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10.14.09. prompt: CHICKEN

Artists:
Brian Padian, screenwriter
Lorna Nakell, painter
Sarah Nordbye, graphic artist/screenprinter
Robin Rosenberg, writer/food artist
Margaret Malone, writer
Courtenay Hameister, essayist
Kathleen Lane, writer

Courtenay Hameister, Brian padian and Margaret Malone perform Courtenay's screenplay

Chicken.Hameister

Sarah Nordbye designed a chicken card, which she screenprinted and mailed to us

Painting by Lorna Nakell

Text: 
The Curry family once lived up the street from me. Their 12 became 10 after two kids drowned in the pond out back.
Mama Curry cooked biscuits with lard from the pigs they slaughtered. Her daughter, Ruby, and I were best friends. We played in the wild strawberry fields, caught tadpoles in the pond, and made her little brother eat mud pies. 
On the door to their back porch hung twenty or so chicken feet - remnants of dinners past

Robin Rosenberg wrote stories to vintage recipe cards

Excerpt from Memories of a Chicken by Kathleen Lane


The so called chicken sat on the table with potatoes around it to hide the fact that it wasn’t.
That’s a bunny, Joan said. Isn’t it? 
It’s dinner, my mother said.
Yeah but it’s a bunny right? I’m not eating it if it’s a bunny.
In our backyard there was a fence that divided our property from Mr. Whitey’s. Mr. Whitey was a sweaty man who wore undershirts so thin and tight we knew all about his belly button. It was an inny, wide around as a door knob. And all around it was stomach hair, smashed into swirls the shape of smoke.
There was a knot in one of the pickets of the fence and we could look through it into the bunny cages lined up on Mr. Whitey’s side.
In spring the babies came and the mothers jumped around when they heard us near the fence. We couldn’t ever see the babies because they were tucked inside the fur nest the mothers made for them. But we found one in the grass once. The little neighbor girl found it and came screaming into our yard with the news.
I found a baby eyore! I found a baby eyore!

It was lying in the grass and we squatted around it, matting down the grass with our hands so we could see it. It was gray and bald and tail-less.

We showed it to our mom, and then to Mr. Whitey, and it turned out baby eyore wasn’t of the eyore species after all. Turned out he was a baby bunny.

Mr. Whitey said it was probably a cat got it.

Mr. Whitey said give him here and we knew by how he said it that he wasn’t going to hold him the same way Joan held him.

It’s still alive, I said. Look, it’s breathing.

Can’t go back in the cage, Mr. Whitey said, the mother won’t take care of it anymore. And this information was new and frightening. We didn’t yet know that some mothers don’t take care of their babies.