GlassFire Magazine
Home Editorial Fiction Poetry Nonfiction Reviews Submissions Contact Us
Amanda Dill lives in
Amanda Dill
Chickens tend to dislike having people poke around in their nests and stealing
their precious eggs, their future children. I suppose I’d feel the same way if
our roles were reversed, but they aren’t, and I happen to like omelets.
My first childhood memory begins inside a
chicken coop, the musty smell of hay and feathers clogging up my nose and mouth,
my head filled with images of little chicken heads and sharp, tiny beaks. It’s
not exactly a pleasant memory. Then again, there aren’t very many nice things
inside of chicken coops.
After
filling our baskets with eggs, some brown, some white, some a muddy non-color
somewhere in between, my grandmother and I sorted the eggs by size into
cardboard cartons. Some we would keep for breakfasts and cakes and other
childhood delights, like ice cream or custard. Leftovers would go down the road
to be sold or traded for meat. Looking back, I see how fragile this practice
was. It’s difficult at best to find farm fresh eggs for sale, even in some rural
areas, simply because it doesn’t yield much profit on a small scale. On that
day, though, I could only see the beauty and wonder of the smooth, thin shell,
the delicate shield which held something familiar yet somehow new. Very
carefully, we loaded the eggs into the back of my grandfather’s pickup truck,
sliding them all the way to the front between two crates of corn to keep them
from tipping over in transit. My grandmother slammed the tailgate shut after I
climbed down, checking to make sure it was secure.
I
walked around to the passenger side, opened the door, and prepared to climb up
into the cab as I did every time my grandfather took eggs to the farmer’s
market. But today, my grandmother stopped me.
“This
time,” she said gravely, “you’ll stay behind and help me in the kitchen.” I
thought nothing of this, as I was a pretty good dough kneader, go-getter, and
pot-stirrer, but perhaps I should have.
Once the truck, the corn, the eggs, and my grandfather were out of sight
except for the dust cloud moving, now soundlessly, down the county road, my
grandmother motioned toward the back yard. I remained clueless until she stopped
in front of the chicken coop for the second time that day. Then I knew.
It
only took a few seconds, I’m sure—maybe a minute, at the most—but it felt like
an eternity to me. I don’t remember if
the chicken made a sound, whether it thrashed about or died with dignity, but I
do remember trying to pluck the damn thing, my eyes clouded by tears,
half-listening to my grandmother’s instructions. I might have been eight years
old, but the gravity of the day’s events was not lost on me. This was not a fly
I’d swatted—this was an animal, one that lived and breathed, provided food for
my family and others, one that I’d watched putter around the farm at dawn—and
I’d killed it with my own tiny hands. Knowing what was on my plate was one
thing, but having to actually kill it, clean it, and help prepare it myself—that
changed things.
It
was, in retrospect, an event that changed not only the way I saw myself, but
also the way I saw my grandmother. Gone was the innocence of not knowing how my
food got to the table. I realized, albeit the hard way, that someone, somewhere,
had to kill and clean everything I ate. It’s not easy.
While I suppose it
would be a beautiful, grand gesture for me to say I’m now a strict vegetarian,
that my killing that chicken scarred me for life, rendering me unable to choke
down a single bite of meat ever again, I simply can’t do that.