Breaking free of being tethered by the news…Letting my own inner projector roll…Above is a photo I took not long ago, but I won’t say more due to perhaps irrational fear of the currently lurking unknown. ___________________

I’m including a story written in my head while on the back of a Vespa in Bulgaria in 1962. It is in my negligible self-published booklet from 2015, Time Wrinkles–A plebian portfolio down to earth & over the top in story & verse: I AM A CHICKEN

My Tale and I Begin, As It Were, Ab Ova: It is inescapably a fact that I am a chicken. I am a little white hen, a chicken whose brain disturbed itself, alas. not with ways and means of mounting the barnyard pecking order, but rather with grasping that lightning often accomplishes rain, and that from eggs come biddies; a beady-eyed chicken whose neck jerks when she walks, whose head will tilt and her little comb will flap just like all the rest of the chickens in the barnyard, though she tries and tries to break the habit. Had this chicken realized at a tenderer age (here I cannot help but shudder at what is implied by that phrase), the inferior position assigned to chickens by the intellectual world, I would undoubtedly–yea, indubitably–have chosen a model other than my mother, or my mother’s kind, to emulate. However, habits rooted in the very nest proved difficult to overcome. Even now I find myself drawing my head back sharply, aghast at the thought of performing an act so gross and irritating to me, and even so completing the circle which has fenced me into my own particular type of hell. It seems I have always known where little chickens come from, if not where they will go. But to this day I am not convinced that one out of ten of my sisters realizes the significance of the beautiful white oval egg that appears in her nest daily. Perhaps that is why they part with them so peacefully. As you shall see, my reason for allowing my nest to be daily robbed was very different, a combination of both faith and naivete. Things went well on our farm. When the rains came we roosted–how I despise that word–in our hen house until the sun came out again, bringing the fragrance of the dirt steaming upward in a veritable epiphany. The humans who fed us did so generously. Not being high on the pecking order, I still managed to keep strong and healthy. The humans protected us, also. Once a weasel had almost worked his way into the coop from the pasture side, and hearing our fearful cry (though mine was more of outrage than fear, I verily believe and maintain), the human disposed of the vile animal and mended the place in the coop which had left us exposed to the whims of passing animals as it almost were. As I grew older and laid my own eggs it seemed only natural that the humans should take my offspring and hatch them themselves. They seemed so much cleverer and capable than us hens in the yard. I suspected that even our rooster was far inferior to the humans, our god-like protectors. It was a somewhat lonely life I led, in the chicken yard. I was the scorn of my instinct-ridden sisters as well as the scorn of my masters, who saw me, rightly, as only a feminine fowl.

I felt a sense of exhilaration as the first beams of dawn woke me. Our rooster crowed grandly, and morning was to me a new chance. Another chance at what i could not have told you, but it was welcomed. Day began. Small particles danced in the sunbeam entering the slits in the slats. I saw the spider in his web in the corner, apparently still asleep. I saw my sisters, my poor ignorant dumb clucks of sisters, apparently still asleep also. The arrival of food would stir them, however, and they, with flapping wings and squawks, would flock outside for the grain, leaving me sitting in the coop, reflecting on our frailties. What an albatross it is to be a chicken, or should I say more correctly that the albatross that weighed me down was my nature. Or perhaps it was my soul, which was not compatible with my nature. At any rate I was a lonely but somewhat content chicken. Few temptations presented themselves, and my days were filled with observing. Thanks to the humans there were things, events to observe. Large machines lumbered by the chicken coop. Young humans danced nearby, even made musical sounds with instruments. They could do infinitely more with their mouths than my kind. Unnatural as it may sound, after listening to the screaming, singing and laughter of the young humans, the staccato muttering of my sisters irritated me. It was in order to escape, momentarily at least, the senseless chatter of my sisters that I wandered away from them one day when it was getting warm again and found myself further from the coop than I had ever been before. It was a glorious morning, and I felt gratitude swell under my inescapably white-feathered bosom. (Breast, I believe it’s called). My feet took me to the rear of the human’s house, and I found some edible droppings around the back door.

The steps led up, and being of a curious nature, I hopped up the stairs to see if perhaps a mess of grain lay there. I was not so hungry as inquisitive. Hating chicken noises as I did, and being unable to imitate any others, I was naturally speechless there on the steps. I reached the top step and there was no pile of grain. I raised my head with a little jerk and realized that I could see through the screen on the back door of the house. There the humans were, not very far from me. Each had an egg in front of him, and as I watched, each scooped the inside out and devoured it.

Everything in front of my eyes went black, and when it turned gray the light was spinning round and round. Half flying, half stumbling down the steps, I departed. They were eating my biddies! Perhaps this is a humorous tale to you, reader. “A ridiculous chicken who aspired to values more human and, as she felt therefore, higher than her calling. “A ridiculous chicken who aspired to values more human and, as she felt, therefore higher than her calling. “A chicken who thought she was a lady,” I can almost hear you say. But reader, dwell on this: I knew no better; I had been in this world less than two years when I inadvertently came across this truth indigestible to me. If the fact that the practice is not indigestible to humans, and this is taken as a pun and made light of, then I can only believe it is a morbid sense of humor on the reader’s part and cry out in my small-fated clucking voice against the injustice in a world that I do not understand. Down the back steps I staggered. The stones in my gullet gritted alarmingly, and I nearly swooned with strange emotions rushing through my poor skull. I did not head back to the coop, however. My path led away from the farm, and over the furthest horizon.

FINIS