A Day in the Life of Two Farm Animals

The sky has suddenly gone dark, depriving us one of those Californian sureties - a sunset, as if a housewife in Victorian garb in an anti-Liliputian world has mistaken our sun for a poached egg and served it to her farmer husband for breakfast. Maybe he belches a little, and even farts as an afterthought, resonating the crowing of the hen as it yawns and turns off its alarm clock - one of those retro pieces whose rude unfiltered ringing always gives you a headache the first thing in the morning. Maybe there is a system, and every day of the week a different hen crows at approximately the same time, but in a different note, and during their leisure time, the seven hens make music with their respective notes, and the farmer, or his wife for that matter, can't stop them because they are protected by severe labor laws, like in Italy.

Maybe the wife envies the labor laws and wishes she had something like that to accentuate her nagging as a defense mechanism. After all, who likes to wake up and serve breakfast to an uncouth man lacking Victorian manners. I wonder what she does when all the housework is over and she's had her fourteen hour bath, say at 11 am, when her husband is off in the farm, buttering up the hens. She can't be thinking of sex, can she? I mean she doesn't really have a frame of reference, does she? A few minutes of pain under Victorian layers and navy blue overalls can't be much fun. And that's all she's ever had. Now, she has no poster of blue-eyed Paul Newman on the rickety walls of her bathroom to touch herself in the bath, does she? Maybe she thinks about how the hens do it, but then she falsely realizes that they are asexual beings.

The man gets drunk on milk after he returns home from the farm. Stop being so cynical! It's hen's milk. You can reach an intoxicated existence if you have enough of it. Plus, it works slowly, like arsenic, and builds up an involuntary craving in its users over years, much like an arcane piece of art or music that grows itself on you gradually, like a Parisian parasitic virus. Maybe he starts talking in guttural French after he is completely inebriated. He puts on an invisible tutu and puts on a little dance for his wife, singing in an Edith Piaf voice during the performance. She laughs, throwing her arms around and brushing the tears off the corners of her squinty little hen-like eyes, rocking back dangerously in her wooden chair, that she is anyway spilling out of. She knows he does back flips for the hens on the farm that she will never see, and yet, she is happy for a few minutes, to sample this cultured little departure, before they both fall asleep in their respective perches, not really ready, but still thankful, to be woken up by a different note.