My mother looks at a picture of me on my fifth birthday. Mole smudges on my face as I bite into a chicken thigh with the few baby teeth I have left. Not pictured, her hands that wrung the chicken’s neck. The hands that dunked the chicken into boiling water and plucked its feathers with her brittle nails. She remembers the chick’s mossy yellow fur, its high-pitched pío píos as it waded around our backyard. She remembers the nerve it took to kill it, the guilt afterwards. She tells me she thought of the chicken as my pet. I laugh and tell her I always thought it would end up in the mole like all the other chickens we had ever owned. We both sit and think about the things we think we know about each other.