It was snowing when she walked to the hospital to give birth. The boy arrived the next day, on a white Christmas. On the eve of his tenth birthday, she cooks goulash for him. I feel sorry for the animal, the boy says, but it tastes good. Should I stop eating meat? His father, who doesn’t eat meat, chops kale, watching an insect, opal green, rise from the leaves’ deep wrinkles and hover, like a spirit leaving the dead, over the green slaughter in the sink. He remembers the dull thud with which the meat landed on the scale before being wrapped in paper. He remembers thinking of pain. He remembers thinking how every act of thinking of the past can change the memory of it, like every telling of a story, the story. It was snowing that day ten years ago. He was at home with his four-year-old firstborn. Now the girl wants to eat kale. Through an imagined gap between a fully sensed desire, an appetite, a bodily need, and the failure to satisfy it, the sudden slash of a thought: is there any quivering, unseen, and soundless like the wings of the opal-green insect, a felt response, the faintest possible, to the knife’s work? In what’s smeared on its blade, any signature of suffering? And that, unlike on the day ten years ago, it’s not snowing.

Bio: Eugene Datta