"Untitled" by Douglas Argue
This was my latest Fiction Writing class assignment, to write a one-page piece inspired by a work at the Weisman Art Museum. After watching Food, Inc, I couldn't not choose this painting. Yeah, that was a double negative.
"Neighbors"
Written 3/10/10
Dust thickens my contact lenses and blurs my vision, as if a desert storm had swept across my sightline. I had forgotten safety goggles, which I sometimes wear to keep feathers out of my eyes, but I did remember my blue hospital facemask, which is supposed to keep out the smell of feces. The stench never failed to waft into my nostrils regardless and prickle the inside of my nose. I felt like a surgeon. I resisted the urge to wipe my itching eyes, and I bent to pick up three dead ones, hoisting them by their spindly legs.
I worked on a chicken farm the summer I turned sixteen. It should hardly be called a farm. It was a factory. It was an assembly line. It was mass production. We had two chicken houses and no windows. There was about enough room for a chicken to stand still amongst its hundreds of neighbors and wait for its slaughter.
Even if it had space to walk, a chicken couldn’t travel far. It only took about 50 days to grow a chicken before it was captured, plucked, and gutted, and it grew at twice the rate it naturally would. We added hormones and antibiotics into the chickens’ food—usually corn produced by our closest neighbors, a corn farm three and a quarter miles south—so they’d grow bigger and quicker and produce more white meat in the breast. Their bones and internal organs couldn’t keep up with the growth of their meat. They would take a few steps before plopping into a white heap on the ground, because their bodies couldn’t carry the unanticipated, heavy weight.
I was sixteen, working for my uncle, saving up to buy a car, dreaming of the day I’d get my driver’s license, when I became a vegetarian.
It had been twenty years since I started working at the farm. I still drove the 1970’s car I bought at the end of my first summer, and I still didn’t eat any of the chickens I helped mass-produce. My uncle passed away and left his farm, tractor, and debt in my name. To build his two chicken houses and upgrade each year to the demands of the meat industry, my uncle had to take out nearly 500,000 dollars in loans. Each year he earned less than 18,000 dollars. I earned 14,000.
My uncle died of pneumonia. The antibiotics his company forced him to inject into the chicken feed fought the bacteria that we, and the chickens, stepped in daily. The bacteria grew a resistance to antibiotics, and our bodies grew an allergy to the antibiotics. My uncle got sick too fast with no treatment.
The day after his death, a member from corporate visited the farm. He instructed me to hire another worker to help fill the void my uncle left. I told him the neighbor kid just west of the farm wanted a part-time job. He recommended an immigrant, so I could pay less and make more progress on my uncle’s loans. He stepped in a pile of feces as he left. I smiled as his black leather shoe slammed on the gas and spread bacteria and feathers onto the pedal of his brand new SUV.
I cranked open the doors to the two chicken houses and stepped back. At first nothing happened. Then, like a gust of wind, flocks of white feathers emptied the buildings and filled the field in waves. Squawking no longer echoed in the contained walls. The sound of their exit felt like a song. I never gave this batch the hormones. They waddled and hurried and pecked at the ground for snacks. They didn’t need to stop every few steps. They didn’t need to fight to hold up their proud breasts.
Dust thickens my contact lenses and blurs my vision, as the storm of chickens sweeps across my sightline.
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I'm on a leave from my novella because I have a much more important story due for class next week, not to mention a movie script for Geology and Cinema, and a paper about the education system in America for French (in French). Yeah. I might not make my deadline, but that's kinda my style.
"Words make things happen. Once they are out, you cannot take them back."
"Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy."
"But silence, like darkness, can be an act of kindness; it, too, is a language."
"What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed."
"The range of her feeling is narrow; she would consider it shameful to give way to her moods. Therefore she keeps most of herself out of view. I would say this odd thing: Because she has never been disillusioned or disappointed, her life has never appalled her. She has never lapsed into inner chaos."
