The Rope Inside the Chicken

"It won't tear," Maya said.

She was holding a chicken thigh in one hand and pulling on something with the other. A thin white string ran along the bone, shining like wet plastic. The meat around it came apart easily. The string did not.

"Pull harder," said Soren.

"I am pulling harder. Look at my face."

Her face was doing the thing where her eyebrows went up and her mouth went flat. Soren put down the knife and looked.

"Cut it," he said.

"I don't want to cut it. I want to know why I can't break it." She pulled again. The string stretched a little, went tight, and held. The meat tore instead, peeling away on both sides and leaving the white cord exposed, like a wire someone had buried in the leg on purpose.

Soren leaned in. "That's the tendon. It connects the muscle to the bone. Grandma always cuts those out."

"I know what it is. I want to know why it's stronger than the chicken."

"Everything's stronger than the chicken. The chicken's dead."

"Soren."

"Sorry." He picked the thigh up himself and tried. He braced it against the cutting board and pulled with two fingers, then with his whole fist. The cord bit into his skin before it gave. He let go. "Okay. That is weirdly strong."

"Weirdly strong is a clue," Maya said.

Grandma was at the stove with her back to them, not turning around. "If you two ruin that thigh I am putting both of you in the soup," she said. She was not really listening. She was tasting the broth off a wooden spoon and frowning at it like it owed her money.

Soren rolled the tendon between his thumb and finger. "It feels like one thing," he said. "But look. When it dried out a little it started to split. See? It's not one string."

Maya looked. Where the cord had frayed at the cut end, it was coming apart into finer threads, and those threads into finer ones still, like a rope unraveling into yarn, and the yarn unraveling into thread.

"It's a rope," she said.

"Ropes are strong because of how they're wound," Soren said slowly. "Not because of what they're made of. You can make a strong rope out of weak grass. My dad showed me. You twist it and the twist is what holds."

"So the chicken twisted it."

"The chicken grew it twisted."

They both went quiet. The broth bubbled.

Maya put the frayed end right up to her eye, closing the other one. "Can ropes be made of ropes?" she asked.

"What do you mean."

"This thread." She pointed at one of the smallest threads she could see, thinner than a hair. "What if that's wound too. Out of even smaller ones."

Soren got the notebook from his back pocket and a pencil that had been sharpened with a knife. He drew three lines and braided them on the paper, then drew three of those braids and braided them, then stopped because his hand could not draw small enough.

"It can't go down forever," he said. "At the bottom there has to be just one strand. The actual thing it's made of."

"So what's the one strand?"

Grandma turned around. She had the spoon in her hand and a look on her face that was halfway between annoyed and interested, which on Grandma was the same look. "You want to know what that string is made of," she said. "It's the same stuff as your skin. And your ears. And the bendy part of your nose. Press your nose."

Maya pressed her nose. Soren pressed his.

"That's the same string," Grandma said. "Just packed in different. In the chicken it's a rope. In your nose it's a wall. In your bones it's the part that doesn't snap when you fall off your bike." She turned back to the stove. "It's called collagen. Now stop manhandling my dinner."

Soren wrote the word down. Collagen. He underlined it twice.

Maya was not looking at the notebook. She was looking at the back of her own hand, turning it over, pressing the soft place between her thumb and finger.

"It's in me," she said. "Right now."

"It's in everybody," Soren said. "That's the part that's getting me. More of it than anything else. Grandma, is it really the most?"

"Most of you that isn't water," Grandma said, not turning. "You're mostly rope and soup."

Soren looked at the braid he had drawn. Three strands wound into one. He thought about the chicken pulling against Maya's whole fist and not breaking.

"Maya," he said. "If you made that same braid out of steel. A steel wire as thin as the chicken string. Would the steel win?"

Maya considered it. She had no way to know. But the cord had cut into Soren's fingers before it gave, and she had seen steel wire of about that thickness on the spool in the garage, and she had a feeling about it the way she sometimes did before she had a reason.

"No," she said. "The string wins."

"You can't know that."

"I know it. The chicken's just a chicken and I couldn't break it. A chicken built a rope that beats a wire and it didn't even try, it just grew." She held the cord up between them, the white of it catching the kitchen light. "And it's the same one that's in my nose. And your ears. And the part of the bone that doesn't snap."

Soren's pencil had stopped. He was staring at his three braided lines, then at his own arm, then at the chicken, doing the math of it in his head and not liking how big the number got.

"So every single person you have ever seen," he said. "Is mostly held together by the strongest rope, wound the same way, all the way down to one strand."

"And the strand is so small," Maya said, "that the smallest thread we can see is already a rope of ropes of ropes."

Grandma set two bowls on the counter, hard, so they clinked. "Soup," she said. "While it's hot."

Neither of them moved. Maya was still holding the cord up to the light. Soren reached out and pulled on it, once, with two fingers, the same as before.

It held.