Hi! I don't have a tumblr, but I am actually on yours because of how much I loved Lost Kings specifi

[dragonlady7]

tw animal slaughter, animal death, gross dead animal nonsense, is my personal brand, Anonymous

via https://ift.tt/371uXxO

Ah thank you!! I’ve got such a soft spot in my heart for that strange little series. I put a lot of myself into it, weirdly.

I often think about the chicken slaughter scene in Hepatomancy https://archiveofourown.org/works/9214547 when it’s chicken processing day on the farm. And then sometimes I wonder what I was thinking, like why would you tie up so much plot in such a gory scene? But then I am mostly just satisfied; I’ve never read any other fiction featuring a chicken processing scene.

So, I’m putting an excerpt behind the cut, and if you’re on Dreamwidth the cut won’t work, sorry, so, TW for animal death and vivid descriptions of innards!

This was so familiar as to be instinctive, the normal structures– soft, soft intestines, the firm roundness of the gravel-and-muscle gizzard, the smooth tapering lobes of liver, dissolving flimsiness of lung, the oblong lump of heart– and then he encountered something sharp and hard and wrong, and yanked his hand out with a startled exclamation of disgust.

“What?” Salah asked.

“Ugh,” Kes said, composing himself, and gingerly reached back in. He grabbed the gizzard, which would serve well enough as a handle, and pulled the whole mass of entrails out. It didn’t come neatly, of course. And there, in the middle, was an accretion of some kind, maybe some foreign body that had gotten into the body cavity and then attacked by the immune system. “Ugh, it’s just– it’s a tumor or growth or something, ugh.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that either,” Salah said, peering over.

“Ew,” Karzai said. “You get all the gross ones today, huh?”

Kes made a face, and made himself reach back into the bird and get the rest of the viscera, the heart and lungs and– ugh, he hadn’t loosened the esophagus enough, he had to wrap it around his fingers and really pull hard to try to get it. It gave suddenly, and he knew that meant it had broken and he’d left the crop.

“Ew,” Salah was saying. She’d pulled the offending accretion over and was poking at it with the tip of her knife.

“Don’t,” Kes said, and took it from her and threw it into the gut bucket.

“What is it?” she asked, craning her neck curiously.

“They’re bad luck,” Kes said, which wasn’t quite what it was. Normal procedure was to let Norasol look at them, but she’d said, if you didn’t know what you were doing, it was better to leave them be. He was leaving it be. He shook himself off a little, and went back in to get the crop out of the bird’s neck opening before sliding the carcass down to Karzai.

Comments

[rmc28]

I am watching a panel at FIYAHCon about MiddleGrade SF, and they have Rebecca Roanhorse on and she just said the biggest thing she learned about Star Wars is they don't have chickens in Star Wars. So she had to make her space chickens have blue feathers and give them a different name, to make the folks at Lucasfilm happy. And that cracked me up. And also my immediate association of Star Wars Chickens is this fic of yours and I had the urge to come and tell you how Rebecca Roanhorse, official published author of Star Wars tie-in novels, also wanted Star Wars Chickens.