Raw Meat

She found Rawmeat at the bottom of the box. The dinosaur plushy was more or less still the same color for which he was named, a distinctly, voraciously anatomical shade of pinkish red that had faded only a little. His name had no spaces, she thought, a swooping attack of a name in a single breath—Rawmeat.

Rawmeat was a gift from a relative. Their father, actually. She couldn’t remember the last time he had visited them, and when she tried to picture him his features emerged only in spasms: a thick, triangular brow, an apostrophe of a scar on the upper lip, the odd hug against a torso that was shaped and felt like a washboard. But when he had last visited them, he had brought them gifts in a small suitcase which she somehow recalled vividly: navy, dented, ribbon on the handle. One of the gifts was a stuffed dinosaur from some airport giftshop, with glass beads for eyes and a single piece of black, grinning string for a mouth, whom her little brother had fallen in love with upon meeting and proceeded to take with him everywhere. She had gotten a new set of crayons, which was martyred one by one to her habit of pressing down very hard on her sketchbook. Her mother had received a new set of cleavers, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what had happened to them. 

There was one afternoon that came to mind, though, a short time after their father came, when she was very sick in bed from a bad case of food poisoning. He must have been out on the town again, or he might have left them for good already, but in either case their mother was in the kitchen hacking apart a chicken with one of her new cleavers and the fierceness of barely suppressed rage. The dull noises of violence drifted into her bedroom in awful syncopation with the hot throb of the fever, threatening to split her head open. 

She wobbled feebly out of her bedroom for a pee and saw her brother sitting on the floor of the living room in a honeyed patch of afternoon sun. He was sitting with his side to her with Rawmeat between his crossed legs, puppeteering the dinosaur’s stubby front limbs to the rhythm of an imaginary waltz. The sunlight struck his feathered, tawny hair and the long eyelashes she had failed to inherit at exactly the right angle, setting them tenderly alight. In that moment, her head pulsing like a fat, juicy pustule on the verge of eruption, she suddenly felt very angry.

She marched over and stood in front of him, and he paused in his puppeteering and looked up at her in surprise, as if he hadn’t realized she was home. Suddenly, she wasn’t sure why she was here—but he was looking up at her now, expecting her to say something. So she opened her mouth.

“Say thank you,” she blurted. Even she was surprised by herself now.

“What?” His brown little eyebrows furrowed.

“I said, say thank you.”

“Why?”

She ran her tongue over her cracked lips, racing frantically for a reason to justify starting this ridiculous conversation. “Because,” she said, eventually. “Because. Because I taught you how to walk.”

It was true. She had taught him to walk on his first birthday, in the living room, after the cake was cut and all her parents and their friends were seated around the low table strewn with magazines. Her father was still with them, she thinks, and he was there at the party with a clean haircut and a crisp button-down that smelled, curiously, of tangerines. She had dug a yo-yo out of the toy box, held the ball, and given the other end of the string to him. When she tugged gently on her end, he stood up miraculously from the carpet and began toddling forward. She remembered his paper crown falling off in the first few wobbly, effortful steps, remembered the adults calling out to each other to look, look, LOOK! She remembered being distinctly unsurprised, as if he was her pet Pomeranian and they were just going for a stroll in the park. But then their father had interrupted their stroll by scooping his son up in his arms and spinning him around in the tangerine-scented air. 

“Thank you?” her brother said, perfect little brows still furrowed.

“Now say it thirty more times,” she demanded. A pause. “Walking is a big, a huge deal, you know.”

He hesitated, as if sensing a trap. Then he shrugged and relented, counting the thirty thank-yous on his stubby little fingers like dollar bills.

Her ears pounded faintly. “A hundred more times,” she ordered, knowing full well that she was being horrible. But she couldn’t stop herself. “Now,” she said.

He was beginning to look afraid.

“I taught you to walk,” she repeated, “and if you didn’t know how to walk, you’d have to be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. You would be in a wheelchair right now, and mom would have to carry you up every floor.” Her tongue throbbed thick and hot and numb between her lips, like a piece of seared rubber.

He counted a hundred thank-yous in a small voice, looking at her the entire time.

“Three hundred more,” she croaked, and felt like fainting.

His cherry-red lips quivered, and turned downwards at the edges.

She pressed on. “If I didn’t teach you how to walk, you would have to be lifted onto the toilet. You can’t pee without someone watching you so you won’t fall over, and no one will love you because that’s disgusting.” Her tongue was moving entirely of its own accord now. “And you’ll never date. Or be married, or have children, because no one can love a cripple. And if you have children, they will—” she swayed— “They will—”

He began to whimper. Then he started to wail, and it was a hideous sound. Fat tears dribbled down his fat cheeks. She remembered stumbling backwards and hitting the bookshelf very hard.

This was where the memory lapsed. She might have really fainted but had no memory of it. But her mother must have heard the wailing, and carried her back to bed, because that was where she found herself conscious and her pajamas drenched with sweat, the fever having broken. It was somehow morning. She was fed undercooked chicken soup for breakfast.

When she asked what had happened, her mother had simply stroked her sweat-soaked hair and said something along the lines of don’t worry about it darling, go to sleep, you’re still sick! She thinks she asked for her father multiple times but forgot what her mother had said in return, or if she ever saw her father again during his visit. She found herself unable to recall what her brother’s face looked like at lunch that day, and what he had possibly said or chose not to say, and the exact fibrous tangle of emotions that had ensnared her the next time she saw him playing with Rawmeat by the window, glancing up and around from time to time like a robin watching for a fox. It made her a little bitter, but mostly amazed, to realize just how much she had managed to forget.  

She set Rawmeat on the shelf of knickknacks she was unsure whether should be sold. Then, after a moment, she moved him into the small box labeled KEEP in black marker, where he peered up at her from a swaddle of old dresses and the multitude of emptied cologne bottles her mother had repurposed as windowsill vases over the years. As she moved to turn away, the light from the window glinted off his clouded bead eyes, and suddenly he looked mischievously alive with his lopsided black-string grin. This annoyed her immensely, so she yanked one of the scarves over his head as she made a mental note to call her brother later, to discuss the price of the house.