CHICKEN HELL

among the works included in the inaugural edition of monkey business: new writing from japan is a collection of vignettes by hiromi kawakami, and the first of those is a short, short story called "chicken hell." as the first person narrator of the piece has described to her by an old man in her neighborhood, the chicken hell is the one reserved for people who are unkind to chickens. and in chicken hell, the damned spend one of their afterlives being tortured by a giant, vengeful chicken.

chelsea hasn't stopped torturing either of the other backyard chickens since asshole died and left her at the top of the pecking order. (you should see the bald patch she's pecked into the smaller speckled chicken's back!) it's possible that our inability to end chelsea's rampage of terror might land us, as the other backyard chickens' stewards, in chicken hell ourselves, but the more interesting question is where the cosmos is going to send chelsea.

is the situation in the coop a chicken hell unto itself wherein the tortured chickens are reincarnations of chicken torturers who have been condemned twofold to suffer the tortures of chelsea while existing as an object of revulsion from their past lives? or, is there a special chicken hell reserved for chelsea? we'd thought of slaughtering her and taking her to the table (something will have to be done with all of the backyard chickens before there's no one left at home to take care of them), but that was before we realized that we might come to embody chelsea's attributes were we to eat her. even though the worst of those might just be insecurity -- not being able to stand having to share the coop and the run with a chicken prettier than herself -- we weren't about to run the risk, regardless.

if one thing's for sure, it's that things are hell for chelsea. the beauty of that circular argument just goes to show the viciousness of the entire universal process. sure, you could change hands, but there's going to come a point when nobody's going to want to eat you, chelsea, and it's not because the entire city went vegetarian. and portland, you take this as guidance come the days we won't be around to advise you. be nicer. from what we can tell, that vengeful chicken is fierce, and you don't want to be anywhere near chicken hell when chelsea picks a fight with it.