Chicken Drummers
By andy
- 810 reads
Lisa Pergert was unfortunately ugly. Very ugly. Ugly to the point of
exaggeration. Totally hyperbolical. Words couldn't describe her. They
refused. Vowels would scrEAm. Consonants would make a run for i.
If you try and imagine those fish that swim very close to the seabed in
places where the sea gets really deep, then that's roughly the facial
situation regarding Lisa Pergert. She was aware of this. It obviously
cut deep but she didn't try to hide it, realising that this would have
been foolish and would have taken up way too much time.
Lisa was an artist. An artist who worked on one subject and one subject
only, with care and love and precision like those Dutch masters who
toiled for months on lemons and fish and boats and wished that they
were born in a Catholic country so that they could loosen up and paint
some big fat mother fucker cherubs.
The Chicken Drumstick was a subject that tortured Lisa as much as it
enticed her. The varieties of skin colouring, the tenderness of the
pink flesh. The coquettish way the bone peeked out at the end.
And then one day a new Halal butchers opened up a few doors down from
her. As the chicken pieces were loaded in through the back door Lisa
turned up at the butchers with her collection of paintings.
They brought tears to the eyes of the proprietor and he immediately
agreed to hang them in the windows of his shop.
This was devotional art. Frau Angelica would have been hard pushed to
emanate such spirituality. Caravaggio would never have done the crispy
bits that good.
A sacred glow seemed to emanate from the windows of the butchers and
passers by were dumbstruck at the beauty of these works. The vegetable
shop proprietor next door became very envious and got a mate to knock
up some aubergine paintings, but they looked cheap and amateurish in
comparison and the artist later hanged himself quoting Ivan Karamazov
and cursing his inability to get a good purple pigment.
Soon the chicken drumsticks became a cause celebre and notable art
critics were travelling to the butchers shop to pass their judgement.
Mr Patak made sure that he always had a good supply of the things to
sell as souvenirs and before long they were being bought by the
trendiest restaurants in town and people began to eat chicken
drumsticks as part of their daily routine.
Those in the know would carry them around in their top pockets like
cravats, or whip one out and take a crafty bite in the middle of a
conversation to make a point. A whole etiquette of chicken drumsticking
came into being with books and accessories and a series where chicken
drumstick experts - a growing field - would visit peoples houses and
shove chicken drumsticks up their hosts arses until their eyes began to
rotate involuntarily.
Childrens television programmes introduced characters shaped like the
fucking things.
The Drumstick was adopted as a symbol of national pride. The ceremonial
mace was replaced by the biggest one that could be found, courtesy of a
competition in the Daily Mirror, although it later turned out that it
was the leg of a Mr Harry Parsons who had been the unfortunate result
of early dabbling in genetic engineering when the restrictions were
much more lax and his mother had too many bills to give up on a chance
of one night with The Cockerel.
Chicken Drummer bars sprung up around the hot spots of the major
cities. Club goers were encouraged to dance like chickens and to shit
all over the floor while The Big Fox Man would come and slit the
throats of those who felt too shy to dump in public.
Meanwhile Lisa felt trapped by her success. Whenever anybody asked her
out for a date they would dress up like Colonel Sanders, in an effort
to impress. Every time she woke up in the morning she would see a
smiling moustachioed man lying next to her and it began to drag her
down.
Vegetarians began to regale her. She became the focus of their anger as
vast tracts of land were bulldozed to make way for vast plants full of
battery hens where, thanks to genetic engineering, chicken were raised
with no wings, just drumsticks with a couple of feet and a beak.
And then one night a group of Chicken Drumstick Liberationists broke
into the compounds and let the Drumstick creatures loose. They ran
across the land and ripped off a couple of petrol stations before
gathering in a small clearing.
Lisa was walking through the woods, driven to distraction by yet
another man telling her that she was 'finger licking good', when she
heard a pitiful sound. She turned and saw the Drumsticks. Her work had
been made animate and was standing opposite her.
'Man look at us' one of them said. Lisa assumed that he was the head
Drumstick by his confident air. He had a swagger in his stride for one
so ludicrous. (That Chicken drummer was one mean son of a bitch. You
could have stuck him under a grill for a week and still his flesh would
have spurted blood all over you).
But Lisa was not afraid by what she saw and took them to Mr Pataks and
showed them the paintings and they cried and cried tears of thin pink
blood.
And now we want to die they said. You must destroy us Lisa. We have
recognised our true beauty. There is nothing else to live for. And man
what the fuck kind of colour is that for an aubergine?
And so Lisa gathered them once more in her arms and took them home and
laid down with them on a pyre that she built.
That night all those who lived in the neighbourhood of Lisa Pergert
said that there was a strange odour in the air, a thin mist that crept
under doors and through windows and which slinked its way around
furniture and ornaments and shuffled into shoes and coat pockets
hanging in wardrobes. And this odour was beautiful. It seemed to carry
a sound. A gentle sizzling that evoked images of beautiful barbecues on
lawns the sizes of football pitches where the trees were as though they
had been seasoned by the hand of God and the sky was not a distant
thing but wound itself round the bodies of all those present and spoke
to them of many mysteries.
And the next morning the town woke to find itself encased in a layer of
chicken drumstick fat. People rubbed it from their eyes and cleared it
from their noses before slithering out of their beds and finding their
houses covered in this sticky film.
All that was left of Lisa Pergert was a delicate pile of ashes which
still managed to look real ugly somehow. And so the paintings were
taken down. And nobody could bring themselves to crap in clubs anymore
and quite a few of The Big Fox Men found themselves being rounded on
and went back to more humdrum jobs.
And suddenly the aubergine painting looked wonderful. It really did.
And the word began to spread. But of course it was too late for Dave
the painter who'd done the noose thing.
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