Portrait of the Artist Chopping Chicken
He grabbed one of the four glistening, plump pink thighs from
the black polystyrene foam container. It was slimy and slippery and he almost
dropped it. Now tight in his grip, he slapped it down on the big plastic
chopping board. He flipped the thigh over and unfurled its flaps: an underside fatmottled
and gristly. He picked up the large, shiny kitchen knife from the left of the
chopping board and, in this motion, roughly determined the middle of the thigh.
He drew down the knife at this co-ordinate and began to saw – rapid strokes, aggressively,
vigorously. It was harder to cut than he had expected: the knife seemed blunt;
the chicken too tough.
He gently placed the knife on the
left side of the chopping board. He flipped over the right half of the thigh so
the smooth pink side was showing again. He rotated it 90° clockwise, then
lifted it and put it down higher on the chopping board – away from the other half
to leave some space for sawing. He drew down the knife onto the far right-hand
side of the half-thigh and began sawing along a vertical axis. At last he managed
to wrestle away a sliver of flesh from the recalcitrantly splaying mass. He
grabbed the sliver (slimy, sticky) and wristflicked it into the nearby ceramic
bowl.
He repeated the actions described
in the last sentence until the chicken had been separated into roughly equal
slivers, then repeated the actions described in the last three sentences except
with the left half instead of the right half, then repeated the actions
described in every sentence and clause up to this one seven more times (there were
two cartons of four thighs he had to chop-up).
Eventually, under the tap, he sluiced
the slime off his hands… and suddenly realised the lyrical, onomatopoeic/synaesthesia-exploiting
potential of the verbal documentation of the actions he’d just performed!
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