Gratitude to the Chicken

Red warm against the back of my hand.

 The combed head in my palm, my fingers holding the little flap of skin between trachea and spine. Against the hills and valleys of columned bones is where the vessels lay. Now severed, now flooding the valleys with warmth, staining feathers with cells they’ve never noticed beneath the surface, dripping onto skin that is not of its own. The scaly legs kick into the air, the brilliantly colored wings flap, the hills of the neck twist and shiver. Freckles of blood cover my arms, are Pollock-ed against the back of the stainless steel sink. My gut is twisting in time with the spasms, my eyebrows knit in concern. Did I do it right? Is this fast enough? Can they feel the pinch and slice, knife through skin, forward cut one vessel, slide down and back the other? 

Two streams of blood, two eyes shutting, many cycles of breath and heartbeats emptying the body.

Stillness.

It is afternoon and I am outside in a field. 

My arms are scrubbed free of blackened red flecks, a few feathers cling to my tangled hair, my mind still holds images of slowly hinging beaks ceasing mid-breath. I carry a basket in my hand and shoo chickens from my feet and laugh at the chaos. I open secret-looking doors and am consistently delighted by finding eggs in golden wood shavings, sometimes with hens defending little bundles of DNA.

Warm in my palm, the energy of potential life.

We gather the eggs and put them into a cool room next to where we slaughtered chickens that morning. We head out again. We started the day with feeding the chicks in the barn and we end doing the same. Little fluffy bodies in our care. Little fluffy bodies that have a fate already determined. Is that a bad thing? Even if they don’t know their fate? Or maybe they do? Do they communicate with one another, can they feel the knowing that at nine weeks of age they will be processed into the next version of themselves, consumed at dinner tables and ooohhhed at at fancy restaurants and boiled into broth that cures the common cold? Is there comfort in the knowing? Maybe even pride? 

Anthropomorphizing aside, maybe chickens feel it all. Maybe they feel more than we do, maybe their clucking language contains a more complex lexicon of emotion than we humans will ever begin to fathom. Perhaps, like so many other species of animal and vegetable, they are the ones in control and have lured us into breeding them, caring for them, eventually ending their lives in a fairly humane manner (at least on this farm) all so that they have some structure in their lives. A structure they (perhaps) crave. A structure that many humans (me) wished they had. Would it be comforting to know that at 50 years of age we would be stuffed into a metal cone face down and pinch slit slit Done? Would our lives feel less frantic if the end date was determined? Of course there is always the chance for an accident. The chicken with the wing ripped off by a raccoon or rat would tell you so. But what if we just knew?

It is still warm after the sun has set. We scream down the dark road on the back of a motorcycle, our bodies blurred to trees and grass and the cows invisible in the fields. All this motion, all this energy moving forward, fragile and full of potential, our death already waiting for us at the end of some road, known or not. And as we hit a bump on the asphalt I wonder if this is it, the end, the pinch and slit and I think of the chicken perhaps orchestrating this all, including my ride on the back of a bike and that my fate is already determined. So I lean into the warm body in front of me, full of love and life, and I smile at the structure of the universe as we move forward into the darkness.