Yeah, this is really rough, but whatever. Allusions to the plight of the working class FOR THE WIN.
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
Blazing Nevada sun warmed rough, stubble-covered patches of skin; a surface which rebelled against the heat by crying thick tears of sweat. The mask, a hot box in temperatures like these, was about seven dollars and twenty-five cents short of unbearable. The smell of sun-baked stuffed toy, soaked in perspiration, permeated every molecule of the bright yellow monstrosity, which management jokingly referred to as ‘the chicken that cooks it’s own eggs’. The eggs, of course, being the wearer’s more tender bits of anatomy. In any case, the stink of it stuck to the man’s skin, and provoked the ritual of a nightly, skin scalding bonding session with a bar of Irish Springs under a fire hose blast of hot water. The smell would leave the man every evening, but his minimum wage misery remained embedded in his clothes, his shoes, under his fingernails, and inside his very skin.
The man let his face tip back down from it’s skyward gaze, and the comical red beak affixed above his mesh peephole again shaded his baked skin from the sun. He had taken to staring at the sun in his most pained moments; he was hoping to go blind and file for workman’s comp.
Out of the corner of his eye the man caught the shadowy trail of a pedestrian. He pivoted carefully, then, almost pleadingly, he outstretched his wing and offered her a crackling sheet of coupons. His forlorn posture, however, cause the passer-by to skitter off to the side, and his hand fell back. The man tried not to let petite rejections like this bother him, however to him, all rejections were person in nature, and stung with a similar hurt.
“Take a break, Manny.” A gravely voice proclaimed, beyond the scope of the mask’s vision. Manny’s beak tilted in a nod, then on scraggly wing lifted to separate the bird’s head from his shoulders. Decapitation revealed the wet, visceral insides of the chicken; a dark-haired young man in his early twenties.
“Already? You’re too kind.” Manny’s dried lips rasped out, his throat shriveled from three hours in confinement within the feathered sauna.
“School’s out.” The manager tipped his bright red hat in the direction of an approaching group of skateboarder teens. They slid towards the chicken and his boss at a slinking, loping gate. The pavement rippled with their shadows, like puddles of oil spilling across the smooth surface of the road. “Get off the street and quit that sarcasm bull. You know that drives me up a wall.”
“Indeed.” The manager vanished back into the cool, air conditioned cave that was El Pollo Loco. Manny shrugged his fuzzed yellow shoulders and sauntered across the street into the local Burger King. Be damned if he would eat chicken while he still wore the skin of one.
The girl working the register shot him a shy smile and nodded her greeting. She was painfully anti social, and Manny was filled with spite and sarcasm. They liked each other, and hence both sought to stay in each other’s good graces by saying as little as possible.
“Usual.” Manny grumbled, staring down at his yellow=fuzzed knuckles. The contrast between the indistinguishable mud color of the Formica and his brilliant colored feathers felt almost like a caution sign along the road. Chicken crossing, the road sign etched with the silhouette of the poultry, perpetually locked in the limbo of concrete, lodged firmly in the in-between.
With further deflated pride he struggled to be born out of the neck hole of the suit, polyester feathers shucking off him to his waist while he dug around in his back pocket for his wallet. He handed over his hard-earned coin, and in return was rewarded with the fruits of his labor: A whopper jr. and a paper cup brimming with cola.
“Thanks,” he grunted out, barely stifling his enthusiasm for the meal ahead. He planted himself in a booth, eyeballing the outside for signs of his nemeses while he unwrapped the greasy sandwich.
The meal passed uneventfully, though he let himself take longer than usual. He ate slow so the piddly bit of food he could afford would satisfy his appetite. His mask stared condescendingly at him while he ate, empty, beady eyes blaming him for all the suffering his chicken people endured to feed the masses.
Manny sighed when he was done, then carried the leavings of his lunch to the waste bin, his mask tucked carefully in the crook of his arm. Then he pushed out into the open again, body shrinking away from the heat of the outside.
The harsh, squawking laughter of teenage boys cut through the air as the sandpaper-rough side of a well-work skateboard cracked against the side of Manny’s skull. The board snapped, and half of it clattered to the ground as the chicken-man and his prison of a mask tumbled with it. The wings of the uniform sprawled at his waist like extra limbs, emphasizing the spread-eagle way he had landed on the sidewalk. The cackling stopped as the boys gained a better grasp on the real and powerful nature of head trauma.
Manny, however, had been awaiting his chance to snap for many months now. Blood masked his face, gushed down over his eye, down his cheek, cascading over his lips and down his neck. A perfect berserker roar wretched out from behind his bared teeth. So distracting was this visage of olden, warrior bloodlust to the delicate constitutions of the fledgling gang that they hadn’t even thought to back away from the fallen blue-collar worker. They were deer in headlights, stroked and coddled by years of soft parenting. Nothing in their lives could have prepared them for the sheer real violence that erupted from years of suppressed hurt and shattered dreams.
In an instant, the boy acting as the arm of the mob’s aggression was caught in a vice grip by the collar of his Hurley sweat shirt. He had no last conscious thoughts, only the rape of his nostrils by the overpowering smell of friend chicken and polyester, as his face split against the brick of the Burger King’s exterior.
Manny now occupies a six by six cell in the Cook County Jail. He presses his face to the bars and cackles with the other inmates, crammed into cramped spaces and stacked on top of each other, row after row, column after column, day after day. His chicken suit is now a different shade of neon, cotton orange. Occasionally, the girl from Burger King visits him. Manny has been secretly elevated to her new hero, a man who struck out against the chains of his minimum wage confinement. Manny knows the truth, though. He is just another bird in a cage.
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