Soft Zipper by George Bowering

Author:George Bowering
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781554201730
Publisher: New Star Books
Published: 2021-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chicken

There were two words I would habitually doodle in the margins of my scribblers while listening to a professor talk or to someone on the telephone. These were “yes” and “chicken.” I am not a psychologist, so I don’t know why. Now I just tell people that “chicken” is my favourite word. I especially like the sound of it, and so does our dog. When I was a boy everyone had chickens in the yard. These, of course, were not pets, and they were not the few you needed for eggs. They were backyard meat on yellow legs. I don’t even remember whether you could go to a grocery store and buy a chicken breast or drumsticks or, heaven forbid, wings. When it was time for a chicken dinner, my father would add a little more blood to the chopping block, then after the headless yardbird quit running, he would hand it over to my mother. First she would submerge the unlucky hen in a bucket of boiled water. I detested the odor that resulted, I did not volunteer to do the plucking, especially while I could hear the surviving birds clucking. I could not imagine my mother and my father raising turkeys or rabbits. After all the feathers were out, leaving dots where they had been, and that blue-skinned bird was on its back on the newspaper on the kitchen table, I guess my mother slit its bottom open, because soon I saw her pulling all the yellow and purple stuff that came sliding out. I could see the several parts, and so could the cats that were looking in the kitchen window. The odour now was preferable to the feather smell, but only just. Now my mother was doing what needed doing with string and checking the stove for wood. I hadn’t said a word, and my mother knew why. I was the boy who had the job of feeding this chicken, and I had often reached under her for an egg. I was thinking about how recently she was pecking at the ground out there, and I was not going to eat her. My mother expected me to outgrow such reluctance.

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