“Mother, look, this rooster is a scientist. Fed well, thinks well. All the holiday needs!”, a grinning merchant gestured a skinny rooster to Mother. The rooster had more black feathers than brown.
Mother bobbed the rooster, then held it in mid-air where my head cut off above her waist. Swinging roosters is a local trick to spot the cheapest yet most excellent rooster. The merchants never spoke a word of truth, and, if they did, it was their homemade truth that changed by the customer. This same rooster would be a patriot or an athlete than a scientist. The truth was tailormade for the customer and the visions they carried in their eyes. Words carried no more truthful weight than a drop of water in the great sea. The street market was a sea of chatter where truth hid itself in the open like a jewel at its deep end.
The customers were as careless and cautious as a school of fish. The cacophony was a familiar waterbody in which they swam directionless until they found a sparkle of hope. They swam in faith until the waves suddenly synced, and the cacophony became a perfect blues for their life—for what they can afford, for their truth.
I remember those waves being bigger than the real ones at the seaside. I think mother had a subtle fear for that market-sea. Mother did not allow me to go by myself until I was fifteen. In retrospect, I see how the waves of hope could unite into tempest and gladly consume a little eleven-year-old boy like me.
Mother took me to the market-sea to teach me things maybe school or other ordinary instruction may not teach me. For my boyish eyes, there was alluring danger and rawness to the market. Remembering the soundscape of holiday customers, suspicious merchants, and caged roosters, I am ever so grateful Mother always tucked me beside her like a gun in a holster.
Mother had a special talent—almost too patient—to tune out the clamor and single out the eligible roosters. I saw her eyes switch short and long as if they were headlights pushing through the night. Perhaps it is this intuitive navigation which left her with too few options that caused her to fall for the cronies’ and pay them more than my father approved. Those merchants of the sea-market, the businessmen of our village, perceived Mother’s attuned rooster examination as an obsessive gullibility.
I am now a man out of the market, the village, and even the country. I look back on those days and wonder if Mother—possessing a wisdom of the high ranked women—may have been gullible. I don’t think so. The better explanation is that she could see the sky from inside the sea, and that vision came at a price neither the merchant nor my father could fathom.
Mother has always also been kind and added an ounce of goodwill to everything she did. She gave both my father and the merchants an opportunity to learn and choose honesty. Again, they never saw this cosmic sky my mother saw above the market-sea, so they only learned after the fact.
Already thrilled by her receptive nature, the merchants fell from presumptive heights when mother abandoned the examined rooster. These men, with unending stories, never considered Mother might be searching for something beyond a rooster. And with my short height, they didn’t bother to even look at me.
“How much is it anyhow?”, asked my mother. The mousey merchant did not hear her.
“Oh, so would you tell me how much it is …?”, mother repeated in higher pitch she used when exhausted.
The merchant sped his rundown of rooster prices for an older man and returned to Mother with a grin which exposed his yellow teeth and bellied the shimmering white which lingered in the afternoon heat.
“Mother, I can give you that for 170 Birr … a real scientist rooster but I don’t love it more than you,” he grinned even wider. I thought this man’s mouth was his superpower. His grin stretched to the extent of his greed and revealed a world withering away behind closed curtains. I was briefly obsessed with his lips, how they opened and closed flashing his blackish red tongue which appeared no different than the hell of fire they talked about at the church.
Mother dropped the rooster into cage’ s hole and draped her white fabric over her head to fight back the intense Ethiopia sun. I tucked deeper into her side shadow.
The merchant was wise enough to recognize her defeat.
“Wait, mother. Look, I won’t lie to you. The sun is beating, and this is the best of them, and only will surely make the holiday holy,” he pulled the rooster out of the cage and gestured it to Mother as if it was a bouquet of roses.
“120, just for you mother, nothing extra … just 120!”
Mother shook her head as a doubtless end point to the conversation. The merchant foxily hopped to a new customer while the rooster flew back into the cage. In the clamor, a shapeless silence wrapped Mother around like a spring wind.
As we walked to the next cage, I felt relieved. I knew, after all, Father would not have liked that rooster at that price.
As a holiday shopper, Mother was a terrible negotiator yet an excellent navigator. She weaved through the market with some intuitive compass guiding her legs and often could identify her rooster before the merchants even said a word. I can’t pretend I understood this back then. The whole bargain resembled a court deliberation where all the cards were laid out and everything was public, but only the judge knew who would win.
To my childish mind, the navigation and multiple disappointments in failing to find the rooster was a mystery that exhausted Mother. Often, I felt the merchants were like peasants before Mother’s queendom and that maybe Mother needed to survey her land before displaying her intuition. I also mostly felt uneasy because Mother’s terrible bargaining skills meant quarrelsome explanation to Father later. She always got what she wanted but Father needed her to stay below an unreasonable budget.
Mother’s knowledge was judicious desire held hostage by a mystic limitation for delivering verdict. In our village, knowledge had its limits. Despite her knowledge of a worthy rooster, Mother could not easily afford the worthy rooster. Therefore, we toured the noisy market until something short of a miracle gave us the underpriced yet well-fed rooster.
“Today was not so lucky … they had black and skinny ones … not acceptable,” Mother told Father who was dozing off after sixteen hours shift at his taxi business. He did not respond.
As an Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christian, Mother took black roosters as the personification of the devil and a skinny one for a sign of the flesh fed on by the evil spirits. The qualifying colors were a dove white or a shade of red orange that resembled the late stage of a setting sun.
This is the only thing I know to be of a hateful nature about Mother, so my childish mind, in careful curiosity to study the case of hate for Mother, recorded all rooster colors at the market. It was game-like for me to see the colors, and pass or fail them within the quiet voice of my mind.
In those days, I gazed up into the bright sky while Mother juggled skinny and, at times, quite ugly roosters. I imagined the ideal rooster so we could find it and bring joy to Mother. I assume the sun’s excessive gushing over the market must have served as a chemical that bathed rooster images in my mind. Regardless, this is one of the earliest life lessons of my youth: mystery can birth beauty and compassion.
I somehow always knew the rooster Mother would buy. I never confessed to Mother about my system and its high accuracy. It didn’t occur to me until I became a man and remembered the series of accurate guesses I made.
⦿
Why might it be I still remember those roosters? I have been in the United States for the better half of a decade, and those roosters escape their makeshift cages and fly to me in feverish colors, brandishing their feathers as if I could never grab and pluck them to their end.
Could it be the darkroom of my mind had only grown with me like Jesus’s garments, and now produces images of memories for my floating solitude?
For a long time, I thought because I miss Mother and the roosters were angels transformed and sent to me from Mother herself. However, this stable rendering was eternally distorted in one night’s dream and exposed the roosters’ indelible territory within my psyche. I would like to recount this important moment.
I was in deep sleep in the early hours after midnight when I saw three colors brilliantly splatter into a mirage backdrop. The colors were rose red, sunflower yellow, and soot black. The glorious sparkle of the colors would radiate and unify in that golden red color Mother loved for roosters. I was aware of this in my sleep and even enjoyed the unnatural ecstasy a dream allows the physical body to embrace. The colors had no real-life resemblance in my current existence.
The colors unified again and separated into themselves, as if they pierced a hole in the misty background that fizzed out of their initial explosion. In this hole, held by the tri colors as halo, I saw myself standing at the verandah of my old Ethiopian home. I walked into the mud house and then Mother’s voice came from the bedroom. The colors oozed and bubbled as if her voice was travelling through water.
“Bubu, there is bread money here, go get some and get ready for school,” her voice was in contralto which I took as the effect of the invisible water which filled the house.
When I got to the village shop, it was as if I transported it to it than walked. I was left with a trailing sensation as if I had flown. The three colors had expanded over my head and fused with the morning light. In the dream, I had wondered if I had flown but that very thought had made me think of the flightless roosters which probably operated the lighting of my dream. I knew I did not fly. I just happened to be at the shop in no time.
There were a woman and a little girl at the shop. The little girl was shorter than the counter, so she had hooked her hands to gaze over the sweet things hanging from the ceiling. The mother was in the process of paying for a handful of coffee wrapped in an A4 size white paper. The little girl had a dirty tank top which some long time ago had been white. She had turned to look at me when I arrived and, in her face, there was a fractured stare of a child who had missed many promised breakfasts.
The mother grabbed the coffee beans and waited for the shopkeeper to finish counting the change. The little girl, knowing it was time to leave, stretched to touch one of the snacks dangling above her head, but her malnourished arms betrayed her, and she plunged into the dirt.
I was in motion to pick her up when her mother broke into a livid shout that sent my dream into a burning red intermission. When I returned, the mother was bending over the fallen little girl, whose shirt had turned a muddy mix of brown and white.
“Do you think I have money to throw away?”, the mother hammered the little girl’s head, then picked her as one would claim luggage.
The little girl’s wailing took over the morning’s quietness. I stood still before the yellow snacks hanging above the counter oozed into my eyes as if the little girl’s cry flushed them into my soul. The little girl stayed loyal to her efforts. As her tears trailed away, she kept staring at them looking at me as if I failed her in some way. Her cry, with its childish sharp edges, pierced into my heart and shook me as if I witnessed a fearful apparition. I had closed my eyes to tune out the ebbing cry, but it was then, in the blank canvas of my inner vision, that suddenly, the image of Mother holding her chosen rooster appeared.
Then I opened my eyes and saw the shopkeeper’s monotonous and unbreakable smile. The dream had resolved to one color, a white glowing within itself.
Ever since this forsaken dream, roosters remind me of a crying little girl and a mother capable of hammering her daughter. Mother never beat roosters or punish me for ogling them. She let them fly when she could not afford them—whatever the color.
⦿
Father has always been an excellent butcher. It was Christmas eve, and Mother and the maid were ready to cook the rooster for the morning. When he locked the rooster’s neck behind his thumb, I knew the little creature’s life had come to its fate. I did not understand death or killing, but I could feel the real and immense pressure on the rooster’s neck. Its face had a silence to it—an eeriness as if melting and growing smaller.
Father was smiling and his overworked biceps showed gorgeous curves like stones sitting beneath his moony bald head which was illuminated by the afternoon Sun. Mother and the maid were fiddling with the boiling water for the afterbath of the slain rooster.
Mother was ambivalent about the killing moment and often had to be coxed into witnessing it by Father.
“Now come here and let bless it,” Father commanded in an irritated tone.
The maid carried on poking the charcoal, and Mother stood a few steps away from Father and the dying rooster. I once again tucked in beside Mother as a gun would slide back into a holster.
Father plucked small feathers from the rooster’s throat, and they said the holy blessing while the fathers glided down as if they no longer belonged to the rooster or had any weight to stay in the air.
I looked at Mother’s eyes, and they were distracted as usual. They were a great contrast to Father’s which were laser focused on the knife as if they were sharpening in while it cut into the roosters wrinkled neck.
“Oh lord, make this a blissful blood,
Bless my children and take care of us all!
In your grace … In you grace …”
In these moments, Mother and I shared a secret silence that was different from the marketplace. As the rooster’s feet pedaled into the empty air, and Father dug deeper into its throat, I could hear sonar waves from the screaming feet, and a thin rope of air caresses my own throat. I had a premonition that the rooster’s life, fused with father’s words, was perishing and becoming something invisible.
Father gave me a piece of injera dipped in hot spice. Everyone ate this to wash off the witness. I ate it and the thin rope around my neck left me like an unwrapped scarf. In retrospect, I see that this was the traditional way of pacifying the evil energy that activates itself by the rooster’s death. It was a nourishment that has gone to killing now returning to nourishment.
“Well, it is all yours now¸” said Father in high spirit, shaking Mother out of her empathic trance.
“Thank you … thank you,” replied Mother and ordered the maid to start the coffee on the charcoal burner.
“If you want to have the first round and go to work, that’s fine,” Mother clued Father. She had banned him from working on holidays, but she appreciated the benefit he brought when he resisted and went on. As usual, she left the decision door ajar and Father knew to walk out.
Once the rooster’s jostling died down under the basin, Mother walked over to inspect its condition. It was quiet. She opened it as I stood next to her. The rooster’s neck was barely attached and its reddish feathers looked almost brown in contrast to with its feverish pool of blood. Its eyes were closed and its body presented an ease that made me believe it was only asleep in an unusual position.
“Let me go set it free,” Father’s voice tore the silence in its jovial tone. He was going to the restroom to set his stomach free.
“You don’t have to tell us, you know,” Mother replied suppressing a chuckle while she focused on the rooster.
I followed Father’s careless gait into the house. The afternoon sun went into the clouds as soon as he disappeared as if she was not interested in the rest of us. The maid brought the hot water to pour over the rooster. This served to make the feathers easily pluckable and also sanitize the rooster entirely.
Mother stepped back and pulled me with her as the maid poured the steaming water into the basin in an instant. I saw the rooster behind the dancing vapor steam, almost regal in its unmoving pose.
I was amused to see the smoke escaping the basin in such a hurry, but mother and the maid were eager to start plucking that they missed a spectacular act by the rooster. Its right leg twitched three times, as if marking the crucifixion, and fell into the steamy water as if it was swimming in nothingness. Only I witnessed its last seconds, last moment, the final act of defiance, its escape from life.
I could not unlatch my eyes from the rooster sleeping inside the water and the steam out the basin and the vapor smoke danced up, up, up. It laid there like an old man in a hot tub. The rooster no longer looked like a creature.
⦿
I wonder which memories would occupy my manhood if for some reason my parents had never allowed roosters in the house. There is no way to know this. Time can go back as much as it can go fast forward. What happened is what it, what is it will have happened. Yet, I wonder. I dream murkily what my memory if I had never witnessed a rooster dyeing or paddling in its death pool.
Memories are heavy and fierce like the first blood that drops on a bleach white sink. When I came to the US for college, the last thing I considered was if those childhood roosters would board the plane with me and follow me around until I turn around to greet them.
Memories are in the air we breathe. I have no choice but to take them in. As they enter me, they collide into each other like clumsy dancers.
Sometimes I wonder if the roosters never really died. What if they were faking it so Mother and Father had their fair theatrical success before my young self? Perhaps the roosters were life and death?
I am those roosters' prisoner. They can’t let me be. Their cries and crows fuse and leak into my soul like ink bleeds on paper to escape time.
Roosters own the colors system of my being. They charter lines of childhood memory, and every new day I write, I color outside the border and tangle them as if they are run-on poetry. One might think a mind tortured by colors would want to become a painter and let it all out onto the canvas. This is not true for me.
Father is very unsure why I try to be a painter. A lot of other jobs can buy a lot more roosters, he would reason. But what about the colorful-rooster explosion inside me? If roosters can be a psyche of colors, then what is the fate of my being?
I paint in silence. I am a fugitive of slaughtered roosters who peck at my most vivid curst of memory. I don’t bleed out for them. Instead, I pluck out a feather for every dent and let it brush the white canvas without remorse. I am now a man who reincarnates roosters and never sells them.
⦿
When they said in life, you win some, you lose some, I am sure they were referring to the artist. It has been almost a decade since I visited home. I talk to Mother and Father through video calls. We look like caged roosters in the little squares on the phone screen.
They don’t ask when I might come home. They believe I have a better life in the US. I don’t break the illusion, so they stay well—together and in love. Ethiopians tell hard things in person. The day I return, I will tell them how roosters have chased me across states. And Mother will go and bring a full plate, lush the doro-wot of the most recent rooster.
I will take a bite and chew in silence until the spice and the rooster rattles inside me, and tear I admit, “it is wonderful things have not changed much here, Mother. This is delicious.”
But, I am not home. I am here—someplace in a foreign land of opportunities. I have given to the rooster psychosis. I am one with them. I am no longer sure if they deserve to die. I don’t know if I can stomach seeing Father cut of a rooster’s head again, but that is what he will do if I go home. “Oh Lord, bless this blood,” he would say, and smile at me with a love that can pull the sun out of the cloud.
Homelessness with roosters has made me an artist.
A year ago, at the start of the spring semester, I painted a lonesome golden rooster. My professor didn’t hide her surprise. She said, “striking!”
At the end of the semester, while compiling my final portfolio, I added a wooden knife below it where it had been a snow-white negative. Amused again, my art professor said, “even more striking!”, and gave me an A+ in silence.
That night, I hung the painting on my one-bedroom apartment’s living room. The room’s smallness resembled the cages roosters know too well. I looked at it in silence and for the first time thought how that little girl probably never had a father who would slaughter roosters for her. She never ate blessed flesh. She was not lucky to contract the rooster fever I have.
I stretched on the couch still looking at the golden rooster. I felt myself drift into weak dream, and the rooster zoomed out into the night as if it was travelling back a thousand miles back to my village.
I shook myself and looked at my rooster again. It gifted me a regal smile with its half open beak and bird-like freedom as it floated above the wooden knife.
I smiled back because that would be it forever. I made the knife wooden, so it never cuts my golden rooster. ⦿
Written in 2025 G.C, Bowling Green, Kentucky, United States of America
© 2026 Masamune Belay (Birhanu Tadesse Gessese). All rights reserved.
All works presented here are the original property of the author. Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or modification of any material is strictly prohibited without prior written consent from the author. For publication permissions or other inquiries, please contact: masamunebelay@outlook.com.