My wife’s family is now my family, too. We are four months out from the miscarriage. 

After a long, ear-blaring flight, we land in the country of my wife’s origin. From the hotel, we take a bus two hours outside the city to a dusty town. To a wilted house, to my mother-in-law’s. For dinner. My mother-in-law has made rice. When she scrapes the rice out from the pan the bottom of the scoop is coal black. She serves my wife first. Then, she serves my father-in-law. Then, she serves herself.

“I have something special for you,” the mother-in-law says.

My wife has started eating, but I can tell she is nervous. She eats the rice one kernel at a time. The father-in-law is silent. The father-in-law fills his mouth with rice and eyes the game playing on the muted TV. 

From the oven, the mother-in-law removes a heart-sized cut of meat with tongs. She toggles it over and sets it on my plate with a splat.

An ear, thick and bulbous like a forest mushroom. The outer flap is a coastline of bristled hair. 

I turn to my wife. Her face has changed. I see rivulets of devotion in her weary eyes. I see hope.

“From a bull,” my wife says.

“It is a very special tradition,” the mother-in-law says, “to recharge and freshen the seed.”

My wife grasps my arm and bows her head.

“Please,” my mother-in-law says, waiting. 

She has calcified back into her chair. Her plate is untouched. She is waiting for me to start. 

My wife’s grip tightens.

“The food is getting cold,” the mother-in-law says. 

With my knife and fork, I try and saw at the ear, but my cutting is useless. 

I saw, but the ear won’t budge. 

“Here,” my wife says, “let me help you.”

My wife shoots a stern look at her mother, who looks ready to object, and picks up a flute of olive oil from the table. Tipping the flute, she spills the olive oil onto the ear and then gently massages the oil into the sizzling flesh. She picks up the coarse hairy ear that is dripping sluggishly with neon green olive oil, and brings it to my lips. The olive oil is fresh and citrusy in my nostrils. My mouth waters. I open my mouth and widen my lips. My teeth try and tear at the ear but like the cutlery, the meat won’t budge. 

“I can’t do it,” I say, “it’s too big.”

The father-in-law snorts, startling all of us. 

“The body knows what it needs,” he says, just to himself, nodding, his eyes magnetically trained on the television. 

My wife nods her head and says, “You have to swallow it. Whole.”

Tears streak from my eyes as she pushes the ear down my straining jaw, and my flickering tongue, lapping at the olive oil, recoils at the bristled hair. 

I start to gag. 

I can’t do this.

The ear pushes into the back of my throat. 

I want to vomit. 

I want this ear out of my mouth. 

My limbs are numb. 

Through tears of suffering, I can see the ceiling kitchen light, a halo of soft amber.

My wife stuffs the ear until it’s stuck. 

I haven’t breathed in I don’t know how long. 

I will die this way. 

I make horrible, embarrassing yacking sounds. They are involuntary.

I think, this is it, a human cannot endure this amount of suffering and survive. 

But something miraculous happens. 

I swallow. 

My body shudders and expands. 

My jaw unhinges, opening like a vault.

My throat swells, and when I swallow, I feel like this is what my throat was meant for.

The ear shoots down my throat, and I black out. 

+

I have a beautiful dream where I am on a tropical island, slamming myself against warm blue waves. My wife appears, stunning in a translucent purple summer shawl, waving. Behind her the kids are beautiful. Their black coats shine, so healthy in the sun. Their snouts are formidable, they are shameless and perfect, with genitals swinging. They look just like me. I look at my hand and see a hoof. 

+

I wake up with my jaw on the table, my spit forming a murky puddle at my mouth. The table has been picked up, no evidence of the dinner. It is the middle of the night. My blood feels hot. I am starving. I have embers in my stomach, a surge of electricity in my chest. 

The next day we are seen off by my wife’s parents. The father-in-law even gets up from his TV chair, he shakes my hand, and then he sits back down in the TV chair. The mother-in-law kisses me on both cheeks. 

She whispers in my ear, “If you kill another one, I will kill you myself.”

My wife and I return to the hotel room, exhausted. We are quiet in the small room that now feels so large.

My wife fills a glass of scotch to the brim.

“Drink this,” she says. 

I swallow. One burning gulp after another. I feel loose and then she straddles me. She fingers my anus. She fits in three fingers. I grow hard. Throbbing, my member is a sword of liquid fire. When I ejaculate inside my wife, I choke on my own spit. 

+

Three years later my daughter collapses on my lap. She is tired after a long afternoon playing like an animal outside. She is sweaty, heaving.

“I am hungry,” she says. 

I scratch her scalp how she likes. I avoid touching her ear. My daughter was born with an atrophied left ear that looks like a shrimp split in half. She hates it when people stare or ask her about it. I feel an urge whenever I see the ear. I want to bite it. I want to tear it off her  as if to let her sprout a new ear. A healthy ear. I recall the urge from when she was an infant, back when she was sweet smelling, how I wanted to bite into her soft skull like an apple. I pretend to nip at her like an angry dog, and she squirrels in my lap. I find the atrophied ear with my mouth and tickle the cartilage with my tongue. My daughter tenses at first, but she can’t help the laughs bubbling within her like soda. 

“Daddy,” she says, when I bite down 

“Daddy?” she says, when I bite down harder.

She starts to scream. 

+++

Ian Crutcher Castillo is a writer living in Brooklyn, and Madrid. He has stories published and forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, Farewell Transmission, and BULL.