speedway chicken

She spun and hurtled forward, flung out with her sisters in a long ribbon of white that opened and broke, the gaps revealing the individual chickens and their lethal velocities that carried them in graceless arcs from the back of the poultry truck to the pavement of the interstate below. Flightless by nature and airborne by chance, the chickens hit the road, inert and heavy objects. Death was instant and messy. Cars careened along neither slowing nor stopping to witness the carnage. 35 chickens lay dead along interstate 10 in Lake City Florida, an occurrence so common that the drivers barely noticed the red and white bird corpses littering the highway, instead dodging dead animals in a mindless way while balancing their cups of coffee and tuning in to their favorite local country radio station, WHYT, broadcasting from a trailer on a local poultry farm, the very one that now filled the road with the nameless bodies of its daughters.
She was lifted into the air with her sisters. In the few seconds it took to reach the asphalt she risked a backward glance. Turned head over chicken feet she saw the poultry truck already dwindling to a speck in the distance. She felt no remorse, only a thin and building rage at her fate. Using her wings against natural design she righted herself, pumped her legs and hit the ground running. She landed on the center line of the interstate with ferocity and a perfect stride. She was the only one to survive the hurl and plummet. A truck pulled up along side her, keeping pace. The man inside opened his door, leaned over and scooped the chicken into the truck. Turning off the highway he carried her to my grandmother’s farm and, eyewitness to the miraculous bird’s feat, related the story to my grandmother while my brothers, cousins and myself listened in delight and awe. “I brung her,’ he said to my granny, “so’s she might have a home.” My granny took her from her rescuer, a man named Carl, and dubbed her Carlene. In our stunned amazement at this chicken’s arrival and in the excitement of getting a new pet, we all heard her name as “Carlane” a reference to her dance of daring and death on the corridor of I-10. There was no rectifying it. We had burned her name and her story into our psyches, attributing great magic and extraordinary powers to this determined little bird. In the language of children, even chickens can become superheroes.