Death and a Garbage Can: The World's Shortest Autopsy
No chickens were technically harmed in the writing of this article. But vegans, you may want to look away. Because a few years ago a chicken died on my watch. And I was the only home to do anything about it…
“Goldie? Gooooldie?”
I was using my most kindergarten whisper — the kind that is 100 percent audible but whose hiss tells you that it’s supposed to be, at some level, a secret.
It was a tricky situation — I needed enough volume to wake up this beautiful chicken — without waking the neighbors. Because here is the thing about living in a tight neighborhood — you never really quite knew when someone would come running to help, and when they did, you couldn’t be sure if you’d end up grateful or the talk of the town. I suspected it depended on the neighbor and the day.
Either way, this was between me and my flock.
I could see in the blackness of the night that Goldie was sitting perfectly still, as if covering her eggs for a restful sleep, which would have been comforting had she been in the safety of her coop. Instead she was nested in the corner of the fenced-in run — the same place I had seen her cooing happily not a few hours before. When dark began to settle in, she should have gone inside with the others. Instead, she looked — from the light of the kitchen window — frozen in time.
I put down the dishes I was doing and, soap still on my hands, went out to shoo her in next to her sisters.
“Goldie? Goldie!”
It took me an impossibly long time to admit that this chicken was not such a deep sleeper that she was deaf to my pleas. As I grabbed her like I would any living chicken, the grotesque flop of her neck confirmed — Goldie was, most certainly, dead.
This may seem like the great peaceful sleep that we all dream of; in a way I, at first, felt thankful that there didn’t seem to be any brutality involved. But the mystery of it concerned me more than brutality probably would have. The only other chicken we had lost had been grabbed by a hawk. A hawk, the blood, the feathers — I could see what happened with all of that. I could easily understand — even if it wasn’t nice. But this… this was something else — and I had other chickens to consider. I had seen no evidence of issues in the flock — but it was possible that whatever took out Goldie could also infect the remaining three chickens.
So I sat back in the darkness of our tiny lawn, Goldie laid out in front of me, and called Brad who, camping in the Great Smoky Mountains, was almost certain to be out of range. 1, 2, 3 voicemails. It looked like I would be playing the role of medical examiner, mortician, and next of kin all on my own.
This may sound incredibly jacked to you, but at this point I assumed, in full, that an autopsy of some sort was required. And being that it was 10 p.m. on a weekend, I was pretty sure I would have to be the one to do it.
“Did I know how to do that? No. Did I have the tools to do that? Also no.”
Did I know how to do that? No. Did I have the tools to do that? Also no.
But 16 or so seasons of NCIS had given me a few hot tips that I was prepared to implement for the sake of the greater good.
And there was a greater good to consider here. Anything that had hurt this chicken had a chance to hurt the others. While I considered my options, I also considered the real possibility that Goldie had suffered. That what I had considered joyful cooing earlier might have been something else entirely. I had to do this so that I could know if the others were suffering too. So don’t be mad. This was not a game, but I was determined.
I felt my way into the garage by the light of my cell phone and grabbed a pair of gloves and a contractor bag. No knives were in sight so I headed into the kitchen where the knife I had used for dinner sat in the suds of my abandoned dish water.
Back outside, I laid my contractor bag down, organized the area, and then laid Goldie down like I was putting a baby down for a nap. Her head moved wildly so I started there; a broken neck could have done it. I held my cell phone flashlight in one hand and moved my gloved hand up and down her spine, but I didn’t feel a break or anything that seemed out of order. Her neck, it seemed, was out of control simply because she wasn’t alive to control it.
From there I opened her eyes, I checked her feet, I pulled aside feathers to check her skin — all the while looking for bugs, discoloration, irritation — anything that looked infection-y. I looked at her vent to see if an egg seemed stuck; I felt her large golden chest for lumps, and bumps, and breaks. And I did it all one handed, the other hand holding my cell phone for it’s flashlight.
I found… nothing.
The only other things I could think of was a heart attack or some sort of cancer or other sickness. I thought there could be organ damage or growths, or that disease would have eaten away at internal muscles or bones.
So I cried.
And I grabbed my knife.
And I pictured a moment earlier in the day, when my knife had nearly bounced off a carrot instead of cutting through it. I made a mental note to ask for better knives for Christmas, and a knife sharpener too.
But this would have to do for now.
Resolved, I…I…
…I stopped.
I had, to my knowledge, checked out all of the things that could put my other chickens at risk. I hadn’t figured anything out. And while I knew how to butcher a chicken to eat, I wasn’t sure this would be a productive experience for anyone. If I’m being honest, I was most concerned with the smell, the fact that I might puke, and a nosey neighbor looking out just in time to see me leaning over an animal, both of us covered in blood. In the dark. Really, really late at night.
“I had a body to get rid of.”
I didn’t need that kind of publicity.
This would have to remain a mystery.
Which meant, I had a new problem.
I had a body to get rid of.
Owning a house that was about 4 feet on either side from your neighbors that didn’t have any fences or large wooded areas didn’t leave me with many options. I didn’t know if I could dig a mini grave in the middle of my lawn one handed in the dark. I thought that if I did, an animal would get to it, which could be another predator to the coop, or another way to spread disease. And so, since I was still my most suburban self and had no property or farm instinct to speak of, I did the most reasonable thing I could think to: I rolled up my contractor-bag-turned-autopsy-table with Goldie inside, and threw that chicken burrito into the garbage can.
To this day, I don’t know if that was strictly legal. But if it’s any consolation, I suffered all night. All I could picture was my carefully wrapped secret rolling undone and Goldie bouncing out onto a sanitation worker’s foot while he unknowingly collected my trash. So I supervised the trash pick-up the next day, carefully hidden in an upstairs window, just to be sure that all ended well. And then I added this to my list of all the reasons why we had to move immediately.
For more on loss…or “lost”…
This essay was created from a writing prompt from Illuminate, a writing program by The Kindred Voice. The topic was actually “lost” but I read that as “loss,” and so here we are. But if you want to read some works by amazing women — who can read the word “lost”, check them out here:
Can Anyone Really Be Lost? by Adeola Sheehy
Carrying My Invisible Baggage by Crystal James
This Way Toward Disaster by Laci Hoyt
Where I Cannot See, I Am. by Leesha Mony
Getting Lost in Motherhood by Christine Carpenter