile to the neighborhood dumpster on frigid January mornings, between the times you mocked me with your friends for being overweight, and my bootleg Nirvana cassette tapes you took with you when you left for college. My memories with you are frayed thin, unhemmed curtains billowing out of an abandoned war bunker. Our mother kept wishing for her children to love each other, but no matter how many chicken feet she ate, she couldn’t make us. She couldn’t show us how. And the bad between us just grew bigger than her wishes. 

Do you remember that day when I was twelve and you brought home two friends to “check me for tits” because you lost a bet? 

I remember. 

I did have breasts, barely, uncomfortable, painful, uneven, wrong. Wrong. There was so much wrong with me and nobody teaching me how to handle a body that felt like a feral animal, so much wrong I tried to cut out and cover up with baggy pants and men’s shirts two sizes too big.

I remember I was doing the dishes and didn’t hear the front door open, just your laughter in the hallway with other boys. And when they came into the kitchen and you didn’t follow, I remember being scared. 

I remember being scared when one of them lifted my shirt over my head like a shroud. 

I remember being scared with my hands in the dishwater and maybe it was fear that replaced the warmth of your hand holding mine that one time on the dirt road to grandma’s house, when time was still thick and summer lasted years, tied down in blooming honeysuckle vine, dragging our tiny feet through knee-high warm breath of grass, unafraid of what else slithered there. 

I remember pulling a knife out of the dirty water and boys laughing the way only boys do at that age, “Dude, your sister’s a savage,” their laughter replacing whatever good there still was between us with chills that took years to unstick from my skin. 

You were on the other side of the kitchen door the whole time. 

Savage.

We grew apart as much as we grew up. I moved a continent away, until the distance felt enough, and I could have lived forever inside the silence between us. 

But then our mother died. 

I know the hole she left was bigger for you, because she always gave you the bigger piece of everything. When she died, I saw you grieving for the first time, and for the first time I could recognize you were trying on a sadness I’d been wearing for years. For the first time, instead of asking you to be my brother, I wanted to try being your sister. 

I’ve started to forgive you for the memories, one by one. I’m not upset about the Nirvana cassettes anymore and I may not be ready to feed you cutlets, but I can share the chicken soup with you again, hoping that one day you’ll ask only for the feet.

Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian immigrant writer, waitress, and kitchen troll living at the tip of Cape Cod. Her photography, poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction work has been featured or is forthcoming in Solstice Literary Magazine, Beyond Words, Wild Roof Journal, The Quarter(ly), and elsewhere. Find her at poetryandbookdesign.com