Katie got her last chicken bag for the month, looked up at the sky. She wasn’t sure where she was any more because they’d put everyone on a train up to somewhere. Her daughter told her it was Siberia this time but she wasn’t sure what it really meant to be in a place at this point.
She imagined whole chickens sometimes, their life cycle: growing inside the egg, the little tooth lets it out, feathers grow in to cover the soft down, then the dinosaur part starts growing and eats the little bugs. Then someone cuts its head off, snaps its spine to get the breasts and legs and whatnot, and this was where she came into the picture: the chicken bag. Saving these parts up you could make soup if you really wanted to try it, but mostly you fried the chicken backs in a pan so the cartilage melted into potatoes.
The potatoes were easier. They grew outside in dirt that everyone got a patch of, and whenever Kate looked at the sky when gardening she got to remember that she was a flightless bird, missed potential, object without motion but not out of motion.
Jess Dutschmann
http://jessdutschmann.blogspot.com
Wedding Day
Dana Levin