Chicken Prep

At Essex today within a 5 second period of contemplation, I went from walking around the farm, clipboard in hand, to straddling a bucket of chicken innards, hands deep in a fleshy bird.

Instructions:

1.  Detach the tendons from the neck.
2.  Find the bulbous sack towards the neck and pull it out. Ask for help because said sack seems absent entirely. Cut the excess skin off the neck.
3. Turn the chicken over.  Make a slice below the tailbone. Pretend you are a surgeon making a delicate incision and then quickly realize you’re not helping humans but gutting a bird that’s just been killed. Feel guilty. Don’t cut too deep or you’ll burst the intestines or gallbladder or both. Oops. Feel guilty again.
4. Reach your hand into the slit and remove the organs. Worry about bursting more organs and ask for help. Hold a tiny chicken heart in your hand and feel bizarrely numb and mesmerized and melodramatic. Think you’ve removed them all and then somehow find more… is that a lung? Realize before this moment you've never conceptualized the inside of a chicken and are somehow surprised they’re not hollow but rather filled with an intricate arrangement of organs that you’ve now made into a mangled mess.
5. Slice a hole in the skin above the tailbone. Tuck the legs into the hole. Wash the bird. Let soak in the water bath. Repeat…?
6. Stare at the vivid blood spattered wall beneath the chicken killing cone devices (is there a word for these?); it’s so red and thick and horrifying and fascinating and you realize what it feels like to not be able to look away.