I noticed he was carrying a plastic shopping bag. He carried it towards me as he said, "See what my wife found in her office." (His wife is the primary art teacher, so her office is also in the school.
As the bag came closer, I got more nervous. Something didn't seem right. It was. "Ah! Ew!" I jumped backed from peering in the bag in alarm.
"It's a.. a..."
"Yup," he countered. "It's a mummified chicken."
I was shocked. Flabbergasted. And more than a little disturbed by the sight I had seen. This was a proper Chinese chicken, so the head was still attached. It looked like a little chicken baby, all wrapped up (poorly) in bandages. It was at once so recognizable as something real, and yet it was so obviously dead. And if it had been in her office, it had been there since last year.
We chatted for a few more minutes, and then he said the chicken demanded some practical joking. Perhaps leaving the chicken in an unsuspecting colleague's office. That colleague would then have to pass the chicken along to another unsuspecting colleague. Having gotten used to (sort of) the presence of the chicken, I agreed that it was a wholesome plan.
Later that afternoon, I learned that he had indeed left the chicken with a colleague. Someone whom we both thought would be all about the joke, but we were mistaken. Not only did he not shriek like a little girl (having been at the school the previous year when the chickens were ceremoniously mummified and having been alerted to the presence of the remaining chicken earlier in the day by said school counselor), he didn't even pass the chicken along. Well, he passed it along to the trash can (or rubbish bin, if you prefer) instead of another teacher.
As I was leaving school, I saw him in the hallway with his head in the door of the administrator's office. "I can't believe you threw away the chicken," I whispered.
"What did you expect me to do?" he replied.
"Not throw it away. I am shocked and saddened you would do such a thing," I continued to whisper. I didn't want to interrupt (too much) his conversation with the Powers that Be.
"Who is that whispering in the hallway?" I heard from inside the office.
And that's when it all came out. That a mummified chicken had been found. That it had been given to him (without his knowing).
"What? The last chicken!" my administrator laughed. "I thought they had all be found. Well, where is it?" she was clearly getting a kick out of the chicken, as much as I had earlier in the day. "We should leave it in a new teacher's room since they won't know what it is." She reminisced for a moment about the disgust and stink that the chicken project creates. (It turns out that what I had slowly pieced together during the day was correct: the chicken was the remnant of a 7th grade social studies projects on Egyptian mummies.)
But, the chicken was gone. The trash was taken out. I coerced my Less Than Fun Colleague into asking the cleaning ladies if they had seen it. (He tried to get me to do it, but I can barely buy something in a shop, let alone ask a cleaning lady where a mummified chicken has gotten to.) We eventually worked out that the chicken had left the building. In a trash bag.
I went to get my bike and head home. Excitement notwithstanding, it was time. My path takes me by the trash heap, however. (It'd be a dumpster anywhere else, but here it's just a pile of trash bags on the ground.) My Less Than Fun Colleague came running after me. He knew where the chicken was! It was in the pile of trash bags! That were being loaded into the trash compactor truck. (Cue sad trombone.) My Less Than Fun Colleague stepped up to help me peer into a couple of trash bags, and even asked the men if they knew of it. Either they totally didn't understand him, didn't care, or had already been freaked out by the chicken themselves because they told us that it was already in the compactor.
And thus ends the life and death of the Last Mummified Chicken. (Until this year's class makes them?)
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| From Random Beijing |
To be continued...
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