rabies parachutes

This is the exact moment I was supposed to have turned into a vegetarian. It is a highly self-conscious moment, a moment that announces itself as poignant and epiphanic. I am standing with my mother, we are up to our wrists in potatoes, rotating, scrutinizing, our hands are dusted a soft yellow, the man sitting behind the dizzying mounds of potatoes is discreetly scratching his crotch. We fill up one of the plastic baskets with hand-picked tubers. Their eyes are winking at me. We know we'll end up with some rotten ones anyway. Or maybe we won't. I am too cynical sometimes. On the other side of the potato seller is the man with his cage bursting with chickens. There is a boy beside him, together they are a well-greased, blood-slicked machine. The boy lops the dirty white wings off with two motions Hemingway would have given his arms for. The squawking amputated chickens are thrust at the man, who bends them over something and hacks their heads off. The bodies catch up a little late, pretending to swim free-style in the ripe air of the market.

Do you see the poignancy?

Do you?

I was supposed to have been transfixed by the brutality of this sight. 'Never again,' I was supposed to cry (on the inside), 'Shall I assist in the perpetuation of this brutal cycle of violence and genocide.' I was supposed to dream of dancing headless chickens, to drop my fork in horror the next time I laid eyes on the corpse transformed, marinaded and paraded, flesh unto meat, and quiver like a good little consumer whose ignorance and hypocrisy had been exposed.

Why am I writing this when I haven't finished my final piece for college?

Perhaps I shall write about headless wingless chickens.

Perhaps I shall write about potatoes.

Perhaps I shall write about how hard it is to be a vegetarian.