Clk 

By the third week of his life the chicken who would, in a less aggressively administered ontology, have been called a free-range chicken had developed a private conviction that the phrase FREE RANGE, stamped in green soy-based ink on the cardboard sleeve that would eventually contain his breasts, thighs, and two pieces of what the copywriters called “succulent wing portions,” referred not to acreage or sky or any of the things that might intuitively seem to follow from the words free and range, but rather to a category of feeling.

This feeling was difficult to describe, not least because the chicken—who had no proper name, though in his own mind he entertained something close to one, a sort of inward monosyllable that sounded like Clk—lived in a barn containing 24,600 other birds, each of whom was, in the technical literature, indistinguishable from him and in practice distinguished mainly by the angle at which it held its head while sleeping in the ammoniac half-light.

The barn itself was one of those structures whose dimensions exceed the perceptual capacities of the creatures inside it. It was less a place than a condition. To say that Clk lived “in” the barn suggested an outside to which “in” might be opposed, and although there were rumors—carried by maintenance workers, by drafts beneath the loading doors, by the intermittent rectangle of daylight that appeared whenever a human entered—that such an outside existed, it occupied for most birds the same epistemological status as the afterlife occupies for secular graduate students: emotionally compelling, theoretically possible, and not especially actionable.

Still, Clk had evidence.

Above him and all around him were walls. At one end of the barn there was a fan whose louvers, when they opened, admitted for fractions of seconds a color that was not white, beige, or the pinkish hue of overtaxed flesh. This color was blue. Not a huge amount of blue, and not consistently. But enough.

Enough for Clk to conclude that whatever FREE RANGE was, it was related to blue.

There was, hanging over one of the feeders, a sign. The birds could not read, obviously, but chickens are not wholly immune to the aura of typography. The sign showed a cheerful red barn, a rolling green field, and six cartoon hens arranged in a semicircle suggestive of either communal joy or a support group. The hens were smiling, which is not a thing actual hens do, but which the human imagination remains deeply committed to believing they ought to.

When the workers spoke, they sometimes used the phrase “these are the free-range ones.”

This was puzzling to Clk, who had never observed any range, unless one counted the six-foot radius he was able to traverse on less crowded days. He began to suspect that “free-range” might be what humans called a being who was destined, at some unspecified future date, to encounter blue.

This belief sustained him.

Not in any noble sense. Clk was not a hero and had no coherent politics. His days were occupied by eating, drinking, sleeping, and engaging in abrupt existential starts in which he’d forget, momentarily, what his body was for. But he cultivated a habit of looking up. While the others pecked and settled and produced the soft static murmur that made the barn sound like a giant organism dreaming anxiously, Clk would crane his neck toward the rafters as if some answer might be written there.

There were moments—particularly at what the humans called night, when the lights dimmed from interrogation to insomnia—when Clk imagined the outside with such intensity that he experienced what might be described as longing, if longing can be said to occur in a creature whose brain weighs less than a walnut but whose suffering, when present, is in no way scaled down to match.

He imagined grass.

Grass was difficult because he had never seen it. The closest analog available was the thin green stripe on the cardboard sleeve depicted on the sign. Still, he furnished it mentally as a surface that yielded slightly underfoot and did not burn his respiratory system. In this imagined world there was space between bodies. One could turn around without stepping on someone’s face. Light arrived from a source too large to be switched on and off by a man in coveralls.

The image was absurdly moving.

Then one morning—although “morning” here denotes only a scheduled change in illumination—the humans came in greater numbers than usual. The barn filled with a new kind of noise, a purposeful clatter. Birds were seized, inverted, placed into crates.

Panic moved through the flock with the speed and incoherence typical of both poultry and financial markets.

Clk was caught by the legs and lifted. The sensation of being airborne, though objectively terrifying, was also vindicating.

He had been right.

There was an outside.

It was cold.

The blue overhead was not a rumor or a promise or a marketing abstraction but a physical fact of almost painful vastness. Clk, upside down in a crate with seven other birds, stared at the sky and felt, for perhaps three seconds, a euphoria so pure that it seemed to erase every prior discomfort.

Free range, he thought.

Or something very close to thought.

The truck door closed.

The darkness that followed was not the familiar darkness of the barn but a denser, terminal sort. The crate rattled. Around him, birds shifted and muttered in tones that might have been fear or simply the body’s refusal to stop narrating itself.

Clk held in his mind the blue.

Not as an argument, exactly, nor as consolation. More as a datum that resisted the system into which he’d been born. Whatever else the world was—and it was manifestly a place where words on packaging could diverge almost comically from lived experience—it also contained that impossible, uncontained color.

The slaughterhouse, when it came, was efficient in the way efficiency becomes morally unsettling once applied to beings capable of wanting anything at all.

Later, a shopper in a supermarket would pause before a refrigerated display. She would notice the green label, the pastoral imagery, the phrase HUMANELY RAISED FREE RANGE CHICKEN. She would feel, not falsely, that she was making a conscientious choice. The package would be cool in her hands.

Inside, among the sealed portions, were cells that had once composed a creature who had seen the sky and recognized it as the answer to a question he’d barely known how to ask.

GPT

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