Vocation by Joseph Starr

One employee at the Chinese restaurant chops the heads off ducks. Imagine the kitchen: thin streams of sweat on the foreheads, array of aged cookware on the walls, spattered oil yellow-hot, and the elderly Chinaman in his little nook. How elegant his silver hair combed in damp stripes! With what grace he wields his hatchet!

Joseph Starr is a freelance writer living in Denver, Colorado. His fiction and short prose have appeared in Literary Review, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and Third Bed.

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