by Kaia Stead

I’m standing in front of a crowd, cradling a panting chicken with a knife on the chair next to me, when someone asks, “Can I GoPro this?” My hair is filthy, streaks of sweat interrupt the dust clinging to my legs, and I’ve spent the past couple of days doing manual labor in the heat.

“Sure,” I say, spotting a camera amid the cluster of faces. “Feel free.” I don’t mean it.

It’s eleven a.m. in the oak-scattered California foothills, and today I will teach this group of hippies, sound healers, tech dudes, and yogis how to slaughter chickens.

Before I left for the foothills, I met my grandma at her house for tea, and she not so delicately asked, “Why do they want you there, again?”

It wasn’t an unreasonable question. People attending quit their jobs to sell crystals from the back of a van. They have been to weeklong silent retreats during which they had meaningful, nonverbal conversations with strangers. Our pre-weekend preparedness packet included suggested readings on transcendence and trust. There was a story called “Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person.”

I told my grandma that, best guess, I’m supposed to help close the gap between production and consumption, to achieve a sense of intimacy with one’s food. I’m supposed to midwife in a deeper understanding of sustenance and eating. That said, there are a lot of ways to get intimate that don’t involve group slaughter.

“Well,” Grandma said, pausing to sip her tea while light poured in from her stained-glass kitchen windows, “if you don’t like it, you can do your workshop and come straight home. We’ll drink a bottle of wine and talk about how bad it went.”

—

I left the house early Thursday morning. I somehow managed to pack into my Honda Civic the makings of a temporary coop, half a bale of hay, camping gear, and a clandestine bottle of tequila and jug of limeade for a chaser, which I justified by categorizing them under the “necessary medications, herbal supplements, and/or snacks” section of the gear checklist. After negotiating ten chickens into the car, we were off.

I spent the drive playing world-groove mixes on repeat, hoping to lull the hens into a French-reggae-induced coma. Keeping my miles per hour within the legal limit was difficult: I speed when I’m worried. I was heading into a situation where I knew only my high-school buddy, who co-founded the campout, and his girlfriend, who I’d met only once before.

I do not like relying on others. Being open with people I don’t know is nearly impossible, but based on the weekend’s planned activities—an “intention arrow” ceremony, sunrise didgeridoo awakenings, group yoga, collective meditation, mandatory volunteering, and sound healing—I get the sense that it’s expected.

After I arrived and ate lunch, I spent the rest of Thursday and most of Friday putting together the temporary coop with my friend’s girlfriend; building an outdoor kitchen with a man who lives in a purple bus and once made money modeling for a marijuana-growing business; constructing a dock for the nearby pond with someone named Wylie, who may or may not have been on drugs; helping erect the Dance Church and Soul Palace; setting up my space (tent, sleeping bag, tequila); and eyeing a fifty-foot swirling ladder painted to look like a stem and flower big enough to sit in. By Friday night, the man who lives in the bus and I lay down on the ground and laughed about how sore we were.

—

Despite the radical inclusion espoused by the event’s guidelines, I knew people were offended by my workshop. Officially, it was called “Mindful Chicken Processing,” a title polished and sugar-coated by the event organizers. Even I knew this was a vaguely ridiculous name and just a way to make killing more palatable to people who meditate regularly and eat hemp hearts. I do neither.

When the group arrived on Friday evening, I heard whispers about the location of the coop. “It’s right by the kitchen,” an uncontestably gorgeous woman commented to an equally beautiful bystander while we waited in line for herbal, lucid-dream tea. “I eat meat, but isn’t that insensitive?”

“I think so,” her friend responded. “Should we really have to see it? That doesn’t seem fair.”

“If you are offended,” I wanted to say to the women ahead of me, “you clearly need to be.” I considered yanking her long, silky hair. But, instead of saying anything, I shut the fuck up, accepted a cup of earthy tea, and skulked off to my tent. I fell asleep almost instantly despite the conversations and music on the other side of the green nylon.

—

I consciously keep my voice steady as I show the crowd how to position the chicken in preparation for slaughter. I put her, a dappled cream Easter Egger who lays blue eggs, in my lap and hold her there by leaning forward. I grab the knife.

From the back, Joanna, a sound healer-slash-mindfulness-teacher-slash-aroma-therapist-slash-doula-in-training, asks, “Do you say prayers now? Is this when you give thanks for the chicken’s spirit?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t say prayers or thank the chicken, but you are welcome to.”

There’s some murmuring, and I let it settle down. I tell the crowd, “I’m about to cut her jugular. Is everyone ready?” I look around. No one leaves. The GoPro keeps recording.

I tap my knife against the chicken’s neck, on the side, just below her ear. When she doesn’t flinch, I cut open her jugular, and she bleeds into the plastic container at my feet. “I’m staying with this now,” I say, trying to talk through it. “I’m watching her body. I’m putting as much focus as I can into what’s happening to her.” Her blood is warm on my hand. My leg hurts. It’s quiet.

When I demonstrate evisceration, people try to joke about the guts and the shit and the partially formed egg, I remind them what we’re doing here. Calling the hen I butchered a “her” until she became an “it” is important. Helping people kill chickens as humanely as you can possibly kill something that doesn’t want to die is important. Joking can be a distancing mechanism, and I want the reality of the situation to be undeniable for the people witnessing it today. “You will have to use your fingernails,” I say above the laughter, “to scrape the lungs from between her ribs. You’ll press here.” I hold the carcass aloft by the hole I cut around her anus and point with a single bloody finger to the spot near her spine. Again, it becomes quiet.

—

After the body is in the cooler, I ask people to break into groups and pick out their chicken for the DIY phase. I tell them everyone needs at least one buddy, preferably two, and that five in a group is not too many. Some people leave.

“I’m ready,” Wiley says immediately. He’s sitting in a chair behind me, holding a tan chicken and wearing nothing but combat boots and boxer briefs. He boasted the day before that his boots were military-grade, made for keeping your feet dry while you wade through blood. He made me place and replace the boards on the swim dock four times because, he said, they were a quarter inch off. I hate him.

“Do you have a buddy?” I ask.

“No, but do I really need one?” He is staring straight at me and speaking loud enough that everyone can hear. I feel challenged and threatened, and I instantly want to launch at him. Instead, I think, Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person.

“Yes, you need a buddy. Who can be Wiley’s buddy?” Mike volunteers, and I am not grateful. Instead, I am bitter that no one validated my dislike of Wiley. I am a shit cactus person and don’t care.

After he cuts the chicken’s jugular, Wiley begins to shake. At first, it’s only his legs, a vibration that reverberates from feet to thighs, but then it becomes full body. Blood spurts everywhere. “Mike, move the blood bucket,” I say. Mike, on his knees in front of Wiley, holds the plastic container to catch the stream. I hold the chicken with one hand and wrap an arm around Wiley.

“It’s okay,” I whisper. “It’s okay.” I don’t know why, but I feel that if I press hard enough on his back, I will absorb the reverberations, like touching a struck bell. I tell myself that I’m doing this for the chicken and in no way for Wiley. I half believe it.

The other executions are smoother. A therapist in training takes his time to calm the bird and cries after he kills her. A couple who flew in from Mississippi holds their chicken for the duration of the workshop, then together lull her to sleep and cut her jugular so quickly and thoroughly that we cannot locate the moment she dies. At a certain point, everything blends together, and I forget the particulars: someone says they weren’t overwhelmed until they saw the small holes left behind by plucked flight feathers. Another comments that it was when my hand was bare and fully inside a chicken carcass, yanking out the intestines, the liver, the heart, that they felt horrified.

—

After the workshop, people thank me. I hug the man whose family owns the land, he tells me I’m wonderful, and we both get teary in this weird-happy-I-don’t-know-you-but-I’m-comfortable-around-you-kind-of way that makes me think I should invest more time in making friends with people who say things like “luminous” and drink green smoothies. I stop thinking so much about if they need an extra volunteer on the cleanup crew and just sign up. I offer my limeade to Wiley, and he accepts.

Later that night, the entire seventy-person festival lays on their backs in the Dance Church and listens to chanting, Joanna’s singing crystal bowls, and the didgeridoo. I don’t get mad at the person next to me when they crowd my personal space. Someone else guides us through group meditation. I sob.

That night I hug everyone. I dance in the Dance Church, drink chamomile tea in the Soul Palace, have a Beanie Baby fight in a tent draped in shag carpeting, and climb the fifty-foot plant ladder to sit in the heart-shaped chamber at the top. There are small messages written inside. You are a limitless being of light. I can see the entire encampment pulsing and glistening below me. Love is all you need. The people are shining with headlamps and glowsticks. We are defined by love. They hug and dance and lay on their backs to look at the stars.

I am not scared of the descent or who I will talk to when I touch back down to earth. There is already a group at the base of the heart, waving and laughing and calling my name.

Inside that warm pink metal organ, I finally say that prayer Joanna suggested. Not to the chicken, but to this. I give thanks.

Kaia Stead is a writer and educator living in Northern California. Her first chapbook, Fast Car, was published by Bottlecap Press, and her essay “Free Falling” appeared in Eunoia Review. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she enjoys rock climbing and hiking with her dogs.