What's Eating You?

The bird which, just a minute ago, we held in our arms like a pet (its eyes calm and docile, even bearing as it did the clear signs of having had dinosaur ancestors who would have eaten our evolutionary shrew ancestors for lunch), struggles upside down in the cone as the blood pours from its throat into the aluminum trough thick with the gore of the birds slaughtered before it. Ninety seconds after Katie slit its throat, the butcher lifts one leg to see if it's still kicking and, certain it is dead, dunks it in a bath of boiling water to make it easier to remove the feathers before we gut it, take it home, cook it, eat it.

On the way home, the driver of the cab (smell of smoke, dents in the door, rips in the upholstery), cannot sit still in his seat. At each stop light he stretches, scratches his arms, pushes out of his chair and back down, twitches, adjusts his hat, grabs the back of his head rest, changes the radio (inevitably louder each time), looks in the mirror, at his phone, at his watch, at the road, to the point where I wonder what is inside him, gnawing at him, that he has to move just to keep it from eating him alive.