Brood by Jackie Polzin

Author:Jackie Polzin [Polzin, Jackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Each sound a chicken makes has meaning. No one knows if these sounds contain information, like our words, or if the sounds of a chicken merely provoke action in the world at large. If at first these seem like the same thing, consider a scream. A scream provokes action without specific information. The specifics prove unimportant. Whatever else a scream aims to accomplish, it gets attention. The same is true of the scream of a chicken, harsh and rising. It is safe to assume that a scream of some form was a precursor to every human language, just as every known human language uses high, soft sounds to comfort a baby. A chicken also uses these high, soft sounds to comfort her young, but because the lives of chickens have evolved toward a separation of hens and chicks, more and more chickens do not learn this language, never hear it, nor use it. At some point, the motherese of chickens will cease to exist, leaving the world no different.

While there is not agreement on the subject of chickens and words, there is agreement that chickens speak only of the here and now. A chicken does not speak of the day before. A chicken does not speak of tomorrow. A chicken speaks of this moment. I see this. I feel this. This is all there is.

It stands to reason, then, that the sounds of a chicken are few, here and now accounting for so much of what a chicken has to say. The sounds do not misrepresent, are instead like a finger pointing, over and over. Words have only ever complicated things. As I watched Johnson trample the hostas, touching each thing and gabbling in turn, I thought he and the chickens might understand each other completely.

Eventually, Johnson tired of the chickens or was just plain tired. He began to cry. I needed a word he would know and like. “Nap,” I said, and his crying turned to screaming. I tucked him beneath my arm as I had learned to do, but he began to kick, and, anyway, he was too long now to hold with ease. I lowered him to the ground and the kicking did not become running, as I would have expected, but instead a violent assault on the grass, which looked quite exhausting and must have been, after which he rolled over three times to arrive at the upturned earth where the chickens bathed. “Ice cream,” I said.

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