Chicken feet for the Soul

Only on two occasions has yours truly thrown a punch in rage or agony. First was in a street fight with a gradeschool classmate named Andy.

Second was when a carabao stepped on my right foot.

The first had Andy’s lip bleeding, the second proved to be a futile
engagement with the stubborn buffalo. It was sundown, and I had earlier tagged along with a cousin as he brought home his kalabaw
from pasture. We were capping the day’s task with the usual farm boy banter, cousin hitching the rope to a steel peg driven deep into the ground, me stroking the carabao’s thick sinews when suddenly, perhaps to shake off mosquitoes now swarming about, the normally stoic beast lifted an itchy leg and then planted the hoof right on my bony toes.

A girlish scream tore through the fading light. I remember punching the damn brute’s tough hide about three times and then hitting it with a rock before it stirred, finally, ending my few second’s foothold in hell.

Andy now runs his own bakery. Cousin is now a school teacher in Bulacan. The clearing where the carabao used to retire for the night is now just another empty lot holding a perpetual pool of ditch
water from neighborhood baths and kitchens. The pasture has since given way to a plant producing pre-mixed concrete, a Smart cell site tower, a Roman Catholic parish built using funds donated by a losing mayoral candidate, and three-storey houses with roof decks that echo with videoke song on weekends.

Never again was the hand lifted in anger. The foot, however, with the sore, sweet memory of rural childhood, never forgets.