Elevator Chicken

The women in the elevator are looking at me as if I’ve lost it. They’ve receded to the back two corners of the lift and are clearly wondering what to make of it all as I rush in from the fifth floor, squat down to take two pictures and proceed to grin like a maniac.

It’s still there. The chicken.

It’s cold, dead and whoever left it had concrete plans for kebabs but instead of a last sizzling hurrah, the chicken has been travelling up and down the apartment building stuck in some kind of purgatory for poultry.

I’m happy to see it and even happier to have witnesses.

Sometimes I’ll say things like: “So this one time I was in an elevator with a chicken…” and people will look at me as though I’m a product of infant concussion before insisting I look into therapy for pathological lying, my weak ankle and my matching love life.

But there it is.

No clucking figment of my imagination.

Rather a packet of Checkers chicken breasts and kebab sticks left on the elevator floor for over an hour.

A gorgeous woman in a suit interrupts my glee.

She’s coloured, chic and as baffled as can be and even more so when I respond to her question in the negative.

“Is this your chicken?”

It isn’t.

I don’t know whose it is. But I rode with it to get some Indian takeout and rode back up with it when I got home and, after all that time together, it seemed fitting to rush back to my apartment, grab my phone and take a picture of my friend in its final hours.

The woman seems to understand.

She’s flanked by two younger women who look like relatives and we all get off at the same floor while discussing what on earth may have happened to the hen.

The chic one thinks it was forgotten.

Like me, she’s seen tenants dumping shopping outside the elevator, racing against the closing door so her theory is, that in all their haste, they simply forgot the Checkers chicken thus dooming it to elevated eternity.

A woman who looks like her daughter agrees but thinks someone really ought to take it to the guard because who’s to say people will simply look, not touch instead of scooping it up as good luck.

She’s right.

From its quality – the good, fleshy stuff you buy at the beginning of the month – if someone with fewer scruples than they have cash saunters in hungry, alone and with an earnest belief in Jesus, the elevator chicken will be in real danger.

Personally, I’d never eat anything off an elevator floor but she has a point.

The problem here is that the guard hasn’t been at his desk for the last hour and moving the chicken may fudge the owner’s retracing of their steps should they ever begin the Great Chicken Hunt of Apartment XYZ.

Not wanting to tamper with the investigation, we agree that leaving the chicken where it lays is probably the most practical course. Great chicken hunts and all things considered.

Me?

At first I thought it was a bomb. Fleetingly, fantastically as I saw it lying there for no logical reason in the world, I considered the terror filled headlines, my fear of freak accidents and thought:

“So this is how it ends. Local columnist killed by Checkers chicken bomb.”

She’s prepared me for undignified death by insisting I wear good underwear in case I get into an accident but I don’t think she has plan for tempering the media storm or the insensitive memes that will undoubtedly follow “death by Checkers chicken bomb”.

I don’t think anyone does.

And as I pull myself towards myself, get my take-out and return to find the chicken still chilling, I realise that somewhere out there someone won’t be having kebabs.