“ Cut, ” I said, picking my poison between gags. Salvador flipped the dame top down by its feet and handed me the serrate tongue. I ’ five hundred expected something sharp. “ No, I hold, ” I changed my mind. I was losing nerve … and command of linguistic process. I passed him the knife and grabbed the scaly wimp ’ south ankles as it clucked and bocked persuasively. “ No, I do this. I cut. ” I took the knife binding. Grave-faced men in egg white coats worked around us, tossing chickens and ducks into vats of boiling water, chopping necks like loaves of bread. I considered making a chicken run. I would sprint off, holding the dame. together, we would metaphorically fly away .
I ’ ve constantly dreamed of being the classify of person who could kill a wimp and feed it. Books, documentaries and capricious farm poetry have persuaded me that humans should have an intimate sense of their food ’ south origins, particularly kernel. So I took the few brave steps to my neighborhood ’ sulfur live-chicken memory, in Brooklyn. Its name : Kikiriki. After four months of passing the shop class every day — and gradually getting comfortable with the smell of chicken shit, which radiates for blocks — I worked up the courage to enter. I strolled round like a regular, coughing to mask involuntary eye twitches. I smiled coolly at the man behind a modest window chopping a batch of de-feathered chickens, crimson and white parts flying everywhere in a cartoonish poultry storm .
It ’ mho true what they say about chickens with their heads cut off.
Reading: I Did It: I Killed a Chicken
Ruth, the woman who oversees the administration of chicken sales, works inside a bantam, toll-booth-like enclosure surrounded by chicken cages. She takes orders through the microphone window and over the phone. This is good business : Ruth puts no-show customers on an ever-growing blacklist. Kikiriki customers, fortunately, are about all regulars who come in weekly, and largely Hispanic. “ spanish people like their things newly, ” Ruth said. “ thus do chinese, Jamaicans and Indians. ”
This Philly dame was going to like it extra fresh. The day I set out to kill my chicken was cheery and bright. Dressed in grease-stained clothes, I took three preparatory laps around Kikiriki before stepping inside. The identify was crowded and anything but cage-free : It is stacked high with barricaded containers, dozens of birds crammed into each. Their butt were ape-like raw and unfeathered. Women came in and out with strollers and men clutched iniquity scraps of paper, to remember their orders. The craze reminded me of Macy ’ sulfur at Christmastime.
I approached the booth and told Ruth I was ready. I was entering a brave newly earth. “ No girls kill. My boss doesn ’ triiodothyronine want girls there, ” she had said. The average sex, obviously, can not take the pressure. normally, only men following halal kill the chickens themselves. I picked my boo : a fat “ White Roasting ” breed chicken. ( “ The red ones are well for sick or meaning people, ” Ruth had told me earlier, glancing at my stomach moments besides long. ) I followed the man and my dinner into the back room to a metal table with 12 five-inch-diameter holes. The walls were splattered with rake. There would be more blood. When I last accepted the tongue, the chop was more like slicing : slow, delayed. My chicken resisted past its natural conclusion. ( It ’ south true what they say about chickens with their heads cut off. ) The blood splattered excess dramatically, a final “ fuck you. ”
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together, we plopped the discerp steer into a metallic element hole, then stuffed the chicken neck-down to drain the blood, its decapitated body jammed up against its old head in a rightfully sadistic turn of events. After 10 seconds or so, the chicken ’ south bony leg stopped shaking. Salvador grabbed it by the knees and plopped it into the vat. I sat in the lobby and waited, blood on my hands and feathers on my coating. Could I get shuttlecock influenza from a chicken ? I kept my forefront down until they called No. 27 .
Back home, I dropped the fictile bag of chicken onto the floor and strip, throwing my clothes into a bag to wash — or burn — later. I took a 20-minute shower and rushed to cut the feet off before my vegetarian roommates returned and petitioned to evict me : Vegetarians could handle chicken breasts, but surely not feet. The cook spanned hours, and felt sweetly domestic. I was blood-free and cozy indoors, enveloped by the smell of crackling chicken. I congratulated myself. This is how Americans should prepare food. Yet I couldn ’ thymine lecture down my disgust, or forget the images of the unfeathered target, my bloody hands, the tub of rubbery joke birds floating above and around each early like souls in the River Styx, dumb at last .
When the chicken was aureate, I prepared myself an ambitious plate of leg, breast and wing. The flesh was blue ; the skin, crisp. I ate a few bites until I found a feather and what looked like a vein. I have veins excessively. I transitioned to the biscuits, then the solution vegetables. I was full. I placed the chicken back in the roasting pan and wrapped it up to save. In a week the chicken went regretful, so I tossed it. To eat kernel, you have to forget, and I couldn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate .
