I believe we may have become lovers, if only we’d had the opportunity to nestle up close to one another. As it was, we were companions who, through great twists and turns of fate, saw each other through the most frightful of times.

I noticed her first, amongst the wriggling, writhing mass of yellow fluff and cheeping. You see, she was such a different colour – it was her blue-grey down that initially struck me, somehow giving me comfort, a break in our otherwise yellow world of fluff and fluorescent light. So I stuck near her, and as I did, I gradually started to notice her level of calm and composure in the general furore.

How long did we live that way? Well, I was so young that I can’t be sure. The hands would come in and grab at our contemporaries. I didn’t know where they went for a while, but we always knew we would find out. One day, a hand came in and grabbed me and performed some action whereby my beak tip was burned clean away, and I was stuffed into a cage.

I thought I would never see my dear Blue-Grey again, and for some time, I didn’t. I had others above me, below me, and to my sides, but none were a substitute for Blue-Grey. But then came the next great twist of fate; one of the birds to my side was weak and died early on. It took several days for the hands to notice, and I suffered the trauma of her dead being during that time as her forlorn face lay pressed up against the wall of the cage adjoining mine. But this terrible trauma became a blessing because when they finally came for her body, for some reason unbeknownst to us, they stuffed Blue-Grey into the cage in her place. Even though our plumage had changed considerably since our early days, I recognised her instantly, and she me. We stared at each other longingly through the cage bars, and Blue-Grey gave her gentle clucking sound, which soothed me greatly. From then on, whenever the bright fluorescent lights were switched out, we would both huddle towards the same side of our respective cages so that our bodies would touch as far as they possibly could, the only comfort in life that either of us ever received amongst the filth and noise and claustrophobia and degradation.

One day, the hands reached in, took Blue-Grey and broke her neck before my very eyes. I found it so unbearable that I shuddered and shook and vowed never to open my eyes again during the rest of my life, lest I should once more witness anything so traumatising. I did not have to keep my vow long as the next day, I was grabbed from my cage, and my neck was swiftly snapped. Aside from the physical shock, I must admit that my own death was rather less traumatic than witnessing the death of Blue-Grey, especially as it led to the liberation of my soul from that most terrible of lives. I saw many other chicken souls fly off freely from the moment of their death, but I was not yet quite ready to let go of my body. Mercifully, the life had been well and truly wrung out of me, for the wrenching of feathers from my body would otherwise have been quite painful, I’m sure. Many would not be able to bear the sight of their own body made headless and denuded, then shrouded in plastic film, but for some reason, I could not yet desert it.

I followed my body through the darkness of transit until again it was thrust into the fluorescent yellow light of a food hall. I perched on the edge of a supermarket shelf and looked down at myself for some time before the next great miracle came as Blue-Grey’s body was shoved next to mine. I’m not sure how I knew it was hers, but it seems that in death, there are things that we see that we cannot while alive. So, I was not surprised to find the soul of Blue-Grey alight next to my own. Although we no longer had bodies with which to become close to one another, we were overjoyed at being reunited at last without the confines of the cages and beyond the possibility of the hands having any further control over our lives.

As our souls nestled together as much as souls possibly can, a family trawled down the aisle, plump and pink, looking not unlike our plucked carcasses. Their eyes widened as they saw that our bodies were two for the price of one. They took Blue-Grey and me and slung us into their shopping trolley, another wire cage, but a somewhat more spacious and luxuriant one than I had known whilst living.

That Sunday, we were roasted side by side in the oven. Unfortunately, the family was less able to consume the two of us than it had hoped, and after Blue-Grey was ripped up and devoured, I was left rather forgotten for several days. The father of the family then attempted rather naïve recompense for the wastage and boiled me into a soup. The stench of my rancid remains spread thick throughout the house and hung in the air for days. I suppose you could say that this was the final insult, but through these actions, Blue-Grey and I found ourselves absolved of the horror and torment of our lives as the family absorbed the energy of that foulness and spent the rest of the week in dispute.

With that horror stripped from us, we became purified, and our souls were left as nothing but love.