Buy Or Don’t Buy

Before I’m burned at the retard stake, let me ask you one question: Have you ever watched a baby chick die?

My mom’s sister and brother-in-law live on a farm on the east coast of Maryland. Most of the farm’s energies used to funnel into Perdue’s skinless boneless. Our car passed rows on rows of long silver chicken houses one Easter on the long driveway up to the family’s small crooked house, that given four more years, collapsed directly to the right of a replacement rambler. My Uncle Tom, ever since his falling out with my father over the ownership of a glass table twenty-one years ago (the table can drink!), held a transparent aloofness on the holidays we visited his family. This aloofness translated into sporadic efforts to really wow us, farm-style, culminating this Sunday afternoon when he issued my brother and me to follow him to the chicken houses.

We trekked through some dried grass spikes towards one of the elongated silver cabins, our feet grazing past one plastic purple egg that I noted for later. Punching in a pin number, Uncle Tom opened the door to his cabin, but only a tad, and had us peek into the dark and feather-filled air. The place reeked and emitted a gray-yellow glow, which, when we dropped our eyes a peck, we found to come from over a million baby chicks squeezed together into every centimeter of the floor’s surface area.

Tom swooshed the metal door open and stepped inside, beckoning my older bro and me to do the same. Our sudden movement and newly acquired leg space caused Armageddon. An uproar of frantic peeps resounded. Quite opposite of a deer confronted by headlights, the baby birds scampered, chick on chick action, climbing one over the other, another over the other, using any strength they might have gained in the big pen to get the fuck to the other side. Eyeing my uncle’s camo trucker hat and red tan lines outlining a tee shirt, I gave the chicks a silent nod of agreement.

 
“Well, here are the chicks,” Tom said, waving his arm around the mass market skin and bones. Yum! My brother and I said with our usually bored eyes. We took in the scene until our attention spans maxed, nearing a commendable twenty seconds this time.

 
“Let’s go back and eat!” my brother and I said.

We stepped back into the grass spikes and looked back at the million cuties. They knew Armageddon was over and stumbled to spread back out. Once patches of the brown dirt recovered into view, we noticed the rubble left behind from the human attack. Flat neon yellow pancakes dotted the chicken house. One small neon pancake nearby our door had one claw flattened to the ground, and the other kicking into the air, slowly losing aerobic speed. The claw gave up and dropped, adding the only 3D element to the flat mess of feathers left below it. The chicks pecked at the ground and their peeps resumed their original cadence. One small bird turned to peck at his flattened neighbor, chipping away a scale from the now motionless claw.

like this, but more yellow and less see-through, and having one claw clawing the air, and without the butts.