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Title: The Second Coming of Chicken Little
***
The
Second Coming of Chicken Little
The
chicken is lying in a bag, hanging from the handlebar of a bicycle. It’s a
young chicken, and clearly the lowest in the flock’s pecking order, so to
speak—its feathers are patchy and half of its upper beak has been broken off.
It’s in a bag, but it’s not tied up. It’s just lying there on its side. No
scratching, no fluffing, no clucking. This is a chicken that has accepted its
fate. This chicken is one with the universe.
It
shits in the bottom of the bag. Take that, universe.
The
bag sways back and forth on the handlebars for a long time, and the chicken
sways with it. The movement is soothing, despite the heat and the general
foulness in the confined space. The chicken’s beady eyes are half-closed,
mesmerized by the rhythmic motion. When it stops, the chicken doesn’t even
realize it until the bag is shifting, up and down before bump-bump-bumping
along in time with the pace of whoever is holding it. The chicken is
disgruntled, but it still doesn’t speak. Why bother? It’s going wherever it’s
going.
The
murky light turns dim and dark, and the air in the bag gets even closer. The
end of it opens up, and the chicken stares up at a large, freakish face—no
beak, no wattle, and a comb so short it might as well not even be there. The
face makes an unintelligible grunting sound, then huge hands descend to pluck
the chicken from its plastic nest.
Now
the chicken has something to say, and boy does it say it. It curses out the man
holding it, all the people sitting in a circle stound them like a bunch of
slow, stupid bugs, and the undignified way it’s suddenly dangling head-first
over a grimy old clay pot, the edge rimed with a pinkish-gray foam that smells
suspiciously like death, and hey wait, what’s that shiny thing coming close to its—
One
hand holds it steady while the other one cuts its throat. It flaps, startled by
the pain, even more startled by the way it begins to leak. Its head is covered
in wet and salt, and its vision goes blurry. It’s shaken a little over the pot,
plink plink plink to get the blood in, then turned upright and set on
the packed earth floor to the left of the sharp-handed, freak-faced human.
The
chicken is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.
The
stupid bug people make stupid noises, pointing and staring at the chicken. The
chicken ignores them, because it is not moving, thank you very much. The
chicken is happy just to sit here and take stock of its life and impending death
and wonder where it all went wrong. The bag, definitely. Leaving the bag is
where it all went wrong, the chicken remembers that now.
The
human to its right says something new, pours something else into the pot, stirs
it all together and throws some of the liquid onto the back of chicken, and
then—
Oh.
Goodness. How strange. It’s like…like being a weed clinging to the crevice of a
rock, only the rock is inside of you and the weed is outside of you, but it
tells you what to do and you do it. The chicken knows that the best thing for
it is not to move, but it doesn’t feel like it can refuse the weed-voice.
It’s clinging to its tiny brain, firing up nerves that have been resignedly
shutting down for the past thirty seconds. The chicken, who is still slightly more
alive than dead, but definitely more dead than alive, gets to its feet.
It
reels to the left first, and runs right into the wall of the hut where this
travesty is taking place. It goes right, gets up speed for a few feet, then
trips over the desiccated maw of a crocodile who predeceased the chicken by
decades in the center of the room, where a pile of bones makes a nest for the
pot. The chicken falls onto its back, and is still for a long moment. The human
bugs make noises, very loud noises, which wouldn’t bother the chicken except
that the weed inside its head is very insistent that it keep moving,
because “hand to the ancestors, what are chickens made of these days that they
can’t handle a few seconds of post-sacrificial cavorting?”
The
chicken kicks once, twice, then manages to flip onto its belly.
There
is loud noise again, but it sounds higher this time, happier, in a way. The
weed begins to withdraw its tendrils from the chicken’s brain, taking away most
of its extra perception as well, which is really for the best considering what
happens to it next. The chicken is completely out of it when new hands,
tentative hands, pick it up and, with a great deal of prompting, break its
wings in their sockets. It barely even feels the vibration run through its body
when those same hands break its legs as well, although a final wisp of
indignation does manage to float through its tiny brain when the hands have to
break its legs again, because they didn’t do it well enough the first
time. Honestly, “what are people coming to these days, when they can’t even
break the legs of their chicken sacrifices like they’d break the legs of their enemies,
swift and sure?”
Wait,
what? Never mind, never…never mind…
The
chicken is plucked, and cooked, and eaten, and knows no more.
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