The Essex Chicken’s defunct

What seemed entirely quotidian to the farmers has become a scene that ceaselessly replays in my mind: a chicken that, in the habitual process of moving coops onto fresh grass, was crushed beneath the wooden edges of the cage while trying to make a swift escape.  Its leg was bent in the wrong direction, folded beneath the bird as it perplexingly perched outside of its caged barrier.

As I gingerly placed it back in the coop I’m certain I could feel its heart racing in my hands. Or perhaps it was my increasing panic projecting onto the warm fleshy bird squirming between my fingers. 

A being nearly defunct by my hands.

There was a subsequent unavoidable anthropomorphizing; what sorts of sensory realizations of pain do chickens experience, I wondered? I unintentionally thought back to the time I broke my foot after a lengthy night of dancing; I considered lying about the amount of pain I felt and the cause of the injury when questioned about the details of my accident, embarrassed by a foolish injury entirely of my own doing.

By the end of the day my hands felt like someone else's entirely; skin taut and dirt stained; faulty transplants on my heavy arms.

Tell it Slant spends chapters outlining the myriad of methods that can be employed to access memories, but it hardly acknowledges the past experiences we wish and perpetually try to push out of our minds into an inaccessible space… never done quite successfully as desired.

Unwanted, this memory vividly sneaks into my thoughts and upon reexamination becomes increasingly haunting, my perspective continuously changing and crafting what has become an exponentially gruesome scene in each iteration. Articulating this in writing feels indulgent and overly melodramatic, but nonetheless somehow seems an accurate portrayal of the spiraling thought processes that have frequently been in my mind.

In an entirely non hyperbolic or facetious way… I don’t think I will ever eat chicken again.