Chicken Man: a short story

Sami stares down at his feet.  They are covered in a dusty, powdery coating of chicken soup powder, the plastic noodle pot rolling away amidst a splay of bright mustardy powder and noodles, desiccated shreds of vegetable matter, and tiny cubes of long-dead dried chicken in a sunburst on the stone floor.

“For fuck’s sake,” he yells in frustration.

“It’s not my fault,” Mother, as unhelpful as ever. She grunts as she rises to look at the mess.  “Were you listening to me?  You’ll need to clean that up.”

Sami feels the rage rise, a swell from the deep well usually capped and concealed.   It erupts, a jet of hot fury in an uncontrollable escape.  “I didn’t say it was your fault,” he snaps.  “I just don’t care about whatever it is you were on about.  It isn’t important, it never is.  I don’t want to listen to it and I just want nobody to speak to me, just leave me alone.”  He isn’t a baby, a child, but he feels like one.  Alone, misunderstood, raging.  He slams around the kitchen, throwing the remains of his food in the bin but stepping in the mess, wallowing and spreading smelly yellow processed chicken powder everywhere, in the cracks between the tiles, under the counter,  on his feet.  “I’ll clean this up later,” he mutters.  He has to get out.

“Oh no you won’t, what are we supposed to do, just wait around trampling in your mess?" She pauses, a full 5 seconds. "Please do it now.  Shall I help you?  Shall I bring the broom?”  She won’t stop.

He glares at her, hating her reasonableness, her podgy, judgy face. He can’t stand it a moment longer. He thinks he will either explode or fall to the floor, rolling in the chicken dust.  Become the chicken dust.  This is what his life has amounted to and this is what he is.  Chicken dust man.

He storms out of the kitchen, pausing only to cram on his shoes and grab his coat.  He trips on the bannister by the door, which cracks ominously, and Mother shrieks in the distance.  She is receding.  He turns and fires out of the doorway, slamming it.  The door frame trembles but he is moving too fast to see it, or care.  She is screaming in the house, he knows.  Blindly he walks fast, his head a blur of rage and sadness and hunger - he's messed up his food, he’s messed up the house and he’s messed up his life, just one big mess of destruction and loss.

He finds himself running, pounding out of the town, past the shabby strip mall and into the woods behind, down the hills leading down to the shore of the shingle beach holding the town fast to the edge of the sea.  He crashes through the undergrowth, fierce thorny gorse tearing at his clothes. He slips on mossy ledged surfaces and slows, slows, as he leaves the whirl of anger behind.  He begins to catch the threads of his breath, his reason.  

The woods are soaking and his shoes start to let in water, and he thinks ruefully of chicken soup as the water mixes with the chicken dust on his feet. At the edge of the beach he climbs over the fallen trees and driftwood, and down onto the shingle.  The waves are loud, rolling in from the open ocean, breaking the surface almost half a mile out and churning in to thunder up the beach, rattling and shaking the shingle with their violence.  The beach shelves steeply.  10 feet from the tideline he would be below it, his head lower than the edge of the beach.  The stones are wet, gleaming grey and brown, tiny remnants of some violent planetary event eons past, smoothed and rounded by time and the salty rasp of the ocean.   

There’s no-one else on the beach in the squally cold.  The wind cuts through his coat. Layers of cloud scud fast across the open sea, striping the water with beams of light. He sheds his wet shoes.  He takes them off and flings them behind a log, abandoning his socks like sea detritus.  His pale bare feet feel clean and free on the icy sand. Sami looks back at the dark line of trees.  He turns to watch the sea and the  breakers endlessly coming in from the rest of the world, from the vast ocean that stretches for thousands of miles, unchanging; steely cold, grey and wild.  The rhythmic pound and rattle of the beach mixes with the cry of gulls, and the salty, fresh petrichor rises from the incoming tide. He shrugs off his coat to feel the biting wind.  

As his eyes relax over the expanse he sees something; something is moving, perpendicular to the waves.  He is sure he sees  a solid grey smudge in the steel grey water, just beyond the breaker line.  It is a lone dolphin, skirting the beach. For  one instant, Sami stops breathing, watching the dolphin rise and fall through the waves, at one with the rough sea.  He read once that dolphins were likely more intelligent than humans, their highly developed frontal cortex possibly used for communication, knowledge, wisdom.  He wipes the rain from his forehead, mesmerised by the dolphin.  It turns, aware of him on the coast, watching him, aware of him watching.  And with one powerful flick of its tail, it jumps, for a moment fully clear of the water and shining with the joy of its existence, caught in a single ray of sunlight emerging through the clouds.