Kikiriki Live Poultry, Inc.

by Katrina Dahl Vogl

Cleo has let the Hiss get too loud again. It’s been two days now since she’s had any money, since she got high, and the Hiss is hissing. Saying, it’s time. So an hour ago she caved and called Louie King, and now he’s sprawled out on her bed with his boots still on, whining that Miro said he’d be home soon, right? Cleo doesn’t answer him. He knows just as well as she does that when a dope dealer says fifteen minutes they mean an hour, and when they say ‘soon’ they mean, this’ll take however long it takes.

Well, he mumbles, I’ll just be here.

On her way to the subway, scuttling down Manhattan Avenue, Cleo fingers the cash he’s given her. A hundred and fifty bucks—enough to last two days, easy. She considers buying the dope and saving it all for herself—she could tell Louie she got robbed. But he’d know, of course he would. Cleo doesn’t like Louie King much (the way he smells or the sound of his voice, the way he says her name, Cleeeeeo, or the little blackheads all over his forehead, or the face he makes when he comes, like he’s just smelled something foul), but he has never lied to her. He has clung to her, puppy-like, and it feels good to feel wanted, needed, even, and she chooses to believe that it is just that simple.

The M train clatters along toward Bushwick, above ground, and Cleo shields her eyes from the late-afternoon sun. On her right arm is an abscess as red and shiny as a ripe nectarine, and the woman sitting across the aisle is staring at it. That looks bad, Louie said to her earlier when he saw it, and she’d thought, bad is a heroin addict with an abscess on their arm, but an abscess with a person attached, now that’s bad bad. The kind of abscess that says, to anyone unlucky enough to see it, the thing attached to this doesn’t care anymore, and neither should you.

A couple feet away there’s an old man yelling that Jesus can if we let him. The woman across from Cleo stands up and switches to the next car and Cleo feels herself wilt a little, embarrassed to be who she is. Her guts churn as the Central Avenue sign comes into view in the subway window. Her body is hysterically excited. She barrels down the steps, two at a time, racing to the bodega bathroom so she doesn’t shit her pants. Bodega bathrooms all look the same: dirty bucket in the corner. A sad mop. Sad, everything sad. No hand soap. No need.

Walking out of the bodega, her cell phone vibrates. A text from Louie King: you get it? She doesn’t bother answering.

Louie King is a junkie, too, but Cleo hasn’t told him about the Hiss and doesn’t plan to. She’s had the Hiss for over a year now; she figures it’s the kind of thing a person keeps to themselves. It’s more than just dope sickness; it’s something she doesn’t have the words for, a drone in her head like someone’s left an AM station on, like someone has opened a pressure release valve somewhere in her, in the dark corners of her.

She scrambles up the four flights of stairs to Miro’s apartment, the smell of Fabuloso and bleach searing through stale cigarette smoke in the air. On the second floor landing, she leans over to dry heave next to a discarded Christmas wreath on the ground.

A woman in her mid-40’s stands in the door of Miro’s apartment: tight shirt, tight pants, curls that look hard with gel. She tells Cleo she’s Miro’s mom and then she gives her a quick once over, gaze lingering on Cleo’s arm.

Cleo follows her into the apartment and sits down on the edge of the couch. She watches Miro’s mom standing under the harsh overhead light in the kitchen, stirring a big pot of white rice. You’ll be alright, sweetie, the woman says, he won’t be long now. Salsa playing on the portable radio in front of her. Stirring the rice. Stirring, stirring. She’s got a cigarette hanging out her mouth and all Cleo can think is that the ash is going to fall into the rice and ruin everything.

The smell of the rice and the smoke sends Cleo lurching towards the tiny bathroom. She’s on the toilet, forehead resting on her knees, but there’s nothing left inside her to expel.

When the Hiss gets really bad, Cleo all at once feels the razor-sharp panic of being trapped within herself and the strange shock of seeing herself at a distance, as if she’s forced to watch a movie about a pitiful, morally repugnant person she doesn’t recognize. She watches her movie-self call Louie King, pathetic, gross Louie King, sweet-talking him for money, knowing full well how much that money will cost her later. She watches her movie-self at the mercy of her liquified insides. Doubled-over on toilets throughout the city, vomiting in stairwells. Her movie-self flails around in bed, masturbating until her hand cramps up because she can’t orgasm when she’s on dope, and her movie-self lies to the people who love her or like her or tolerate her or to anyone who’ll listen—excuse me, ma’am, I got pickpocketed and I’m not from here, I need cab money to get back to New Jersey—she watches the stubby fingers of her movie-self slip into strangers’ back pockets on the subway. She watches her movie-self steal her roommate’s money then help him look for it.

As she watches this film that she has seen so many times now, simultaneously the most horrifying and boring film there is, she feels each of her five senses turn on her, one after another, becoming little weapons. Smells slap and screech. Sounds violate. Textures turn sinister, the cold porcelain of the toilet like death itself gripping her bony ass.

She stands and flushes the toilet, hobbles out of the bathroom. Curled up in the fetal position on the couch, she watches Miro’s mom stir the rice and smoke cigarette after cigarette. The room is filled with smoke, now, and Cleo’s jaw is clenched and her toes are clenched and her stomach is clenched and all the while she feels her right arm throbbing, as if it has become its own pulse point in her body.

Finally there is Miro’s key in the door. He ambles in, smiling, and kisses his mom on the cheek before acknowledging Cleo. Cleo hands him the cash and he disappears into another room before coming back with the dope. As soon as the wax packets are in her hand, she feels better knowing she’ll soon be feeling better.

Can I use your bathroom? Cleo asks. Her voice shakes. Sometimes he lets her get high at his place, sometimes not. She’s never done it with his mom there before, but she’s too sick to care. He shakes his head no and she stands up quickly.

See you, then, she says.

You should get that checked out. Miro’s mom nods to Cleo’s arm and raises her eyebrows.

Cleo knows she’s right. One of these days, something will have to be done about it.

*

Cleo can barely make it down the stairs. Her muscles are starting to give out, wobbly as though she has just woken up. She sits down in front of the Christmas-wreath apartment and starts taking out her gear when she hears an apartment door open.

No, an older man says, hell no. No, no, no.

She doesn’t answer—just puts her stuff back in her bag and gets to getting.

When she bursts out the door into the late afternoon, Wyckoff Avenue is buzzing with the usual suspects. Throbbing bass from passing cars, honking, the nauseating sweetness of the laundromat next door: each sense cranked up to screeching. Every smell, every sound, every texture, all of it, it all hurts. It all crackles.

She looks around, wild-eyed. She knows the laundromat won’t let her use their bathroom—she’s pleaded unsuccessfully with them a number of times—and she needs to be somewhere quiet, somewhere people won’t be waiting outside thinking, how long has that girl been in there.

On the breeze is the stench of animal shit and bleach, and she looks across the street at Kikiriki Live Poultry, the live chicken shop. She’s seen this place many times, every time she leaves Miro’s, and she has never considered entering it. There’s never been a need to.

The shop’s sign is brightly colored. KIKIRIKI in blue, LIVE POULTRY, INC. in yellow. A bright red background. Around the text there are photos: a chicken, a duck with its mouth open. A white rabbit. SINCE 1912, the sign says, and under the sign is a dark doorway.

She breathes through her mouth, crosses the street, and enters.

The chicken-bleach smell lands somewhere in the back of her throat and stays there. Around her is a cacophony of little squawks and chirps. She is stunned by the sheer volume of now-useless wings; cages are stacked all along the walls, in tall aisles throughout. It is overwhelmingly, fantastically depressing, a nightmare for anyone with ears or eyes or a nose.

A man wearing a dirty white apron spots Cleo standing there and approaches purposefully. You want to buy a chicken?

Do you have a bathroom?

Down the stairs.

Already he has turned away from her. She holds her breath and weaves through the towering cages. The chickens don’t seem to notice her. A few people are scattered through the store, standing before the cages, examining the birds. In the back corner she sees the basement door and pushes it open, rushing down the steep, dark staircase.

In front of her are boxes: piles and piles and piles of boxes, hundreds of them, huge cardboard boxes that someone was too lazy to break down. The sight is unexpected and Cleo understands that under different conditions, she would have appreciated the strangeness of it, all these boxes—did that man upstairs forget about them? Why’s he letting random people see the mess he’s made? As she wades through them to the bathroom in the far corner, she pictures him throwing box after box down the stairs every day: out of sight, out of mind.

She flips the light switch: it’s exactly the bathroom she’d expect to find in the basement of a live poultry store. A dirty toilet, a few squares of toilet paper clinging to a roll propped on the sink, double-bulbed light fixture with only one light bulb in it. Cleo locks the door and feels a deep sense of calm; she always feels this same calm getting high in public bathrooms. There is something beautiful to her about being able to lock yourself inside a place that isn’t yours.

She kneels and spreads her gear on top of the toilet seat. A syringe, the cut-off bottom of a Coke can, q-tips, a short strip of rubber hose. She turns on the tap and places it under the faucet, hands shaking, and feels the heat radiating from the abscess on her arm. The process is hypnotic and deeply familiar: a series of small steps that feel exact and measured, that make Cleo herself feel exact and measured.

Finally, as she pushes down the plunger of the syringe, as she pulls the rubber tourniquet from her bicep, the Hiss goes silent. A cool flush starts in the back of her throat and floats up through her skull, heavy and light at the same time; she feels herself pulled down down down to the bathroom floor but also up, weightless and emancipated, drifting somewhere above the chicken store, above the M train. Wilt-proof, Hiss-proof, with nowhere to be but up.

 * 

Cleo wakes up on the ground.

She isn’t sure how much time has passed. The needle is on the ground next to her, and a few drops of blood from her arm have dripped sideways onto the tiles that were probably white once. She stares at the tiles for a few seconds, eye-level with them, before heaving herself up.

When she opens the bathroom door, she hears the chickens upstairs. She wades through the river of boxes to the staircase, and when she gets to the top and opens the door, she is met with darkness.

The place is closed. No lights, no people. Just her and the chickens.

The security gate has been rolled down, and she is locked inside. They must have forgotten about me, she thinks, then reflexively brings her hand to her left breast to feel the scratch of the dope she’s stored in her bra.

Against the wall, there is a row of metal folding chairs. Three of them, all lined up next to each other. She sits down on one of them and stares at the room before her, lit softly with a huge, glowing red bulb that has kept the room a comfortable temperature. Though she is no longer dope sick, though the Hiss is no longer hissing, her brain feels foggy and hard to access. The infection on her arm is getting worse.

She takes out her cell phone. Twenty-three missed calls from Louie King. Fifteen text messages, all saying more or less the same thing. Where the fuck are you.

In the cage beside her, a chicken is standing, motionless. She can’t see its coloring; only the hazy silhouette of the strange rubbery tendrils atop its head. Cleo feels for the latch on the cage and opens it.

At first the chicken doesn’t come out—just keeps standing there, staring ahead. Cleo makes some clucking noises, and the chicken cocks his head the way chickens do and takes a tentative step towards her. In the near-darkness, she sees the chicken’s eyes for the first time.

Hi, she says aloud. What’s your name?

The chicken takes another step toward her.

My name is Fredo, the chicken says.

Cleo is not disturbed by the chicken talking to her. She understands, on some level, that the chicken is not actually talking. Part of her, though, the part that remembers that she was forgotten about in a live poultry store basement, wants the voice to be real.

I’m Cleo, she says.

The chicken takes another step forward. Will you pick me up? he says, I want to be held.

She reaches into the cage and clasps the chicken’s greasy feathers between her hands. The chicken squawks at the way she’s holding it: she has never held a chicken before, and doesn’t know how to, and it pecks at her forearms, little nips that remind her of needle pricks. You can’t hurt me, she laughs, and pulls Fredo from his cage.

She draws him close to her chest. There you go, she coos. You’re alright, little chicken. She stands, moving to the center of the room. She sings: Should I try to hide, the way I feel inside? My heart for you—would you say that you, would try to love me too?

Please keep singing, Fredo says.

She feels his body relax in her arms, and while she sings she thinks about how nice it is to hold something. She thinks of Louie King, of how disgusting it feels to fuck him, how much she hates the strange stale-popcorn, handful-of-potting-soil stank of him that sticks to her sheets and skin and hair, but also how, despite that fact, despite her revulsion, despite the fact that she does not care about him or he her, she keeps returning to him.

She continues to hum the song. Her eyes are closed. She imagines that the hundreds of tiny eyes in the room are all looking at her slow dance with Fredo, and the thought of this makes her smile, that all these eyes are watching her hold something gently in her arms.

Fredo, she says to the chicken, what an interesting name. Did your mother name you that?

Fredo doesn’t answer. He has fallen asleep in her arms.

Then Cleo’s stomach rumbles, the first hunger pain she’s felt in hours. She couldn’t stomach anything all day, but now her hunger feels cavernous. Insatiable.

She gingerly bends to put Fredo on the floor. He clucks in protest and strides away from her and she bumbles through the almost darkness, pulling back thick strips of plastic that lead to the back of the store. Straining her eyes. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for, but soon stumbles upon a little mini-fridge in the corner. Inside is a can of Coca-Cola and a plate of food covered in saran wrap. She lifts the saran wrap and sniffs: roasted chicken. With her fingers, she rips off a piece and eats it, then another piece, then another. The skin of the chicken is seasoned with salt and pepper and paprika. She has never tasted anything so delicious.

There’s a peck at her shoe. Hi Fredo, Cleo says. She tosses a few pieces of the meat onto the ground and Fredo eats them. She tosses a few more. She can barely see him in the dark, but she knows that he is eating the meat and she knows, knows that he is grateful. She wants to give him more, but she has eaten every last piece, and as she looks down at him she feels her stomach drop, understanding suddenly what she has just done. She isn’t horrified by the fact that she has fed chicken to a chicken, or that she’d forgotten that the meat had, at one point, clucked and had wings; she is horrified at how proud she’d felt of herself, of her generosity, when she’d thrown Fredo the meat.

She reaches out to touch him, but he has moved away from her.

Fredo, she calls out into the darkness. Her voice cracks. Are you still there?

From across the room, he says, Where else would I be?

I’m so sorry, she mumbles. I wasn’t thinking.

These things happen, he says.

Cleo feels the heat of the abscess on her arm. This is just the way that I am, she whispers. I do things like this.

No one has ever spent the night here. No one has ever let me out of my cage.

I fed you chicken, Cleo says. I’m not a good person.

There is a long silence.

Are you going to call him back? Fredo says.

Where are the rabbits? Cleo says. The ducks? There were pictures of rabbits and ducks on the sign outside.

There have never been any rabbits or ducks here, Fredo says.

Why would they be on the sign, then?

Listen to me, Fredo says. When the sun comes up tomorrow, you get to walk out of here—

I’m sorry, I wish there was a window I could open, to let you out—

Stop interrupting. When the sun comes up, you’ll walk out of here. You’ll get to eat whatever you like. There are so many ways to live.

The words hang in the air. She thinks: chickens don’t talk.

Years earlier, before heroin, Cleo had thought, one day, maybe I could be happy, one day. And though she had not been happy then, when she’d had this thought, she’d felt that quasi-happiness one feels for the anticipation of happiness, almost better than happiness itself.

There is no other way, she says aloud. Not for me. She leans against the wall in the darkness, as still as she can be. A small voice inside her thinks: you are already dead.

She touches her cheek, then, and feels that it is freezing cold, as cold as the bathroom’s tile floor she passed out on. Maybe everything that has transpired since she left that bathroom, she thinks, it has all been happening somewhere inside her while her physical body remains on that bathroom floor. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day or the day after that, some unlucky Kikiriki employee will open the door to the bathroom and find a skinny girl dead on the floor, a needle beside her, and maybe he will say a prayer or maybe he won’t, and he will call the police and the police will call her mother and say, ma’am, I’m sorry to tell you this, but we found your daughter’s body in the basement of a live poultry store in Bushwick. Cleo’s mother will sit up in bed, alone in her dark apartment in Elmhurst, and hold the phone to her ear with both hands, as if by gripping it hard enough, she can snap the police officer out of it and make him say, my god, never mind—I’m terribly sorry for the mix-up, ma’am. Your daughter isn’t dead, after all. Her mother will hold the phone to her ear long after the police officer has hung up.

Cleo’s eyes have adjusted more to the darkness, now, and she can make out shapes, tables and doorways. She walks to a door in the back of the store and approaches a long white counter. Hung on the wall above it is a strip of knives: this is where the chickens are butchered.

Cleo, Fredo says, what’re you doing? His voice sounds far away.

Chickens don’t talk, she says, and picks up one of the knives, pushing the blade flat against the abscess on her arm until the pain is almost unbearable. She can hear Fredo pleading with her to stop, but she doesn’t. She won’t. She is grateful for the pain of it; she’s sure that she would not feel that pain if she was dead. As the knife finally pierces through her skin, the pain bursts out of her in thick yellow pus, opaque, shiny pus, streaming and streaming and streaming. She squeezes the wound until only blood remains: a gaping hole. She stares down into it and feels a quiet relief. Her outsides finally match her insides. Cavernous, body and soul.

She walks back to the room full of cages and sits down on the folding chair, rolls down her sleeve to cover the fresh wound. Outside on the street, a car drives by, stereo blasting reggaeton. Her head feels clearer and lighter with each moment that passes; she hears Fredo clucking a few feet away. She knows she will not hear his voice again.

*

She awakes around dawn the next morning.

Ma’am, says a voice in front of her, what are you doing here? She opens her eyes and sees the man who let her use the bathroom the afternoon before.

Cleo sits up in the chair. There is sunlight streaming in from the open door.

You let me use the bathroom yesterday, she says.

He shakes his head slowly. You slept there? In the bathroom?

She wants to tell him that his chickens, they have names, and to apologize for the mess she left in the butchery—blood and pus everywhere. A disgusting sight. Instead, she shrugs and says nothing.

The man looks at the empty plate beside her. You ate the chicken that was in the fridge?

She nods. I’m sorry, she says.

He reaches out and pats her shoulder firmly, the way someone pats a dog’s stomach. The sort of pat that sounds rough but isn’t. Time to go now, he says, we open soon.

Cleo stands up and follows him through the cages towards the door. In the early morning light, she can see all the chickens’ tiny faces, their brightly colored feathers. She can see them and they can see her. She looks at Fredo’s cage and sees him inside it. He is not looking at her. He is pecking at the side of his cage.

Perhaps there are other ways to live, she thinks, and then it’s back to the rattling subway, the five blocks on Norman Avenue, the left on Diamond Street and up the steps to her apartment; back to her bedroom, where Louie King is still asleep in her bed, stirring at the sound of her entering, his breathing ragged and eager as she fixes his shot first (because this is the kind of person she can be, if she chooses to, the kind that gives); back to her gear spread out on the table before her like an altar, back to this private kind of worship, this anticipation of happiness better, almost, than happiness itself.

 

Katrina Dahl Vogl is a writer and filmmaker from New York and a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writers Workshop. She was a semifinalist for the 2023 Story Magazine Foundation Prize and her creative non-fiction has appeared in The Fix; her films have screened at the New Haven International Film Festival, Miami Independent Film Festival, and others. In January 2023, she was a fiction fellow working with Sabrina Orah Mark at the Under the Volcano residency in Tepoztlan, Mexico.