THE VEGETARIAN
Gayle
The other day, my mom was cleaning a chicken....you know, the dead
kind - the kind you eat. Notice, I say "you". That's because I don't
eat dead chickens anymore. I don't eat live ones either, of course.
I just don't eat chickens. Not after seeing a perfectly shaped
chicken just sitting on the kitchen counter getting its last tiny
feathers plucked out, just before getting cooked, cut up into pieces
and eaten for dinner. It's easy when it's chicken salad - or even
chicken cutlets - if you just never think about where it came from.
But, I mean there it was - it looked just like a chicken - just like
the kind you see on a farm or in a petting zoo. Except this one was
bald. Bald and dead. I just decided right then and there that I
couldn't do it. I told my mom "starting right now, I'm a
vegetarian!" Without so much as a blink she said "So, should I make
you some spinach for dinner tonight?" "What do you mean?" I asked
her. It had never occurred to me that vegetarians actually eat
vegetables.
© 1998 Jill Abusch, Barbara Orwick at The Play Group Theatre for
children and Young Adults