Emotionally Scarred

One day I assigned my students to write about a significant event. The assignment was to retell the event and then explain how it affected them.

Most of the students wrote about the death of a grandparent or the birth of a sibling. Two students, however, wrote about an event that seemed extremely insignificant to me. Perhaps their lives were pleasant. Perhaps nothing traumatic or seemingly important had happened.

Perhaps there were too many horrifying things to choose from.

One of the girls is a student that I also give private English lessons to. I was talking with her and her mother the other day, and somehow it came up that the girl had once had a pet chicken.

This fascinated me. A pet chicken? In an apartment in Paris?

In a very lighthearted tone the mother told me how it was a tradition in her culture (they’re not from France) that when you get a new car you are to sacrifice an animal and rub its blood on the vehicle to ward off potential traffic accidents.

Normally it’s a cow, but as they couldn’t reasonably (hmm… reasonably) keep a cow in the apartment, they bought a chicken.

The girl kept it as a pet for a few days. When the time came, the mother, daughter, and nanny went down into the parking garage to slaughter the chicken.

The mom told the nanny to do it, but the young Russian nanny refused. So, the mom chopped the chicken’s head off with a knife, the little girl ran away screaming, and then they rubbed the new Mercedes down with chicken blood.

Of course, they also ate the chicken for dinner. (No doubt the nanny was forced to pluck and debone it).

If you grow up on a farm, I suppose cutting the heads off of chickens might not be that odd of an event. However, if you’re growing up in an apartment in the city, I’d say decapitating a chicken in a public parking garage would rank pretty high on my list of significant events.