Nov
26
Light Chicken Soup by Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah
I’m vegan. I’ve lived with this for my whole life. My girlfriend, Constance, for a time was thinking that I was a Buddhist. I don’t know why I’m vegan. But I’ve enjoyed living my life. Maybe that’s why I’ve found birds and especially fowls in space. I keep all kinds of fowls, including Silkie, Brahma chicken, Ayam Cemani, Sussex chicken, Ameraucana, Ga Noi, Naked Neck, Ayam Kampong, Dong Tao, and Minora chicken, and Constance is aiding in this respect by adding all kinds when she returns from her long journeys. She’s following me. She’s keeping ducks, turkeys, and pheasants. You ask yourself, are they for poultry or game? I don’t know. That’s why you don’t. We enjoy having them around. She wants to stop, using animal products such as silk and leather.
My Aunt Josie who’s visited me is sitting at my writing desk, varnishing her nails. She says, “Constance must be in to prepare my chicken soup. Since losing my job I’ve been a vegetable.”
Maybe she remembered the scent of her siblings’ house, where the fragrant smell was always the children’s soup. You can read the best stop in cuts of chicken meat: the breast, tenderloin, back, wing, leg, drumstick, thigh, giblet, and neck. The soup pot was full of ingredients like carrots, onions, celery, parsnips and dill. Uncle had many friends who came in for the cuts. The fragrant smell was everywhere. The putrid smell of rotten meat was everywhere. Those days were gone. But they’re still within everybody who goes there or comes here. The scent of this childhood.
“Why don’t you continue with this? You look very fine in your clothes. I like it.”
“Are you playing a game with me?”
“How? When this game is a variant of baseball. Aunt, what are you going to do when the stones are worn and broken?”
“I’ve warned you not to call me by the word aunt.”
“Josie,”
“Yes honey, you know whom I’m referring to.”
“They say, better insulation of your home will help to reduce heating bills.”
I’ve eventually wormed the secret out of her.
“Honey, don’t worry. My previous boss will act as a reference for me in the new place I’m searching for.”
“You must come clean this time.”
She refutes any suggestion that she behaved unprofessionally.
She’s looking at my new yellow jacket. This jacket zips up right to the neck. Almost like the naked neck chicken.
“You remind the preacher at your dad’s funeral. He opened the sermon with a real zinger.”
She knows I’m a baseball player. She loves that game very much. That’s why we’re very close to each other. She’s only three years older than me. At first, my mom thought that she was having an affair with me. Though they’ve worked on their differences, there’s still misunderstanding between them. She’s the last born from a different mother. My mom hates her mother very much. In those days when Josie was 15 and she was in during her dad’s funeral, her elder sisters, my mom, Aunt Mercy, and Aunt Philippa would group and eat chicken. Aunt Philippa was always having chicken thighs in her mouth. I was served with ploughman’s lunch.
“Prices vary according to the type of room you require,” Aunt Philippa told my mom. She put as much feeling into her voice as she could. Relations of Josie’s mother were in. Their accommodation was a huge debate among my mothers.
“All the houses look bewilderingly similar,” Aunt Marcy
“I know what I’ll be doing for the next three weeks but I haven’t thought beyond that,” my mom changed the subject.
“We can’t leave them in Eric’s place,” Aunt Philippa reminded with a plummy accent. She smiled, but privately she was furious.
My mom’s old friend, who’s a bird with a whitish throat, would offer the smell of chicken soup and the confab among them could be the plinth. Though she was quiet listening, she held the plenary powers to be here. Mom held that view. Her siblings weren’t in line with this view.
“You give them my house or you find a decent place for them to lodge,” Uncle Eric demanded from my aunts when he was passing by. “Please, don’t forget that that hotel is closed for refurbishment.” He hung his coat on a nail protruding from the wall. The phone rang. He picked the receiver and said, “The building work will go ahead, despite protests from the local residents.” He left the phone off the hook as he didn’t want to be disturbed. He told his sisters, “I’m not the putative father of any child. It’s all a ploy to distract attention from my real aims.” He whizzed down the road on his motorbike to the countryside.
I got on my bicycle and rode off. Josie was running after me. The photographers pursued their quarry through the streets. My granddad was very worthy, owning a cloth making industry.
You want your light chicken soup. You’re like your elder sisters. Let’s go somewhere a bit more private.
“If only I had known you then,” she says wistfully.
“Are you here to relish a fight?” I asked her again.
“I don’t know. I see, I relive the horror of my childhood every night in my dreams.”
“What’s that meant?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must start to know from here. I know you’re lying to know.”
“You want me to accept the charge without protecting what my mother used to do?”
“I wish I could marry her.”
“Your mother?” she says with a failed voice. She clutches her bag protectively. “Nobody could quarrel with your conclusions.” She peels and quarters an apple. “Have you finally plucked up the courage to ask her for a date?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can I do that for you?”
“No. Leave Constance for me. I’m going to do that someday.”
It’s very difficult to find light chicken soup at the moment. The birds are free within their space clucking, bawking and purring.
Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is a multilingual poet, multidisciplinary artist, algebraist, journalist, publisher and wanderer. He is the author of District 7, a collection of flash fiction. He edits RawPaper, an academic journal. His individual pieces have appeared in more than 500 journals, including JMWW, Constellations
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