How It Is
by Luc Reid
The chicken settled into the in basket on my desk for lack of a better seat. He was clearly uncomfortable.
“I gather you’re here about your kind being killed for us to eat?” I said.
“Oh,” said the chicken. “So that part’s true. But–”
“Let me explain. When we kill a chicken–and by ‘we’ I mean some anonymous worker way off in a processing plant somewhere–we make most of the parts of that chicken into food. For instance, we might roast the whole chicken together–”
“After a decent funeral, I hope? No, I’m kidding. Sorry: nervous habit.”
I cleared my throat. The conversation was uncomfortable, but the chicken was more diplomatic than I’d been led to expect. “So we might roast the whole chicken, or we might use the breast meat in strips in one place and the wings in another … are you sure you’re all right?”
The chicken was scratching at the papers beneath him now, his feathers looking a little ruffled. “Honestly?” he said. “You aren’t quite the barbaric kind of creature I was expecting, but in a way this is worse. Your talk is pretty cold-blooded, for a mammal.”
“Well, unless we’re going to live on apples and tree nuts, we have to kill something, right?”
“But here we are, having a conversation … are you saying you’d just as soon eat me as talk with me? How do you justify that?”
“Listen, I’d love to see better treatment of your people while you’re alive, but it’s not as though you contemplate your impending doom the way a human would. And chickens don’t actually talk.”
“But … I can talk! Clearly your idea that chickens can’t talk is erroneous in some way.”
“You’re fictional. I don’t eat fictional chickens.”
“Uh … oh,” said the chicken. He spontaneously let out a kind of “buGAW!” noise, then looked embarrassed. “So that’s how it is?”
“That’s how it is.”
“This didn’t come out the way I was hoping.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll just let myself out, then.”
“Sounds good.” I smiled perfunctorily, and he flapped down to the floor. “Oh, and would you send in the Amazon rain forest on your way out? Thanks.”