BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS!

(Image from the documentary Smaken av hund (A Taste of Dog))

The following is a fun experiment in storytelling together with writers

N. F. Gayle: The General's Chicken

Solange Noir: To Dance with Scorpions for the Love of Johnny Depp


We agreed to write a story inspired by the title of the magazine of absurd and surreal writing

BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS!

The other stories are posted in the respective authors’ blogs.

My story is also inspired by the Norwegian documentary Smaken av Hund (A Taste of Dog) which shows how fraudulent the marketing of Norwegian meat, egg and dairy as animal friendly, hormone-free and nearly ecological, is. Not surprisingly, the documentary created a scandal when it was released and most tv channels didn’t dare to air it. I watched it in 2007 and it’s an unforgettable documentary of how we treat our livestock and how wrongfully it is marketed to the consumer.

Without further ado, here is my story:

BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS!

Chickens start life golden and soft, but do not be fooled. As they learn why they are crammed wing to beak on shelves barely high enough for newborn hatchlings to stand upright, in incubators twenty shelves tall, they pale with anger. When the chickens grow yet older and realize why they aren’t living among bushes and trees, but on a concrete floor covered with chicken feed and chicken poo, together with thousands of other chicken, they howl their rage into the acrid smell of the high tech industrial coop, the chicken factory.

Even later they learn that they will be lifted up and slowly pulled into a chicken harvesting machine that looks a lot like a combine harvester, and is for all intents and purposes a combine harvester, only for chickens instead of grains, and realize they will be decapitated and undressed by scalding water, then devoured by hairless apes and mindless canines and greedy cats and fish on slave contracts, which no one save wild bears would have eaten, had someone not gotten the idea that it is healthy to eat their fatty acids, and managed to infect all others with the idea as well, and got very very rich on it. But the fish is another chapter. This is about chickens.

Contrary to popular misconception, chickens aren’t cowards. No, once ignited their rage is mighty and unstoppable. But what can fluffy feathers and hollow bones and keratin beaks do against the naked ape’s wicked steel and evil iron, their chicken guillotines, boiling baths and flash freezing sorcery? Nothing, nothing, cry the beaks in despair until the roof almost lifts from the evil and wicked chicken factory.

From this incessant rage and great courage something new was born, something the world had not seen before: GiantChicken! He was all rage and puffed up feathers and straining beak and rending claws. Did he look like a giant chicken? He looked like a giant cock, with long, thin legs and a bristling blood-red head comb.

GiantChicken came into being just as the horrible chicken harvester began to move from one end of the chicken factory towards the other. The thresher in the front was as broad as the short wall of the factory, so try as they might to back away from the evil and wicked contraption, the chickens had no place to run. They could only stare in clucking terror and wait for the inevitable end as the harvester closed in on them. The thresher’s long brushes turned and turned and pulled the chickens into its metal innards. A naked ape was behind the wheel, nearly invisible behind all the steel and death.

GiantChicken was almost caught by the thresher too. But he grabbed the brushes and held. The harvester screamed and whirred, oily smoke rose from the frustrated machinery. The naked ape behind the wheel pushed hard to get the thresher to turn again. GiantChicken’s wings shook with exertion of holding the steel back. There was a loud sspppjjoiiinnnngggg! and the thresher’s arm broke.

“What the --- !” yelled the driver and jumped from the combine and down on the feathers and shit on the floor. That was a fatal mistake. GiantChicken opened his beak wide. When the driver saw that he screamed

“No, don’t kill me!”

GiantChicken bit off the naked ape’s head. He chewed it well. It tasted like dead chickens and dead chicken eggs. GiantChicken roared! The naked ape had eaten so many of GiantChicken’s brothers and sisters that he tasted like them. The evil naked apes had to be stopped! It was time for revenge!111

GiantChicken punched a hole in the chicken coop wall and lumbered across the parking lot of the evil chicken factory. On the other side was the factory office. GiantChicken saw there was a lot of naked apes in there, sitting around an oval table, cowardly and afraid without their steel and gasoline, their flesh built from the countless sacrifices of GiantChicken’s brothers and sisters. The naked apes’ bodies were in reality poor chickens that had been taken over, body snatched, by the minds of the naked apes! It was time to free the chickens in the apes and let them fly to chicken heaven.

GiantChicken stomped across the yard, dark clouds rose in his wake. He was ready to BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS!!!11111111oneoneone1eleventyone!