Call a Body Home

Abstract

Call a Body Home Michael Alessi (bio) It's not the fists of steam that roll from the body when the sow strung up on gambrels spills open. It's not her father stepping inside to cut away what will be chitlins, the skin folding around his shoulders like two wings. The pocket of heat inside the body soothes the bite of the autumn air, reminding him of a long lost night spent slow-dancing with a married woman at a county bar with wood chips on [End Page 110] its floors. The smell of the offal is ripe, but sweet to breathe, almost honeyed. He opens his nostrils to it and pictures the woman, the wife of a friend, guiding his hand to cup the full curve of her hip. His knife is sure, not as clumsy as his lumpy hands feel, bearing no sign of the ache that has set into the bones these last few years, and if he nicks himself, he cannot tell. It's not the buckets of blood her twin nephews lug to the barn together to pour into an earthen trough. The shorter one has it painted down the side of his overalls from losing his grip on the handle. Still, he refuses to quit, afraid, as he has always been, of the secret weaknesses of his body; its smallness and the way it pines for the touch of taller, stronger boys. His brother curses at him to keep his end of the bucket even, so he raises it, raises it too high, and sends blood spilling in the other direction for once. It's not the black mantle of hair that bobs on the surface of the scalding pan, or the hook her uncle uses to stir the body. He can barely hear the sound of the old-timers bickering about the heat of the fire. Too hot or cold and the hairs will stick. In the water he sees the white shape of his mother when she used to bathe with him in their trailer's tub, a story he has never told his wife, who grew up in a house in a town far from the hollows. It's not the way the zinc can lids melt and curl from the heat as the giddy neighbor kids scrape away the last black hairs. They weren't here this morning when the sun didn't so much as rise as pause on the edge of the dark woods, until something passing for daylight occurred; when she woke to find the space her mother left behind still empty, six months cold. Recently, she has been testing gestures, such as slapping her brother when he tells her to chew with her mouth closed, hoping to find one that might summon their mother back from her new home. Today, despite her father's protests, she [End Page 111] shared her breakfast with the old sow. A last meal. When the coast was clear, her brother, nursing the glow of a stolen cigarette in his gangly fingers, whistled her over to the fence where she and the sow took turns licking globs of oatmeal off a serving spoon. Maybe their father had forgotten the ghostly shape of their mother, years ago, barefoot in her nightdress in the winter cold, spooning the piglet scraps from her plate. Maybe he'd made up his mind that killing something was easier work than caring for it. It's not the sight of her brother finally leading the pig to the clearing by a rope. Or their father's pistol, granted for the task, hanging in his free hand. It's that the sow lifts her head to the barrel at the sound of his whistle, the one he uses to call her home. [End Page 112] Michael Alessi Michael Alessi's work has recently appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, Passages North, Mid-American Review, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals. He is the author of the prose chapbook The Horribles (Greying Ghost Press, 2019), and holds an MFA from Old Dominion University. A native of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, he currently lives in Chicago. Copyright © 2021 Berea...