Sleepless Nights 89 - The Chick.

There was this one time when I was a kid. I was playing outside, minding my own business and being so utterly lost in fantasy when I noticed a couple of chicks (The animal ones, obviously) being stuck in a drain. The mother (Which was also an animal) was distressed and couldn't do anything because it was a fucking chicken so I thought 'Yeah, I'm going to help these helpless creatures'. I had a conscience back then, apparently.

So I bent down to take them out of the drain but the mother fucking panicked for no reason. It tried to peck me to no avail and then decided that I was a big enough threat to justify running away and leaving its young behind. The fucked up thing was that while trying to flee the scene, it jumped onto an unstable brick that was placed conveniently above the drain and well, the brick fell right smack on top of one of the chicks.

Three things followed suit. 1) The fallen brick became a ladder which the other chicks used to get the fuck out, 2) I quite audibly tried to ask the mother 'Why the fuck did you do that? I was only trying to help, you dumbfuck' and 3) I freaked the fuck out because the chick that was crushed underneath the brick was still very much alive.

So I removed the brick and the chick was there with its abdomen (Abdomen? Middle part of chicken? Chickdomen? Chickdomen.) split open and guts hanging out and... Man, I didn't know what to do. I remembered very clearly thinking that this was something that warranted the presence of a fucking adult, if not a hundred of them. For some reason, I picked the dying chick and placed it into my palm and I needed to find some fucking help. So I walked towards my house; if I ran, I might drop the already cursed animal, and I wanted to tell my Mom. But here's the thing: I was shit scared of my mother back then, a really tangible form of terror. I thought that if I told her, she might think that I purposely smashed the chick with a brick for attention or that I was a mentally unstable kid. What if she was watching a really good show and she gets annoyed by my pestering. What if there was nothing odd with bricks falling on chicks and killing them? While I was thinking about all that, the chick took two rapid breaths and then stopped breathing altogether.

And I just stood there, with this grotesque, mangled corpse on my palm, not knowing what exactly to do in that situation. It was my first time encountering death and I just stood there in shorts, looking confused as fuck. There was no sadness or guilt or whatever negative emotion, no, there was just apathy. So I went to the backyard and threw the dead chick over the fence and washed my hand. Maybe I read a book right after, I can't remember.

Later though, I thought about it and I got stressed out because there were a lot of things that went amiss there.

1) I was fucking seven years old, what sort of universe allows this shit to happen to barely sentient children?
2) I just wanted to help, god damn it. How did something that started out as a noble desire, end up being fucking messed up?
3) Why did the damn mother panic? I was trying to help and even if it was a creature that's incapable of  logic based rationalisation, it should've at the very least sensed that I meant no harm whatsoever.
4) My hesitation in telling my mother meant that I felt wholly responsible for the death. If I had told her immediately, I would've felt the responsibility shift to the adult.
5) I should've buried the chick instead of flinging it over the fence like a savage.

And then I was caught in this web of confusion because I never learned about what to do in that situation. There wasn't a book that offered a step by step guide on what to do in the event that one sees a chick crushed to death by a fucking brick. So I lived with that shit for awhile, constantly waiting for the hour where some random policeman rappels down the rambutan tree to arrest me.

I honestly believe that my morals (Or a severe lack of it) was shaped by what I experienced that day. It became mould in which I set myself. Gore became something that fascinated me. Deep down I refuse to intervene because I constantly have this nagging feeling that things will end up like the chick in the drain.

If I wasn't there, acting all noble and kind, the brick wouldn't have fallen on the chick. Of course, predicting what might've happened would be a foolish thing to do but I've always thought of how things might've panned out. Would my personality remain the same or would I become something more? Or less?

See, this is why I need time travel.