Le Coq Sportif
by David Foote
I am Dusautoir. That is my name. It is my considerable dishonor that before today I didn’t know I needed one. If I thought of myself as anything it was as Dàshī, the maestro, king of a disputed kingdom. I sat in my box at the market, enduring the wall eyed, frenetic squabbling of my neighbours, and watched as one by one they were removed. Where were they taken? Tiān ā, I knew little and cared less!
Soon only one other was left, and him I called duìshǒu, the rival. Across from us we could see our guīfáng, the broody courtesans we both knew to be our birthright. How I longed to cover them all, batter them with my wings, and crow my triumph to the heavens. Only the bars between us kept me from scratching out my rivals eyes with my spurs. My hour would come though, and during those long hot nights towards the end of summer, as the sleepy murmuring of my harem drifted across the narrow gap between my cage and theirs (exciting in me a fever I thought could never be quenched) the image of my duìshǒu’s bloody comeuppance is all that sustained me.
