We hang them so carefully, the neat net curtains with which we shield ourselves from inconvenient truths. And should an unlikely breeze part them for just a second, lifting the corner in an idle flap, we hasten to close the gap, fussing the edges, tugging the hems. Letting in enough light to convince ourselves we see the day clearly. But very occasionally, something happens. The fabric is blasted from the frame, the frosted glass shatters, and the fragile membranes separating the world we choose from the one we shun are nothing but damp tissue paper stretched taut over wire, the skin of an overblown balloon bursting with unbearable inevitability. And we cannot help but see.

It is a filthy day in January. We are driving off the motorway in fierce rain and midwinter mist, and sadness is settling inside the car as my sister and I contemplate the coming reality of our other sister’s death. About 2 p.m. That nothing sort-of time when the morning is done, but the day, though darkening, is far from conclusion and comfort. And suddenly I see you. An incongruous pool of white on the water-blackened tarmac. Every passing headlight illuminating the terrifying stillness of your still living body in the centre of two lanes of streaming, speeding cars. I can’t compute what I’m seeing. I panic. I want to brake, but I can’t. And suddenly we are passing and I stare down in horror, and I see you. And you see me. Eyes bright amid all your broken-legged intelligence. A feather-wrought body never meant to be seen. And at this intersection of life and death, it is as though the windshield has splintered, and the freezing rain drenches our smug seclusion. I no longer see you through the safe detachment of a screen. I no longer see you as one of many billions. I see you.

But believe me, I have tried not to. I turn the radio up the several times a week I pass the same spot. I try not to remember your exact position on the road. Try not to see the speed of the traffic just here, or to recall my failure to act. Because maybe I could have pulled over. And maybe somehow heroically stopped the cars. Maybe a better me would have. But I didn’t, and the following day there was no sign of you. I scour the liter-strewn verge. Are those feathers? I do not want to think about your certain fate. Your confusion and terror. The searing pain of your fractured bones. The overwhelming noise and height of the tyres on the road. The softness of you. But the radio doesn’t go loud enough, and so now I am here, trying to tell the story of the fleeting second our lives crossed, in the hope that someone else might read it, might share this burden of knowing you. Might somehow gentle the image of your broken, breathing body pyrographed into my brain. In the hope that someone else might see you too.

We all “see” you, of course. We all see you every day. In the supermarket. In the adverts. In the multitude of abattoir lorries with their stacked loads of bright yellow, plastic crates. Living, sentient protein, your existence is generally obfuscated and obscured. It is important that we don’t really see you, because the system for which you have just become the unwitting figurehead is dependent upon our not seeing you. But the veil between worlds is not so very thick, and we are willing accomplices. Surrounded in the supermarket aisle by the anonymous, plastic-wrapped, nakedness of your soya-fed flesh, it is almost inconceivable to think now that we once celebrated you for anything but. That we honoured you for your excellent mothering and fierce commitment to your family. That we hailed you for your wit, timekeeping, and innate beauty. And yet here, by some freak chance, or perhaps an inherent will even yet undimmed by us, you have made it once more impossible to ignore the irrepressible birdness of your living, shattered body. You have made it impossible not to see. I will never know exactly how you came to be in the middle of the road that January day. I can hardly bear to consider the ironic horror of a bid for freedom. But in falling from the lorry, you evaded the evasion. Silently defied the yellow-crated silence. You will no longer be invisibly “harvested” or processed or consumed, and although killed just as surely, the storm-sodden implausibility of your exotic death leaves a radiant stain that cannot be ignored.

In cheating the slaughterhouse knife, you join instead, of course, the unending parade of foxes, badgers, deer, and hedgehogs littering the road. Twisted forms as familiar and unseen as the plastic detritus with which they lie. Unavoidable, we think – if we think of them at all. Inevitable, we mutter, as we pull the net curtain tighter. But in those briefest of moments, when you so radically disrupted the cellophaned acceptability of your discontinued life, you achieved what the bodies of the countless road dead have not in a hundred years. Separated from the masses, and the unlikeliest of roadkill, you became unique. No longer one of billions, and dying before us in all the anguish we would rather not see, you committed the transgression of becoming yourself. And in the sharp focus of your individuality, you shine, as though from a beacon, the brightest of lights on all the other ungrievable lives strewing the edges of our own. You have illuminated them in the glorious singularity of their own lived experience. Enabled them, too, to rise from the dark smear on the tarmac, to become, to our shielded eyes, themselves. To inhabit the vital quirks of their own particular personalities and to endure the chaos and torture of their own exceptional death. In that moment your body became a portal in which systems collided, membranes tore, and all the worlds met. It was Paul McCartney, in the famous PETA campaign, who said “If slaughterhouses had glass walls…”. Well, you did it. You created the glass wall of the slaughterhouse. And on that bleakest of days, from the snowy pool of your rain-soaked, filth-spattered feathers, you looked up at us in those moments before the violence of your own, very public death, and in the luminous burst of your pain and fear, you forced us to look back.

The net curtain is down. Tattered, torn, and trampled at my feet. The slivers of glass that remain in the frame are jagged and sharp and hold the promise of lost blood. There never were any feathers. Not the next day, or the next. Not even when I drove as slowly as I dared and asked my eagle-eyed daughter to look as we crawled past. It is as though you never existed. I can only imagine that your already-crushed bones will be joining the others, adding to the stratigraphic curse in the geological record. An indelible marker of us. Because I saw you. But I will never forget that you saw me too. In all the shame of my humanity. I bend and pick up the shreds of fabric at my feet. I have been unsure what to do with the memory of you that hovers almost continuously at the periphery of my thought. My stitching is poor, but in the unflinching light of this new day, I will instead write you a shroud. I will weave a shroud of words. A shroud that will never hold your bones, just the echo of your singular, glowing life. And, just perhaps, this shroud might allow others to see you too.

Images
Featured Image: Singular Lives I. Collected bones of rescued caged hens, loved by the author during the years of their retirement, by Ibby Lanfear.
Image 2: Singular Lives II, Collected bones of rescued caged hens, loved by the author during the years of their retirement, by Ibby Lanfear.