The Culinary Advance

by Ken Poyner

                                           

All day we’ve been collecting the robot chickens.  Just the grinning border collie and I.  None of the neighbors will pitch in.  They stand at their fences and smile, thinking “Serves you right,” and “What did you expect?” and other clichés like those you would hear hurled from the untested mouths of boys.

Their border collies would chase my robot chickens if given the opportunity.  Border collies love to work.  They have thoughts the size of a human child’s thoughts, without the self-interest or moral mud construction.

But we can do this alone.  Already we have the flock nearing the coop, the white spit of their electricity beginning to even out, their imbedded locators starting to rile themselves into resetting transmission, into finding the mother satellite.

The sun is going applecart down and perhaps the ambient interference will loosen.   Never again will I let the penning system run for days on the backup power alone, slowly bleed its strength into the atmospheric sub-spectrum.  I read the manuals, but at times I am as sightless as a stone, as bull headed as melt water, and I have to fail at the technical first to succeed in the marketplace later.

The dog barks as regular as tide at one chicken frozen in place, a motor or a processor gone bad and the plump metal fowl unable to be herded, to be consummately flocked.  The neighbors, still accomplishing poultry husbandry the traditional way, with flesh and feathered flocks, finds this particularly amusing:  the mechanical bird stuck in space and the dog trying first the left and then the right, nose to the ground, his hindquarters hinged to anticipate a move that will not be coming.

The bird will go nowhere, but neither will any predator consume it, the weather weaken it.  I can let it stay out all night, in the morning collect it and do all that needs to be done with only a screwdriver and clipboard.  No loss in my asset ledgers.

The community at large does not understand progress, fights any change that does not result in lower labor costs:  wedded to an economic model that paints the payments of people as the chief impediment to their own climb into sole proprietorship wealth. They hire help and watch poultry come and go, watch generations of feed get shipped in and disappear, are forever retuning the gallantry of fences.  In the end, with profit margins cut in a market they cannot understand, they blame the hired help, cut people to cut costs, count chickens as a last resort.

Minor hiccups like mine provide entertainment but are to be expected with any innovation.  See.  The roosting module is coming back on line.  The chickens are sparking into place, entering one at a time the coop, taking their places with searing cold happiness.  The dog watches them travel like a toy train trapped, with its thousand obedient cars, on an uncaring track.  He thinks he has done a good job; that he has earned his keep; that he is more than emotion and habit.  I could replace him with a good electrician.   But not yet.

I am willing to wait until buying season to see who is right.  The executives from the big processing plants, lumbering under their consumption projections and bar chart checkbooks,  will settle our dispute:  the neighbors’ fat, arbitrary chickens, howling and squirming, with a percentage lost both in transportation and to the diseases of cramp; or the meat of my beautifully mechanical birds, all in a row and turned with a joystick?  I will tap the metal breasts of my product and regale the blubbering buyers with tails of indestructibility, Gordian shelf-life, and a freedom from serendipity.  The buyers will look the spinster chances of disaster in the Medusa face, and see with me the absence of a downside.

Then, over a chilled glass of air wine, I will explain:  so what if there is nothing here to eat?  Cut out the butchers, the sorters, the package handlers.  There is something to market, and what for all of us is any better?  The matter is how you sell it:  we are entering a new age of posters and advertising, virtual feast and famine.  Out in my coop, the chickens will stand as a publicly known quantity:  take this, and you will always have what you left with.

 Ken Poyner has placed about 400 poems and stories in the small presses and on the web during the last 40 years.  He lives with his power lifting wife, who just won the USAPL National Raw Dead Lift and National Raw Push/Pull in the 48kg class, and five rescue cats in the lower right hand corner of Virginia .  Flash fiction is relatively new to him, but you can find some of his smotherings in “Corium”, “Menacing Hedge”, “Blue Fifth”, “Alice Blue”, “ Metazen ”, “Emprise Review”, and the ubiquitous elsewhere.