Key West - Part One (of Eight)

Death is the loneliest thing because death cuts you off from everything.

One of Matt Lang’s chickens died. A dog got it, tore it up. Matt was brushing his teeth when he heard the squawks and the growls and the flapping wings. He spit in the sink and ran down his back stairs. In the backyard, he found the chicken on its side, under a pear tree, with its entrails pooled in the grass. The chicken’s eyes were open and then they weren’t. It flapped once, and slid away and was gone just like that. 

His daughter was watching from the kitchen window. He didn’t think she was ready to see chicken entrails pooled in the grass, so he shouted for her to stay inside until he said she could come out. 

Matt dug a hole in the ground, threw the chicken in, and threw dirt on top. He called to his daughter. When she came outside, she asked if the chicken died (yes), if it was in the ground (yes), and if it is was lonely. 

Photo by Sahand Babali on Unsplash

A chicken flaps, a chicken scratches, a chicken pecks, and a chicken clucks, but this chicken was doing none of those things. A chicken lives with other chickens, a chicken breaths, a chickens leaves the coop and returns, a chicken knows when the sun comes up and the sun goes down, but this chicken was in the dirt, cut off from the sun and everything else it used to know. That’s loneliness. A worse kind of loneliness is being cut off from who you used to be. Death is the loneliest thing because death cuts you off from everything. Matt was standing next to the chicken when it gave that last flap, the feathers and skin and beak all stayed there, but its chickenness, the spark that kept its eyes open, went somewhere else. So the chicken was lonely, but it was lonely even before the feathers and skin and beak got covered in dirt. 

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Thank you for reading. To be continued in Part Two, which starts like this:

Well before the chicken and the dog and the yard and the daughter, Matt and Jody took a trip.