Atila the Hen by Brenda Quant

Hey you!

Yes you, fried chicken breath. I’d like a word with you while you’re

licking your fingers. Before you bite into that next golden fried drumstick,

consider the injustice you heap upon me in the name of your balanced diet. Your

favorite dish. Moi.

How would you like to go through life being referred to by names that describe the

specific ways in which you should be cooked? Consider the telling, foreboding

names by which I am known.

When I am young and tender, blossoming into a plump and promising thing of

beauty, I am affectionately known as a fryer or a broiler. When I am allowed to

grow beyond adolescence, when I am on the eve of ripeness and maturity, what am

I’m called? A roaster, that’s what! Destined for a 350-degree oven. And when my

drumsticks have grown think and shapely, my breast full and firm, I say I have

reached my prime. You say I’m a stewing hen.

I’m stewing alright. Not in gravy at the moment, although I know the gravy will

soon claim me as it has so many of my brethren. You persist in calling me names

that deny me any hope of a future outside of a skillet.

Now while I have your attention, I have a few more bones to pick with you. For

a change, I’ll be the picker and you the pickee. Stop calling people chicken when

you mean to insult them. I can think of much worse things to be called than a

chicken. Turkey comes to mind. And damn it, leave my liver alone. Ban pâté.

May I also point out some of the nasty ways you have of tricking and deceiving

me. Dressing a chicken for dinner is one of the most low-down deceptions ever

perpetrated upon any living creature. Picture yourself dressed for dinner. Coat and

tie or designer dress, shined shoes, freshly don hair — elegant picture. Now

visualize me dressed for dinner. Consider what you get when you ask your butcher

for a dressed chicken. You get me completely stripped of all my feathers, footless,

headless, eviscerated. Sometimes I lay for hours this way in a cold meat case.

Dressed. Completely naked. How embarrassing. Not to mention cold.

Sometimes you carry the deceit even further. You announce to your family that I

will be served with dressing. I overhear - I am elated. Will I be reunited with my

feathers? Will I come to the table wearing clothes like everyone else? Certainly

not! Another cruel hoax. You arrange the dressing beside me on a platter, so close

that I could almost reach across the carrots and pull it over me like a topcoat, yet

out of reach since you so thoughtlessly folded my wings behind me. What a dirty trick.

You know what else gets my feathers up? Well, if I still had feathers, they’d be up

I assure you. It upsets me to no end to be called a stuffed chicken. The term

contradicts itself. What really happens is this. I get shafted with stuffing, you sit

down and eat until you’re stuffed, and then you get up from the table and say you

just ate a stuffed chicken. What nerve! I never get to sit down and eat until I’m

stuffed like you do at your mother’s house every Sunday. This Sunday’s feast

should rightfully be called stuffed people and you know it.

One last thing. About eggs. You think nothing of frying them, poaching them,

boiling them for your egg salads, scrambling them until they don’t know their

yolks from a hole in the ground. You even stuff them and send them to hell.

Deviled eggs you call them. It’s true you do honor the poor little orphans once a

year at Easter time. You dye and decorate them, nestle them in cellophane grass in

pretty baskets, and surround them with candies made in their likeness. (This of

course after you’ve hard-boiled them.)

We could appreciate this position of honor and affection except for one final

insult. You give all the credit to that damned rabbit. He stands there in the middle

of that basket every year, lording himself over the colorful eggs, and takes all the

credit. And you encourage him — egg him on, so to speak. Now you know

rabbits can’t lay eggs. And yet every year you say “oh, look what the Easter

Bunny brought.”

Please tell your children the truth.

I’ve had my say. Go on, drown me in ketchup and finish me off. But next time

you refer to me as fowl, remember this. We chickens are noble, tender (I know

tenderness is the only virtue you care about in a chicken,) patient, long-suffering

creatures. Foul is what you are.