Heaven-Meat

Meat fell from the sky like red chunks of hail. It was cold too—January, the beginning of January, before the ground had fully unthawed—and the bones of Gloria the greyhound were still secure and safe in packed soil under the bedroom window. We heard the flesh hit the roof in disjointed pieces, thunks, and we peeked out into the garden with tired eyes, thinking we were hallucinating. One of us went through the screen door, knelt at the front step to inspect a piece of the unknown meat. It was raw, layered with carnelian stripes like a sedimentary rock, wet to the touch. They picked it up and brought it inside. “Let’s cook it.” “What kind of meat is it?” “How much more is in the yard?” “Oh, it’s stopped…” And we looked out the window again to see scattered meat in our garden, our gravel driveway, in the rusty truck bed. It had only fallen on our property it seemed—later in the day we explored, romping through the forest, and realized it promptly ended a mile or so in every direction—and we didn’t know what to do. In the end, we decided to gather as much as we could around the house before depositing it in big, black trash bags. It took hours of daylight. But our neighbors never asked, they never talked to us, and so we never told them. This was our secret. Another one of us fried up a piece of the meat, bit into it, and likened it to lavender. A few days later, we went out to explore the east woods, across the pasture. There, a forgotten piece of heaven-meat had rooted between some patches of knee-high grass. We tried to lift it, but it was thickly threaded with the dirt below. So, we left it. And kept an eye on it. Over the next few days, it grew into a tree. The tree had a fat middle and spindly branches, red and dripping juice. After just three days, our meat tree had become taller than the house. We touched it again, and it felt the same as when it was fresh and small—tender, soggy, solid. We must’ve been a blessed party, that’s what we settled on. Meat ribbed of Adam, boneless, something from an animal we’d never helped slaughter. We were blessed, and this was our way out of the old house with poor insulation and dead, dead things rattling at night. We began to make a few sketches for marketing purposes at the table alongside green beans and ice water. But, after supper, we had a real idea that might’ve changed everything: we would put the piece of cooked meat that had been chilling in Tupperware in the proper drawer of the refrigerator over Gloria’s grave—a test. We waited five minutes, watching diligently from porch and hoarfrost and window alike, until we gave up and returned to the drawing board. Maybe this wouldn’t work after such a transformation, after a bite had been stolen from it. Maybe it wouldn’t work at all, and we had to continue as we were. But, when we came back out the next morning, our dog was standing—sniffing our pansies with a thin, wagging tail.