Spatchcock

The whole bird lay naked on the cutting board. Iris had received the wooden board as a wedding present. It held the scars of years and years of tiny careful cuts.

The body hardly looked like a recognizable creature without the head, the feathers, the feet. She could almost forget it had been alive. Iris traced her left index finger over the creature’s skin, a puckered goosebump film over too-pink flesh. She then worked her finger over the pathetic folded wings, the stiff legs pointed towards her. The leg joints had already been severed from the body with a pair of kitchen shears. With one smooth motion, she flipped the carcass, so it lay prone, belly up. Iris held the sturdy kitchen knife in her right hand and considered the spine. It was her first Sunday alone, and she was hungry.

Her husband had been difficult to please. He had been a vegetarian. While Iris spent years as a housewife mastering meatless dishes for him, he had satisfied his appetites with his coworker, the one with creamy skin and cherry lipstick that left bloody grenadine smears on Iris’s sateen pillowcases.

Iris ran her fingers up and down the bird’s backbone. She was good with a knife. Carefully, she dragged the blade down one side of the bone and then the other. The tip of the knife worked through the fat lines with ease, and look how quickly the bones gave way to the steel blade with some light sawing motions. Sss, sss, crunch. With each hack at the animal’s ribs, it became easier for Iris to breathe.

She flipped the body again, so it lay on its stomach, the carcass looser, easier to control. Iris pressed down on the spine with her left hand and both legs with her right arm, pushing all her weight so she crushed the animal, and it lay perfectly flat, making it easier to roast evenly. The body obliged with a satisfying crunch of rearranged bone. She smiled at her work and took the herb butter she’d prepped earlier to rub beneath the skin. That morning she’d grabbed rosemary, thyme, and parsley when she was working out in her garden, and now they perfumed her filthy hands as she caressed it into the muscles, bones, and fat. Once the butter was spread, she washed her hands yet again and noted she really ought to clean out the kitchen sink better: it was still covered with dirt from earlier. Time to cook the bird now. It entered the oven at a blasting 400 degrees.

There was dirt beneath her nails still. She’d done so much digging that morning, and she was so, so hungry. Iris looked out the window at all that freshly turned soil, shook her head at the mess she’d made. They redid the garden a few years back, all his idea of what it should look like, even though she was the one who spent all her time out there growing something out of nothing. Now that she’d destroyed his creation, perhaps it was time for a change. She’d have to replant her rosemary bush, the dill plant, even the roses. There was so much to clean still, in the bedroom and in the garden. But once the meat really got to cooking, once the fat melted off the bones and redistributed itself, once she properly washed her hands and her knife, once she burned the bloody bedsheets twisted open like lips parted, this house would smell like a home again.