how to kill a chicken
By Malcolm MacDougall
Illustration by Jackie Claiborne
Content Warning: Graphic Imagery
Here is how to kill a chicken with no struggle the way your friend taught you in the baking summer of 2012, hunched in a tin-roofed shed on his family farm that grows like a cancer on the borders of Marion, Iowa:
Step one: Pin the chicken and hypnotize it by drawing a line in front of its face. Let it sag and relax, its little mind focusing only on this dark line stretching forever before it.
Step two: As it lies there, thinking of nothing but the line—the line—reach for your hatchet with the caution of a cat. It can be a small one, but make sure its head is heavy; it must bite clean through the awkward neck without catching on the brittle bones.
Step three: Clip off the head with a spurt of arterial blood. The chicken will, at first, not quite know what to do; its brain that has been telling its body line, line, line is no longer giving those signals. The chicken’s scrawny little calves will double up underneath it, propelling the headless body forward like a diver off their block.
Step four: Let the chicken have its last run, too mindless to understand that this is the end. Its claws kick up the dried summer dirt, its dark blood turns the rut of the line into iron-smelling sludge. It runs with no direction, a frantic, random circle that grows ever smaller.
Your friend watches its desperate flight with a faint smile. He’s grown up on this farm, the executions such a regular part of his life it no longer leaves an impression. He has a bit of smeared blood on his cheek from when he wiped it with a gory hand, the hatchet still dangling from limp, casual fingers. The blood clings to his haphazardly stubbly chin; he’s recently started to grow it and hasn’t learned to shave it properly.
“Why do they run like that?” you ask.
He shrugs. “They’re dumb. Too dumb to know they’re dead.” His voice is deep like a bullfrog's croak. You’d been in the church choir together when your voices had broken, simultaneous creak-cracks in the middle of the Gloria. You would both race down the scale, pushing the Adam’s apples protruding from your throats further into your collarbones.
“Sometimes I wonder if they know they’re alive when they are,” he rumbles.
You watch the headless chicken, now fallen on its side, legs pedaling at the sky. It doesn’t seem to understand. The primal urges that moved its body are still telling it to eat, to run, to fuck. Was there any instruction in those cells that told it when to die?
Seven years pass by like pages in a flipbook and you drift apart. It’s nothing severe, no fights, no caustic remarks, just the natural progression of childhood friendships. Just what happens when you’re too much a man to say how much you care, like two pieces of driftwood bobbing apart in a soft-rippling sea.
You’re scrolling through bland Facebook posts, watching lives unspool in front of you, people who don’t really care about each other spitting sentiments like mother birds vomiting down their children’s throats. One post stops you.
It starts with “We have news,” and suddenly you remember him.
It begins with that glistening morning killing chickens when the doors burst open and you’re swallowed up. You remember how he wanted to do music, and how you argued about which was the superior childhood state, New Jersey or New York. You remember how he listened to you as you talked and talked and talked about how if superheroes teleported fast enough from point A to point B, they would start to show up at point B before they’d left point A, and wasn't that so cool?
You read about how he went to a hotel halfway across the world—an ordinary vacation to someplace in Eastern Europe, some grand vacation destination—how he’d been as happy as he’d ever been.
You read how he’d eaten something off, not had water for two days, how something had gone wrong.
You read how he ran and ran and ran in a straight line off the twelfth story of the hotel.
You read how he died.
Did he still run when he hit the ground?
You don’t go to his funeral, don’t feel like you had the right. All you could think of was the lurid details of it all—how he must have looked, how his body must have come apart. You hate your lack of respect, but you can’t stop. You replay the run you imagined him taking in your mind’s eye; you think of his mud-brown eyes dark with fear and panic.
You promise to visit him in an impassioned Facebook message to an empty page. You find your way to the little graveyard where they buried him, and you have to leap over the sagging wrought-iron fence to get in.
It’s been raining and the water slops into your shoes as it squeezes out of the muddy, slogging earth. The heavy smell of rain on metal hangs off of the crucifix towering above you. An agonized Christ clings to it like a wiry squirrel, all stringy muscle and rusted face, staring you down with tormented eyes. You scuttle past and creep between the silent rows of tilted grave markers.
Stones and tiny obelisks with farmer's families in neat lines glare at you. MOTHER and FATHER and CHILD, CHILD, CHILD. You scan the names, searching for his, wondering if you found the right place.
Chickens are the stupidest animals. Humans know when we have been killed. When our brains are severed from the spinal cord creeping down our backs, we have the decency to flop over and die. But, standing in the graveyard, the heavy damp weighing down your shoulders, you want him to be there.
You want to see him after death, see some sort of life. Even if he bursts from behind a tree with his head split open, pulpy and gooey like a smashed-in orange. Even if he spins in ever-tightening circles, spurting gore. You’re hungry for him, to see him—offensive, horrifying, but there. You want him to defy death, to stand up again and run in crazed, loose patterns.
Chickens have it right, you think. Better to not know you’re dead than to be standing outside of it with rain soaking through your thrift-store windbreaker. Better to not know than to be trapped longing for impossibilities.
You go home, the damp of the rain clinging to your cheeks like chicken blood.