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Here's an except from one of the pieces in the anthology:
Chicken Scratch
By Andrine de la Rocha
A while back, my daughter announced that
she was interested in hatching baby chicks from eggs for a science
project. Typically, she failed to tell us this until it was too late
to acquire fertile eggs and incubate them. Instead we bought half a
dozen day-old chicks at the feed store with which she intended to
perform complex and mysterious experiments.
Around that same time,
my girlfriend and I had begun reading the Babylonian Talmud, the body
of Jewish writings by ancient Rabbis, and were delighted to discover
how many of the stories refer to chickens and experiments. The moment
of God's wrath: when the rooster stands on one leg and his comb pales.
How to tell if there are demons about: sprinkle a fine ash on the
floor at night and when you wake there will be chicken tracks in the
ash, which proves there are demons, as everyone knows that demons have
chicken feet.
In the first few days
one of the yellow chicks became ill and, despite moving it to a box
under a heat lamp in my daughter's bedroom, it died in the middle of
the night. The wailing woke me as she cried, "I've never prayed
for anything so hard in my life and it still died! God does not
exist!" I was poorly prepared to handle a spiritual crisis at
three a.m. The science project would take on a decidedly different
tone. I wrapped the chick in tissue and put it in a Ziploc bag in the
basement freezer to bury when we could say Kaddish and give it a
proper funeral.
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