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NEWS / Janet Kauffman //¦TA ON'T TELL ME ABOUT CHICKEN SLAUGHTER. I've been !_• there," Jean said. She'd walked down the road and into Rochelle's kitchen, for the first time in six years, a return visit she called it, and there she was, in white shorts, sitting on a stool at the free-standing counter Rochelle called an island. "You picked a day," Rochelle said. "Take the stool there at the island. There's no place else." She stood with a knife in her hand. "There's five more coming, I can't believe it." "Look, relax, I don't mind," Jean said. "There's been plenty of chicken death in my family, as you know. We're fifth generation Campbells. Soup is the ticket. Throw the bones in some water. Me and the kids could be rich, you know. We're in line to inherit, if we can outlive the right people." Jean twisted her bare legs around the legs of the stool and made herself comfortable. "If you squint," Rochelle said, pointing toward the sink, "it looks very colorful. There's beauty there." But Jean didn't squint. "On the other hand," Rochelle went on—she had to go on—"it's devastation. It's the mire." Mutilation, she thought. Pestilential filth. On the counters and in the sink lay fifteen chickens, half with the feet on, half without; a few gutted, most not; and everywhere else, chicken smells, chicken parts—a pan of livers and hearts on the island; the yellow stalks of feet piled on a brown paper bag; and in the sink, a large bowl of loopy intestines, crops, an esophagus like a white plastic tube, some gall bladders, dark green. In the air, in the cloth of her shirt, hung the surgical smell of singed feathers, the dangerous open-body smell of carcasses. "Honey, you have a thread of something, there in your hair," Jean said. Rochelle combed at her curls with her fingers. "God only knows," she said. She threw something into the sink. At the back door, Joey gave two kicks, and when Rochelle opened the door for him, he bowed, and held out five more chickens, upside down, three in one hand, two in the other. "Where do you want these?" "Anyplace." With his elbow, Joey shoved a kettle to one side of the island and stacked the chickens. He washed his hands in a corner of the sink. "It's about time," he said to Jean. "I don't believe it." He took her 204 · The Missouri Review hand and kissed her cheek. "How are you? It's luck you stopped by, I tell you. How are you?" "Unlucky. Why else would I stop in? I come in misery, I'm ready to belt my kids, and I walk in here and Rochelle has her hands bloodied and I think, what has happened to poor Joey?" "Not to worry," he said. "Joey is intact. Rochelle gives the order, 'murder them all,' and so we do. No mercy." "They look nice," Jean said. "You'll have plenty of meat." "We didn't kill them for meat," Rochelle said. "We killed them to get rid of them. These are murdered chickens. We'll eat them, but they deserved to die." "Executed?" Jean said. "You execute chickens?" "Rochelle, for God's sake. Have a beer," Joey said. "You want a beer, Jean?" "I can't drink a beer in here," Rochelle said. But she put down the knife and washed her hands, too. "So come outside," Joey said. "We all need a break." "It's worse out there." "We will do this," Jean said, taking the three beers Joey handed out from the refrigerator. "We will go onto the front steps where we can watch the road and see no blood and think no blood and we will all be fine." She pushed against the screen door with her shoulder and held the door open. "Let the flies in, and we will go out." It was July, a cloudless late afternoon with no wind. They sat on the top step of the porch. Joey leaned his back against the door...

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