Do Si Do

Something must have gotten into the chicken feed.  There’s just no other rational explanation for such a drastic change in behavior.  Don’t get me wrong, I mean, those chickens were never the friendliest animals.  Just last week little Mary Sue took a fierce peck to the hand when she went in there to collect the eggs.  Poor little thing carried on about it as if she’d lost her hand.  Of course, she’d likely give up both hands if it meant she could undo what happened to her this week.  Doc Walters says she’s going to be okay, but his eyes say different.  And he can’t tell us when she might come out of the coma.

Maybe it would have been different if the hen hadn’t clawed at the same hand that had been pecked, maybe the problem was when the Rooster got loose and, for reasons unknown to us, looked at Mary Sue as a threat for the first time. We don’t know. We do know that the infection spread from her hand, up her arm, to her heart, and her heart, bless it, pumped the infection everywhere else.

And I don’t want you to get the wrong idea when we talk about our “little farm” and old “doc” Walters. Our farm supplies 80% of the grain to the county and 30% of the poultry. We don’t deal so much in dairy, the government gave us a grant not to deal in dairy. And old “doc” Walters is a 47 year-old Johns Hopkins alumnus who damn well knows how to read a CT scan and an MRI, so, I may make us sound simple, but, it’s just that we have our ways.

So, with all the worry over Mary Sue, no one really paid much attention to the chickens at first.  Even with the family away, the rest of the staff came to work as usual and chickens were boxed up and shipped out.  None of us considered that  the accident might not have been so accidental.  We didn’t consider the chickens’ behavior to be unusual until much later in the week, when the little quirks became huge problems and they started hunting the other barnyard animals. By the time they took down their first cow, it was already too late – the contaminated chicken meat was on the shelves of refrigerators all around the country.

This was an exercise  with my friend Kat where we switched off writing every few minutes. I would do it again.

Grandpa Lied

My grandfather lied to my grandmother, I guess it runs in the family. They met in Prague shortly after WWII, both destitute. My grandmother was Jewish and while she never escaped the concentration camps, she did make it through. My grandfather was so smitten with her that he would have said anything. The Greeks call it “the Thunderbolt,” at least they did in “the Godfather,” but my grandfather wasn’t Greek, so, he just called it “wow.” It wasn’t until after he died that we found out he had been a NAZI officer.

It wasn’t until that weekend in Duluth when we all came together for his funeral, when we were going through his things and my little brother, Stewart, found a sunken compartment inside grandpa’s steamer trunk that had his old military uniform (just a regular uniform), a few medals (mostly for bravery), his passport (stamped only for Czechoslovakia and the USA), and a clothbound journal written in German.

This is a writing exercise that was cut short and I no longer remember where it was going before I was interrupted

Snarx

In a world where danger flows from the very pours pores of our skin, there lives a creature, nay, a hero.

SNARX.