By that point the rest of the family had piled into the kitchen and, as if picking up where she’d left off, Nana Ana restored her grip on my hand and led me onward through the house, out the back door, and into a small cobblestoned courtyard where several chickens and roosters dashed about, squawking in alarm. I shook my head with confused trepidation as she began pointing to the chickens and imploring me in her authoritative rasp to do something.

Ana appeared beside me and translated her grandmother’s request as the rest of the family gathered round in a semicircle. “It’s customary in Bulgaria for the guest to supply the first night’s meal. But because you haven’t brought anything she’s offering you the choice of one of her chickens.”

“You mean like —”

“To kill.”

“Seriously?”

“Welcome to the mountains.”

“Kill how?”

She pointed to a wooden stump in the corner that had a machete driven into it. The handle of the machete was wrapped in black electrical tape.

“I’m vegetarian,” I said.

Ana smiled. “C’mon, she’s waiting for you.”

With all eight members of the family watching, I took a step forward into the courtyard, which erupted into a new flurry of avian commotion. I made a few half-hearted attempts to scrabble at a brown hen before realizing we’d be there all night unless I really committed to it. I became keenly aware that my masculinity was on public trial. I swallowed, grit my teeth, and told myself, Your ancestors lived in fucking mud homes on the prairies, raised and killed and gutted their own livestock, and you can’t even catch a fucking chicken in a tiny yard for a group of onlookers? C’mon, you limp-wristed pussy. I lunged at a mottled white hen and was startled to feel my hands close around its sides; to feel the force of its wings pushing out against my palms. And then another sensation that aroused nothing short of terror in me: the shocking insistence of its beating heart. It was so completely and undeniably alive. As I held its throbbing body, walked to the corner of the yard, and placed it on the wooden stump, I could quite literally feel the moment the chicken apprehended its own death, and in that moment I had the distinct impression I was holding both a living bird and its carcass, something caught in the abject place between those states. And of course I had to render it a carcass, an object, in my mind, an “it” not a “her,” in order to bear the act of actually making it one. As I pushed it down into the wooden stump with my left hand and gripped the machete with my right, I felt both sets of the Anas’ hands close around my raised arm. The courtyard filled with laughter. I looked up at their faces in confusion.

“She’s totally pranking you,” Ana said. “She made a roast and it’s ready to eat.”