It was market day and my father woke me before dawn.
I followed him outside.
The sun was but a promise in the dark sky.
The goats bleated—dimly.
We packed our wagon with food. When we had finished, my father disappeared into darkness.
The goats bleated—dimly.
He reappeared pulling a goat by a rope around its neck. The goat’s thin legs struggled against him, leaving trails in the dirt.
“Life is hard,” he said.
From behind his belt he pulled his knife.
“Understand?”
He passed the knife to me.
I took it, but it weighed heavily in my hands. I looked at the knife; I looked at the goat, which was calmer now, noticing how its eyes reflected the surrounding blackness, in which I myself was.
“A man must be strong,” my father said.
The goat stood.
I stood.
“You are old enough.”
“Understand?”
I took the rope from my father.
He loomed above me as I loomed above the goat.
“Kill,” he said.
“We will sell the meat at the market.”
I obeyed.
Knife—
blood poured forth.
The goat bucked, but tightly I held the rope. Its black eyes, each containing a distortion of my face, began to shake, then spin like the Earth: days and weeks and months and—twin white rings extended from its dying eyes and shot out, trailing thin translucent skin sacks; attaching themselves to my own eyes, and through the dermal corridors between us, I saw the goat’s diminishing soul, its innocence and its terrible lack of understanding, and I felt these primevally as if they were my own.
I slashed madly at the skin sacks.
And they were gone:
The pre-dawn returned. The goat: dead, its warm blood sleek upon my hands, which held the knife, and the looming, dim face of my father:
“It is done.”
After my father killed two more goats, we butchered their carcasses in silence, and took them on the wagon to the market.
I was as if under a spell.
The road was bumpy, and we passed checkpoints manned by tribesmen with rifles. At one, up ahead, there erupted yelling, followed by gunfire.
An explosion—
My bloody hands;
My father’s distorted face;
Fragmented wagons and the dead bodies of tribesmen, but from above, increasingly from above, until they were nothing and the dawn became all at once…
Through light to flesh: heat to warmth: eternity unto the comforting temporality of the world, I travelled, until feeling my body again I was carried by contractions through a tubular wetness and deposited on the ground.
Blind. Deaf.
Squirming on the Earth.
I was a baby goat.
Unable to speak, I could not tell my experience to the people around me. I could merely bleat—dimly.
One day, a man pulled me toward a boy.
I knew the boy.
I was he.
Holding a knife, the boy looked into my eyes, and with all my might I thought, Do not kill us!
But he misunderstood.
And I was re-born: a boy without memory.