“You want a live chicken?” asked the short Oriental woman, gesturing to two curious young men on Chicago Avenue. “C’mon in here, I get you live chicken.”
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She then walked behind a large scale. A hundred chickens, mourning doves, and quails filled their very temporary home–Williams Live Chickens, 1512 W. Chicago–with the sound of squawking.
One of the two pointed meekly to a fluffy young hen, and the woman grabbed it by the neck and threw it on the scale. From there she dispatched it to a large bin, which contained it while the woman tore a piece of paper off a brown bag and wrote down a price. Then she handed the bird to another woman who could have been her sister. She took the chicken into the back of the shop, where it was quickly and (evidently) painlessly killed, then hung it upside down to drain its blood.
“Chicken very dead now, won’t hurt you for sure,” she said, laughing. “But I forget, you used to frozen one, so I put in bag.”
