Steak and Robotic Eggs

Down at the Grant and Franklin they got all manner of gizmo. Picked me up a Self-Buryin' Shovel, which I haven't seen since the day I got it. "Oh you'll find it when the batteries run out" says the feller behind the counter. But I also put in some of them Never Die D cells, which the ads say are worth every single penny. Remember pennies? I don't.

But I also got me one of them Robot Chickens. Now, this ain't one of them Frankenstein-with-a-sodderin'-iron concoctions. This is the real deal. Japanese. Precision, right down to the filament of each feather, looks so much like an actual chicken the Olympic Chicken Kickers had to ban 'em from competition.

Feller behind the counter says : "You're a farmer, aintcha?" And I says "Ayuh" cause I heard a fella from Maine say that oncet. "Well, a farm without a chicken's like a woman without breastages!" And then he laughed all giggly, like half the women in Grayson County don't got cancer. Cityfied asshole.

But I bought it anyway. Took it home, back to the farm, took it out of its box. Japonaise writin' all over the place. An instruction sheet in about thirty languages. The English pretty much said, over and over, variations on "Do not eat." It also said what to feed it (cracked corn) where to sleep it (chicken coop) and whether to let it fraternize with real chickens (sure, why not, bub). No one's seen a real chicken in ten years.

But mostly "Do not eat." On a whim I fired up my Amazoog Translator, and scanned the other bits n pieces. Portuguese: do not eat. Three kinds of Chinese: do not eat. Latin: do not consume. That's Amazoog, for ya---puttin' on airs with vocab just to showcase a scholarship language.

So I gave her the thrice over, lookin for a place to put batteries. None I could tell. Kinda squirmy, already, movin' in my hands, sort of warm, had a musty smell to 'er. I put her down. Off she goes, struttin' and clucking and cockin' her head sideways at a noise and eyeballin' ya like she knows your soul's made of chicken scratch.

Whatever. I got on with my day. I'm like that. Whimsical. I get up and do chores and mosey into town and get the horse repaired and hit the General for a sasparilla and maybe wander over to the saloon for a fight or a piece of strange and then pick up some feed and a new hitch and back to the farm for more chores and my dinner and my supper. Or sometimes, supper first because who's going to tell me what to do?

Things went on like they do. Coupla days of that. And ain't it funny how there ain't no accountin' for thinkin' about nothin' until somethin' comes along and makes even the nothin' a piece of time before a thing. That's context for ya. Run that one through Amazoog and you'll probably get some five dollar words like Derridian and such. Citified crap.

So there's me, fixin' a rain gutter out to the shack at the corner of my 40, the one where I store shack-fixin' tools, and way out yonder there's burst of light and the sky turns green. My bones turned to mush. My stomach dropped through the bottom of my drawers and my hair stood on end. Fell of my ladder, knocked the wind out of me. When I got it back, I could smell it, the rain, the ozone, the clouds turning black and that deep sexual sting of dirt.

Tornado on its way. Son of a biscuit.

Slapped my horse on its rear to wake it up, flipped up a panel to program it to run home, then took off running myself. Took five minutes of lung-bustin' and gave me a mess of blisters in my boots I didn't notice till later. And there's me, flying around the ranch, closing things up. The wind starting to swirl. The sky getting darker greener. Bits of rain. And that damn chicken, just cluckin' and struttin' like I wasn't about to be sucked up to Oz.

I got the not-cow into the barn, strapped down the tractor to the concrete slab, set the timer on the Box Silo so that if the wind ripped it up the boomer would go off so it wouldn't fall on my house. The horse eventually showed up, so I stalled it and shut it down. Meanwhile the rain comes and the sky goes from darker greener to boiling black, there's that train sound in the distance and my fillings are starting to tingle. I started heaving the barn door closed, and just as it's about to shut, that damn robot chicken walks out into the comin’ weather, casually like, one eyed cocked to the side. I couldn't stop the door. It hit home with a boom, the safety pistons engaged, the air-lock hissed, and all I could do was fall on my ass and stare.

Number 86, my not-cow, nuzzled my neck, so I stood up. Nothing to do about it now; that chicken was a goner. Paid good money for that mother clucker, but what are you going to do. Something about spilled milk and cryin'? Nope not me. I commenced to crappin' my overalls instead at what the tornado was doin' to my barn.

Oh, how it howled. How it shook. Number 86 walked back and forth, worryin' a path in the concrete slab. The horse turned itself on and off a few times. I tried to watch the plasma TV, but all I could get was sports channels and cartoons. The sounds coming from outside were ungodly. I couldn't tell if the Box Silo fell over at one point, or if my house upped and flew off, or if Jesus himself set up a drum kit and started playing a god-damn jazz-funk solo. Tarnation, it was loud. I feel asleep.

Woke up back to back with Number 86, who was asleep too, curled up next me. I gave her a pat on the rump and sat up myself. All seemed calm, so I risked it, fingering the remote in my pocket to unlock the barn door. It eased open, quiet-like. Sunshine poured in, that glorious blue sun-light you get after a storm. And the smell, the smell of rain, clean water, good grass, distant mountains, blue skies. I rubbed my eyes and walked out into it.

Everything looked okay. Maybe the Box Silo was a tad crooked---but maybe it was crooked before. I walked over to it and shut off the boomer. The house seemed intact. There was some leaves on the ground, a few branches, nothing major. I shrugged. Three cheers for titanium? That salesman told me if I replaced all my tree trunks with titanium, reinforced my house, coated my silo with a titanium epoxy, I could survive any old storm. Don't know why I forgot all about it till after. More philosophy I guess. Or Psychology. I spat on the ground for effect.

I went back to the barn to turn the horse back on. He'd need to warm up if I was going to ride into town, see about the damage there. I let Number 86 out to chew on stuff in the pasture. Unstrapped the tractor in case it decided to go till somethin'. Feelin' pretty good, actually. That new-sky smile.

Turned a corner around the barn to fetch my locker of boot polish, and there it was. Just sittin' there. An egg. A chicken egg. White, shinin' in the sun, round. A Grade AA I'd say, recallin' education at farmer college. Just one damn egg... but no chicken.

I looked around for it for a while. Forgot all about that boot polish. I walked around the house, the Box Silo, the barn. The tractor started itself up and went off to till somethin'. Number 86 moseyed out of the barn, found a patch of pasture to chew on. The horse finished its self-diagnostics and went to stand by a fence. I checked that fence, too. No chicken.

I don't know what was goin' through my head all this time. But I finally noticed a long shadow and realized evening was comin' on. I guess I wasn't headin' into town. Them citified folk could look after their own damage I guess.

A growlin' commenced up in my belly, so I fetched out a few protein bars, wandered over to the Box Silo. Grabbed my halogen and hunted through for the box that chicken came in. Lots of old boxes in there. It's like swimmin' through cardboard memories. The three long flat boxes for my plasma TVs. Here's the boxes from when they delivered the wrong tractor repair parts five times. The box for my phone, the one I called the tractor people five times on. So much god-danged Styrofoam. Boxes for everything, going back some thirty years. All in a jumble. And that box smell, a quiet, restful smell. I ended up cradles between a refrigerator box and a bunch of Christmas ornament boxes, comfortable, reading old instruction manuals until I fell asleep.

Woke up to pitch black, since the halogen'd run out of propane. Managed to climb out of the silo anyway, made it back to the house and caught a few more cycles before sun-up. Wandered into the kitchen for some coffee, and there on the table was the chicken manual, right where I'd left it a week before. Well, spit.

There was nothin' in it about eggs. Not one damn word. I ran every language through Amazoog, and nothing. Just "do no eat" and a warranty section that more or less said "no waarranty." On a whim I checked the etherfeed, but I couldn't find the company that made chickens anywhere. I did find a few articles about cholesterol, though. Whatever.

I decided to go talk to number 86 about it. Like I said, 86 is my not-cow. She's a cow all-right, one hundred percent bovine from hoof to snout, but for insurance reason I have to call her a not-cow on account of she can read. She can't talk, but she reads, magazines mostly, People and Fish & Stream. Caught 'er reading a Bon Apetit once and I whipped her something fierce. That's worse than porn for any not-cows, my opinion.

I ambled out the pasture where she was munching some Kentucky Blue and flippin' through an old issue of Better Homes. I opined on the nature of chickens, and poultry, and domesticated fowl. I mused on that chicken-and-the-egg thing. I used words like "ova" and "macrocellular" and "gustatorial." 86 just nodded and chewed and flipped pages. I think she liked the pictures.

Yeah, past tense. Cause I decided to eat that egg. It's sitting in front of me now. Boiled, of course, even though steak n eggs is a fried-egg thing, or at least sunny-side up, as far as I know. Slaughtering my not-cow took a while, but I thanked my stars I'd taken my old dad's advice. "Never name the live-stock, son. You'll get too attached. Who want's Bessie for supper? Not me."

The steak smells good. I got one of those self-cutting knives... turns out self-cutting means it cuts itself. Oh well, the steak's tender, so I'll just worry it with a fork. I'll get to that egg shortly. I'm not saying its staring at me---how could it? But I'll get to that egg shortly.