The Dead Chicken Guy (or: Vegetarians Beware)

I have never been fond of running errands. Nor have I ever been fond of dying animals (I know, I’m wimpy. I didn’t grow up on a farm). That’s why taking a bike to be fixed is quite a chore for me. What does fixing a bike have to do with dying animals? Well, in order to get to the bike-repair guy, I have to walk past several chicken butchers. I must tiptoe not through the tulips, but through rivulets of blood flowing down the concrete slab. I push the bike through the blood to the back trying not to look to the left or right where the doomed chickens await their fate and where the butcher chops up the last unlucky creature. The smiling toothless bike-repair guy covered in grease awaits me. He speaks to me in French which I always find funny since it’s usually the upper class that speak French. Once, when he wasn’t there, I had to wait for him in the car for about ten minutes. There, front and center, stood the chicken butcher with a whole cage of chickens. He grabbed one at a time, grasped it between his legs, sliced its throat, then threw it into a large blue bucket. Lovely. Then I noticed the bucket rocking back and forth, back – and – forth, b-a-c-k and f-o-r-t-h until it slowed to a stop. A few minutes later I had the repaired bike in the car (for $2.00) and headed home, breathing a sigh of relief. And planning a vegetarian supper.