Hypno Chick

This has nothing to do w/ historic preservation. It does have to do with
my need for time and date witness in the BP archive. 1, 500 words about
a boy, a girl, science, and the thoughts of a chicken. Read, as you so
desire. Comments welcome. It was written as a challenge excercise from
another writer.

Thanks,
][<en

Hypno Chick
By Gabriel Orgrease

“Bluck…bluck, bluck, bluck…bluck.”

Shaded by the leaf expanse of a mature black walnut, the yard between
the rear door of the house and the small barn is dusty clay, where above
there is chatter of gray squirrels industriously jumping from sturdy
branch to branch. A farmyard pelted by the occasional fall of husky nuts
the size of goose eggs.

“Bring the chicken here.”

“She has a name.”

“Oh?”

“Esmeralda,” says Coleus.

“So bring Esmeralda here and we can try out this experiment.”

“Chicken, chicken, chicken, ” she calls.

“Yeah, right,” he says to himself under the breath, “Girls!”

“Here she is, Jurgin.”

Reaching into his pants Jurgin pulls out his latest invention.

“Well, that is a pretty amazing something. What do you call it?” says
Coleus.

“This is my Universal Transliterating One-eyed Mind Adjusted Reading
Electrical Gobbler Inquisition Babbling Undulating Device.”

“All that for such a small… uh, a tiny little thing?”

“We have miniaturization. I call it UTOMAREGIBUD for short.”

“It must be German. I think I’ll call it You-Too if you don’t mind. What
does it do?”

“Well, we place the chicken with her head down on the ground, like
this.” Jurgin in a crouch lays his hands upon the breast of Esmeralda
and slowly rests her dun feathered head upon the gray clay.

Coleus losing patience, “Her name is Esmeralda.”

“I got it, Esmeralda.” Jurgin then, in a very smooth and deliberate
motion of his arm draws with his index finger a circle in the dirt,
moving from right to left clockwise, around the chicken’s plump body,
leaning and reaching over, balancing to avoid touching her feet.
Finally, and with the deliberation of a master, he slowly and accurately
draws a line in the dirt from the chicken’s beak to the crude circle.

“I’ve seen this before, Jurgin. So what?”

“Once the chicken is hypnotized we lay this optical biofeedback loop
over her eye, like this.”

“Over Esmeralda’s eye, you mean.”

“Yes, Esmeralda. And then we plug this connection into the Apple II and
load the program.”

“What program?”

“The transliteration program that I wrote in Pascal.”

“I thought that was an ancient language.”

“It is, but when you want to read minds you take what you can get.”

“Are you sure that Esmeralda likes this?”

“We will find out when the program translates her thoughts onto the
screen. Here we go.”

Jurgin flips a toggle and there is a slight whirring noise in the
You-Too as the antennae fills with hydraulic fluid and extends itself,
swelling into a tumescent chromium mast, while LEDs red and green
flicker on and off. They wait. Then with one word slowly following
another word in a sluggish sequential progression a line of text
gradually displays itself letter by letter bit by bit across the
monochrome screen of the Apple II while Jurgin and Coleus hold their
breath and dream of kissing.

“Beagle wampus bacon hole diddle dilly nookie thump wax muffin cock dick
doodle sweet potato pie yum yum.”

“My, Esmeralda has some vocabulary,” says Coleus in earnest amazement
and admiration for Jurgin Black’s revolutionary invention, “Just think
what this will mean for chicken liberation.”

“What it means is that there is something seriously wrong.”

“What? Why should there be anything wrong?”

“Chickens don’t think like that, they think about worms and cracked corn
and sow bugs.”

“I always thought that Esmeralda was a more than smarter chicken.”

“I don’t understand. It should be working better than this,” says Jurgin
as he thumps his You-Too a few times briskly against the clay. There is
a small rise in the cloud of gray dust that surrounds Esmeralda’s head.

“Have you tried this before?”

“Yeah, it worked fine on the turkey.”

“Is there a loose wire or something?”

“I soldered all the connections.”

“What could be the problem?”

“I imagine it is eruptions of boiling gaseous sun spots that are causing
a radio wave interference in the photon stratosphere envelope whereby
elemental daemon zooplankton are melded into cranial cylinders of
participle extrusions with muezzin clasps pastorating with the mandible
fraenum till resulting in something screwing with my computer program.”

“Sounds very complicated to me.”

“It is sort of complicated. But I got it all figured out.”

“What is this loose thingy here on the side of the box for?”

“You mean the wing nut?”

“Whatever you call it.”

“Oh, that should be tightened. Can you give it a twist?”

“Stuck… stuck… corn… corn… nut… worm… worm… egg… egg.”

“Ah, Coleus, I think we have success!”

“I liked it better before. This makes it look like Esmeralda is a dumb
chicken.”

“That may be true, Coleus, but the purpose of scientific exploration is
to set us free with the facts of reality. The same thing happened to
Isaac Newton and it took him twenty years before he even realized it. We
shall have nothing but the facts of reason. We cannot, under any
circumstances pretend or speculate as to what a chicken may be thinking.
We have to accept the reality of the chicken’s actual thinking process.
We cannot accept a rationalized anthropomorphism and sentimental romance
in transferring our emotional outbursts into the mind of a chicken. A
chicken is not a puppet to play around with and make up wild stories
like childish fairy tales.”

“Esmeralda’s thinking process.”

“Yes, Esmeralda.”

“Esmeralda is NOT a dumb chicken.”

“I’m sorry, Coleus. The truth is the truth.”

“Are you saying that Esmeralda is a dumb chicken?”

“No, the chicken is a smart chicken for a chicken with a chicken brain!”

“You don’t understand anything.”

“What’s to understand?”

“Well, for one thing, you don’t seem to understand that Esmeralda has a
name.”

“Ok, I’m sorry, Esmeralda.”

“I’ve had enough of this science stuff, Jurgin. I’m going inside.”

“Hey, wait a minute, what about the chicken?”

“Forget Esmeralda, I want a chocolate egg cream. You want an egg cream?”

Coleus Forskholi briskly runs to the rear door of the house. Just as she
pulls on the handle of the screen she turns and with the blink of her
hazel eyes she flicks her tongue like a serpent tasting air in a manner
that requires no machine to translate. Jurgin Black, taking one last
glimpse at his You-Too, knows well enough when to give up on science and
reason and long-winded explication and stands up to follow she who must
be obeyed.

“Hay… hay… up… up… free… run… run… peck… peck.”

Remaining motionless though not quite thoughtless, Esmeralda lies head
down on the clay as the round fire of sun moves in the heavens and
filters between shadows through the swaying breeze of branched leaves
and likewise not quite thoughtless squirrels jump from branch to branch,
chattering, but we know not what they think of any of this and once
again we return to the thoughts of Esmeralda.

“Stuck… stuck… squirrel… squirrel… nut… dog… dog… egg… egg.”

Esmeralda confuses her biologic imperative in procreation with a beagle
wandering into the yard on the scent of squirrel and the dog running in
nose down zigs then zags and short stops approaches Esmeralda who
remains transfixed, paralyzed, a dog’s meal lying helpless and exposed
on the clay.

“Dog… dog… dog… dog… dog… dog… dog… dog… dog.”

The beagle stops, wet black nose slowly approaching a dry beak in a
momentous hesitation of Zeno, then, suddenly, “Squirrel… chicken…
rabbit… corn… bone… fluff… wag…peck… sniff.”

Which brings us to a very serious question and almost breaks apart the
mystery of this scene and threatens to drop the reader right out of this
story and onto their rational tushie, “Can there be a melding of animal
minds if there is no witness?”

Or should we elect to bring Jurgin and Coleus back out of the house, out
the back door, slamming the screen door behind them, out of their
embrace in the kitchen brought on over the innocent splitting of an egg
cream with two straws, and parade them around a bit more in the back
yard in hopes to shoo away the otherwise curious beagle from eating
Esmeralda?

No fear, this beagle is not that much smarter than this chicken and he
quickly runs off stage left in pursuit of the scent of a large rat that
has been skirting around in the anemic azaleas at the edge of the yard.

“Stuck… stuck… bluck… bluck… free... corn… corn… peck… peck.”

Day wears toward dull evening. Then, suddenly, as a blazing asteroid
approaches the biosphere, or as Lucifer underwent a transition of his
vertical state, or the fate of a meteorite the circumference of a
baseball, a discarded fragment of a space station, the congruence of
Uranus with my Neptune on a natal chart, there fell a lone walnut to
hitting Esmeralda in the backside. Instantly she jumps up free shakes
her head ripples her neck fluffs her body scratches the ground then runs
over to peck at a kernel of cracked corn. It only takes one loose nut to
set us free.

Copyright © Drumlin Enterprises 2001