There's a chicken in my house. I came home from work and there he was in the kitchen, staring at me askance with a dumb chicken-look. Some shit on the floor. A puddle where he spilled the dish that was left for him. Cackling and pecking at the linoleum floor. I thought I was hallucinating--there was no chicken here when I left for work this morning. But there he was in the middle of the room, a chicken. How did he get here? 

Mike Denver. My good buddy and temporary roommate. He found a chicken somewhere. But why the hell did he bring it here? Maybe he thought it would be fun to have a chicken around. Or maybe he wants to eat it. Where the hell did he find a chicken? I want to call him and ask him why there is a chicken in my house, but he doesn't have a phone, probably partly because he doesn't want people calling him anytime they feel like and asking him sensitive questions, like "Why did you bring a goddamned chicken into my house?"

It's fun having Mike around. He's good when he's not bringing chickens into the house. He keeps the place mostly clean, except the room he inhabits (Now I hear the sounds of things being knocked over in the kitchen, followed by a muted cackling. He's pecking everything) which has been hit by a clothes bomb. The kitchen stays mostly clean and last week he scrubbed the bathroom (I asked him to).

The chicken was trying to get in the living room. Uh uh. He came to the door and I held up my foot in front of his face. He stopped, but eyed my foot and held his ground. When I shoved my foot closer to his face, he pecked it. Brazen little shit. Does he have any idea how many chickens I've devoured in my lifetime?

I tried to scare him with chants of "Stir fry". No use. He's bold, or is it a she? I think it's a she. I don't know my chickens well. Don't care to. He's pecking the floor again. Now I know the sound linoleum makes when it is pecked by a chicken. Who says it's not interesting having a chicken in your house?

Why does Mike want a chicken? For a moment I wondered if the chicken was Mike. Mike is a sci-fi nut. I thought maybe he got his wish and witnessed some firsthand, real-life hocus pocus. "I was sitting at the table and WHAM! I was transformed into a chicken. So I decided to lay low cause I knew if I went out some fucker would fry my ass...." That's something Mike would say, even if he had not been actually turned into a chicken.

But I'm sure the chicken is not Mike. For one thing, there is a bowl on the floor. Mike probably wouldn't have bothered with a bowl if it were for himself. He wouldn't have even been able to get the bowl down from the cupboard if he were a chicken. If anything, the bowl is a sign that a concerned Mike did his best to feed a chicken which was another creature altogether.

For another thing, there is shit in the middle of the floor. Mike isn't the cleanest guy I know, but I'm sure he would have at least tried to shit on some paper or something.

Being single is interesting. If I were married now, there would probably be no chicken in my house. My life would have taken a different trajectory from my wedding day, probably producing an environment in which chickens do not unexpectedly turn up in the kitchen on Tuesday afternoons.

I said, "I thought I was hallucinating", but how I do I know I'm not? This is very out of the ordinary. But chickens are not such strange animals--it would have been a different story if I'd seen a dodo or a crocodile--so it was easy to accept, as strange and as out-of-context as it was, that there was actually a chicken in my house. But still, how do I know I am not imagining this?

I don't have a history of uninvited hallucinations. Okay, good. But it's never too late to start, and the fact that I have never done it doesn't mean I'm not doing it now. 

When he pecked my foot, I felt it. Or I felt something. Could it simply be a very complex hallucination with sounds and smells to match?

Smells...yes. When I first came in the kitchen, I'm sure I smelled, well, a chicken smell, or at least something new and unlike the normal smell of my house. If this is an illusion, which is seeming more and more unlikely, it is a very sophisticated one.

After I thought it was a hallucination, I thought maybe I was on Candid Camera, child of American TV that I am. A natural thought, "This is bizarre. I must be on candid camera." Maybe some weird Korean version of the popular 70's show where Koreans laugh at waygooks placed into strange situations. 

I checked around the room and didn't see anything that looked like a camera, so I ruled that out too. I'm forced to conclude that there is really a chicken in my house, which, if you knew Mike, is not such an implausible conclusion. Perfectly sensible, actually.

As I sat and went around my business, only occasionally reminded of the chicken (by sounds of crashing and pecking and flapping in the next room), the phone rang. It was my mom. She asked, "What's new, honey?"

Funny you should ask.

The next morning I saw Mike and our conversation naturally drifted to the chicken cowering by my refrigerator. He said he saw it on a passing truck, and when he found out it cost only three thousand won, he couldn't pass it up. He was excited because he had never owned a chicken before.

Despite myself and the growing pile of chicken shit under my table, I must admit that I got caught up in the excitement too. I grew up the suburbs of New York, and I live now in another big city--in short, I've never spent any time around chickens, and I began to find it interesting.

I also started feeling sorry for the thing. She had it pretty good at my place: a roof over her head, all kinds of goodies to eat, lots of attention and petting, etc. but I knew she couldn't stay. She, like all chickens, was doomed from Day One. 

Chickens exist to feed people, plain and simple. They suffer the triple misfortune of being flightless, stupid, and delicious. Chickens are born to lose, and perhaps the only reason they haven't gone the way of the Dodo is because humans got smart and started managing their slaughter so we could keep on eating them forever. 

Unfortunately for this chicken, compassion doesn't always translate into mercy, and I told Mike to get it the hell out of my house. This immediately raised the problem of what to do with it. There are no safe havens for chickens anywhere, bird sanctuaries included. In the mountains she would die of starvation, at the beach she would probably be eaten, and in the streets she would be run down as quickly as all the other creatures who venture out into the streets of Pusan.

Mike took the chicken with him to beach today, and I don't yet know what eventually became of it. I can only tell you that if you are out by Haeundae and you see a brown chicken running wild, you are probably not seeing things. It's really a chicken. I'm pretty sure of that.