I had a couple of other ideas for my next post, but an occurrence from the last couple of days has brought to mind a truly bizarre experience from my childhood that I hope you will appreciate.
For the most part, I don't anticipate delving into my childhood for source material, primarily because I don't remember all that much of it. This is probably because there was nothing particularly remarkable about it; however, one event from an otherwise hazy time has always featured prominently in my memory, and I was recently reminded of it by, of all things, my son's trip to the local feed store.
It seems that in this particular feed store, they currently have a clutch of newly-hatched chicks; indeed, seeing these chicks is the reason my wife took the kids there in the first place. These cute little chicks caused quite a stir with the family and, in fact, even prompted some discussion about acquiring some chickens (guess who was the wet blanket in that conversation!). All this talk of chicks, however, took me all the way back to a certain spring day in 1977: disco was in its heyday, Gerald Ford was in the White House, and I was in kindergarten.
It was a rainy, dreary day. But something marvelous was about to occur: one of the little girls in my class (I no longer remember her name, although I can still picture her--dark hair, glasses, freckles) had brought in a chicken egg that was about to hatch. We would be witnessing the miracle of birth! We would actually get to see a baby chicken emerge from its shell and live!
Naturally, I missed it. I was doing arts or crafts or some such crap and the whole damned thing happened without me. No ringside seat to the wonders of new life for me, thank you very much. What I did not miss was the opposite of a miraculous birth, which happened almost immediately.
In the aftermath of life's greatest miracle--hell, right in the middle of it, actually--a heinous crime was committed. As it was related to me by the girl who had brought in the egg/chick (dammit, what was her name?!), one of our classmates, a boy named Jay (his name is indelibly burned into my memory!), had seized the chick, still a-borning, placed it in the doorway of our classroom, and slammed the heavy wooden door on its tiny neck in such a way that its head popped right off.
Its. Head. Popped. Right. Off.
Bear in mind that, as disturbing as this chain of events was, I had still not personally witnessed anything troubling. Yet. My young, fragile psyche was still unscarred. Hoping to remedy this, I quickly rushed to the scene of the crime.
Aside from having its head severed from its body, the chick was not what I had expected. I had pictured a fluffy puff of downy yellow feathers; instead, its still-damp feathers were plastered to its body (which had not yet completely emerged from the egg), giving it a scrawny, alien appearance. The kindergarten teacher had scooped up the mortal remains on a piece of white paper (we didn't have printer paper then, it was probably typewriter paper or mimeograph paper, and if you're too young to know what a mimeograph is, I hate you). The body, still half-in, half-out of the egg, lay a few inches away from the head, which had a little pool of blood around it. I remember being a little surprised at how small that pool of blood was. But mostly I remember how fascinated and horrified I was by the fact that the head was still alive.
Of course, it wasn't really alive, but the little beak was still opening and shutting silently; I could almost hear the ghost of the peeping sound it was trying to make. The beak would open grotesquely wide, then it would shut, then open again. And again. And again. Peep. Peep. Peep. There were only three of us children who had not already fled the scene in terror--all boys, of course.
I am fairly certain that my kindergarten teacher was completely discombobulated by the atrocity that had just been perpetrated so unexpectedly; that is the only way I can explain what happened next. She shoved the piece of paper, with its mangled occupant, into the hand of the boy standing next to me, and ordered the three of us to take the victim into the bathroom and flush it.
Our kindergarten class was in a shabby little outbuilding separated from the dungeon-like elementary school we attended, so we had our own little unisex bathroom connected to the classroom. Our strange little funeral procession--three six-year old pallbearers carrying a murdered chick on a piece of mimeograph paper (Google it!), no mourners--marched into the bathroom and right up to the toilet. Where we stood, staring, mesmerized, at the still-silently-peeping corpse we were supposed to flush. Peep. Peep. Peep. We still weren't convinced it was actually dead, so flushing it seemed wrong somehow. Peep. Peep. Peep.
I'm not sure how long we stood there before the teacher came in, wordlessly grabbed the paper, flung the whole mess into the toilet and flushed. Peep. The three of us stood, helplessly transfixed, as paper, body, and head all began circling, independently of each other. Peep. That head, that hideous, silent, peeping head continued to convulse, open and shut, open and shut. Peep. Peep. Peep. It just kept circling and peeping, circling and peeping.
This whole memory has a very surreal, dreamlike quality to it, even now. Some might think my traumatized little six-year-old brain imagined it, that disembodied head and its deathly-silent peeping on its circular journey around that watery vortex to the grave. Maybe. But I swear, I remember with absolute perfect clarity, that tiny head, its beak opening and shutting, peeping, peeping, peeping, all the way down, until it disappeared into the sewer.
I'll probably have nightmares about it tonight.
--Incredibill
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