Joshua Malbin1A Chicken-and-Egg StoryMelle was hatched in an incubator tray along with a few dozen other chicks, fuzzylittle Nerf balls piled together. It was cramped in there—she was always being jostled,shouldered out of the way, or even trampled when some other chick got impatient of pushing through the crowd and tried to climb overtop it instead.A day after hatching a hand reached in from the sky, took hold of her, flipped herover, and squeezed her so violently that feces ran out of her cloaca. Then the handreleased her and picked up her neighbor. That chick was returned just as Melle had been,but the next three times the hand reappeared empty to pick out another in their brood.When it was all over the chicks took stock of themselves and realized that only the girlshad been spared. It left them a little more elbow room but they were still sad. If they’dknown how they’d have mourned the boys, but they were so young they hadn’t yetlearned. All they could do was wonder if they’d be forever separated or if someday theboys might come home to the tray.But they didn’t stay in the tray themselves. They felt themselves lifted and carriedsome distance, and then they were emptied into a larger pen under an electric sun alongwith dozens and dozens of other chicks. The sun warmed them relentlessly and they soongrew to fill the small space. Their down stiffened into real feathers and their beaks grew

Joshua Malbin2heavy and strong. Just when it seemed they’d all crush each other if they grew any more,hands descended from the sky again and began to remove Melle’s sisters. When theyreached for her she panicked, terrified she’d vanish like the boys. She tried to scrambleover the other girls and did make it past a few, but that only brought her to the edge of thepen, where she was easily caught. The hands lifted her aloft and carried her a short way.A great force pushed her head forward so that her beak entered a kind of slot, and painswamped her senses. It flooded her so badly that she was forced to retreat to higherground inside herself. She hid there awhile, above all afraid of what she’d find when shehad to return to inspect the damage.When she did rejoin herself she found she was in a small wire cage with a slantedfloor, along six or seven other pullets she thought she knew from the tray. It was hard tobe sure at first because they’d all had the front parts of their beaks cut off. Her pain hadresolved itself to the center of her face, so Melle knew that the same had happened to her.A white dropping fell through the top of the cage and struck one of the others on thewing. The hen tried to extend that wing to shake it, but couldn’t find the room no matterwhich way she turned. Eventually she settled down again, retracted her beakless headbetween her shoulders, and sat still, staring fixedly ahead.Melle looked up to discover where the dropping had come from. Directly abovetheir cage was another; she could see the feet and underbellies of half a dozen or sochickens shifting over its grated floor. Every so often two of them made enough spacefor her to see past them to what looked like yet another cage full of birds. She peeredbetween her feet and found the heads and backs of half a dozen more hens, and a half-dozen beyond

them

. And there were full cages on three of her four sides. Only the fourth

Joshua Malbin3opened onto ten feet of empty space, across which a wall of cages, all filled with birds,extended beyond view to the left and right.She became aware of the incredible noise, thousands of chickens squawking at once:yelling at each other, whining about their pain, begging for mercy—and much more lostto the din.Over the next few days, as their pains began to subside, Melle started hearing otherthings in the mass cackle. Mostly it was news: Liza had fallen sick. Emily had died of her sickness and her cagemates were still living with her dead body three days later.Lucia had been taken away. Ellen had been taken away. Melissa had been taken away.Rhody had been taken away. Noreen had been taken away. A whole swathe of cageshad been put on the near-starvation diet.Melle didn’t know the chickens in these accounts. She couldn’t even guess howmany cages their stories had had to travel to reach her, nor how much farther they wouldtravel after she or some other hen near her passed them on. No one around her kneweither, and it would have been pointless to try to find out. Even if the question weretransmitted back to the cage where the information originated, those chickens wouldn’tknow any better than Melle how far they were from her. For all any of them knew, thesame stories might echo around their world of cages for days or even weeks after theyceased being relevant.At least one story definitely did reverberate like that, passing by Melle’s cage overand over in fragments until at last she was able to assemble it into a complete tale and tellit herself. Unlike all the other circulating stories it was not about hens but about theircaptors, the humans, who fed them, stole the unhatched babies that rolled away from