I want to kill the butter lamb
easter brunch. originally written in 2025
Last year there was a lamb made out of butter on the table for Easter brunch. It was a delicious brunch and the company, though not my own family, was kind enough. But I had some fixation on the butter lamb. Maybe everyone at the table did, given its delicate beauty, the way it was perched in this pale shade of yellow upon the breakfast spread with all of its small little features and inquisitive expression carved on its face. I had never seen such a thing before and it felt like a childhood dream that had come alive right in front of me, something that only ever made an appearance through Little House on the Prarie books or was hinted at in museums through the random butter mold. It was so beautiful and lovely that I felt this very sharp pang of discomfort as I watched it pass around the table with pieces of its body being sliced away.
As if I were in a dream, my hands, too, reached for the knife when it arrived, along with some strange confidence that this butter was probably from some artisanal grass-fed cow living on a Swiss mountain somewhere and a distinctly European thing, so I had to take it or I would miss my opportunity to try this blessed butter in the shape of a lamb. A curl of leg peeled away from body with a flick of the knife and then it was on my plate with a little plop. A weight. The tiniest thud of a misshapen chunk of soft butter. Butter, yes, butter, was it salted or unsalted, what would it taste like? The Swiss Alps, perhaps, like sun and earth and ice blue water and lush green grass. And lamb. Butter lamb.
How does everyone else cut their butter lamb? I glanced around. It was three people away. We were all happy and laughing there, delight and joy. Sunday Easter brunch. Thank you, Jesus, for this Sunday Easter brunch and smoked salmon and fresh bread and orange juice made with 100% freshly squeezed orange, and deviled eggs and tiny little bio capers and slices of lemon. Thank you for this room full of beautiful people with big bright smiles on their faces, we’re all related by blood—well, mostly—we’re all the same except a few, there’s me here, we don’t look the same and we don’t speak the same language and we don’t think the same, either, but thank you, that’s the point of Sunday Easter brunch, isn’t it! Repentance, redemption, rebirth. We are all saved. Not the person next to me, perhaps, this man who is definitely not like me, who I wonder sometimes if he even likes me. But no, stop that thought. Repent, redeem, reborn. That applies to him too. He doesn’t care, though. No one cares. No one at this table even believes in the power of Jesus, including me. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
And for a moment I was looking at it and I suddenly understood Judas looking at Jesus at The Last Supper. Look at it, that useless butter lamb. It’s not even real. Can’t even make out a little bleat. There’s only half a body now. There wasn’t any fight, was there? Mute stares, that’s all it can do. Pathetic.
I stared it down, cruelly, menacingly, with red hot rage flushing through my veins that vaporized into steam once it hit my heart. What a sad little lifeform, what a boring victim. I should rescue it, someone should. But to take it into my hands and gently pocket it away would be an insult to everyone else in the room, too nakedly saint-ish, too Virgin Mary. And too loving.
It’s okay, the voice of God would have drifted through the room, soft and sweet and sickeningly kind. You are all forgiven. The lamb is forgiven, and you are forgiven, too, for all of your intentions with her, for all of your ignorance and looking away.
No. No, the lamb had to be saved with violence.
If I were meaner and angrier then I would have hacked that butter lamb to death right then and there, stretched myself over the giant slab of wooden table and stabbed it so violently and quickly with my blunt butter knife that pieces would be thrown through the air to land in little half-melted lumps all over the room. It would have happened so suddenly and randomly that everyone around the table would have gone quiet and had no idea what to do but stare. They would have all looked at me and I might have had a psychotic break and started screaming.
Look at the fucking lamb! I would have shrieked. You’re eating a fucking lamb made out of a butter, you turned that lamb into butter and you’re slapping it onto your bread and shoveling it in your mouth. A lamb. A dainty, darling, beautiful thing. Sacrificial lamb. Innocent lamb. Biblical lamb. Turned into butter and paraded around, and everyone circles it around the table and it’s being dissected away into perfect little pieces to sit perfectly onto their bread? They can’t escape their slaughter even in the parallel universe where they take the form of butter. All they do is exist and be cut. It’s betrayal, is what it is. Betrayal.
And then everyone would have been horrified and I would have been carried out by the man who probably didn’t like me, dragged by his two hands, soft appendages digging sharp blades into my armpits. He would have sat me in a bedroom and asked if I was okay. I would have nodded, blankly, stopped thinking and remembering from that point on. Drifted away as he left the room. Turned into dust and settled into the cracks of the wooden floors and walls before he came back in. The microscopic particles of my body would have dissipated into the universe like the melting pieces of the butter lamb and no one would ever, ever lay eyes on me, touch me, destroy me, ever again.
I ate the butter with zopf. I can’t remember, honestly, what it tasted like, if it was even good, if the texture was hard or soft, if it was salted or unsalted. I just remember the butter in the shape of the lamb, and I remember the chamber of empty space in my heart that opened as it was carved away. There was a block of salami that was also in the form of some animal, and that fell away in slices, too, and it surely must have ended up on my plate at some point. The salami animal or the butter lamb. Somehow the lamb felt worse.