The novelty was gone, but Wanda was still dressed as a chicken, and
would be until she found her friend Ten. The third group of assholes to
descend upon her had stolen her street clothes.
	The piece she'd gotten birded up for failed anyway. She had planned
to visit a resaurant in costume, order chicken for her meal, and then pro-
voke a confrontation before leaving--a confrontation unrelated to her
outfit or to any kind of perceived vegetarian agenda. Animal rights held no
interest to Wanda except as a diversionary subtext. She'd been sneering at
a PETA ad when the idea struck. People are USED to this, she thought.
People will assume there's a REASON the chicken is there.
	Instead, the chef refused outright to prepare her order, suspecting
a scam, and the other patrons clucked loudly as she left. Somebody lobbed
their special teriyaki lunch combo (What, was it no good? Had she picked an
inferior restaurant on top of everything else?) at her and covered one wing
in gritty, oily sauce. The piece had gone unsatisfyingly wrong.
	As a chicken, even the nice part of town becomes unfriendly. One
creep had no sooner gotten off his rote chicken puns than other figures
drifted in out of the shadows. A pair of older women wanted to enlist her
in a 'specialty cleaning' business, with sexy costumes and no real clean-
ing. A sad man in khakis preaching fire and brimstone pursed his lips when
she went by, then sprang forward to interrogate her about the getup so he
could calculate her exact stay in purgatory. And of course there were the
packs of predators, mostly male, exchanging knowing high-fives with each
other once they'd gotten in her face, one set of them snatching her
rucksack before she could find a bathroom to change in.
	She could at least have removed the head, but it seemed a matter of
pride not to.

	Wanda returned to Ten's place wanting only to change and get a
train back to Chicago. Nobody was home. She fluffed out the oily feathers
on her left side to restore some of the costume's original symmetry. Then
she waited.
	Bored, Wanda passed the time by comparing surface details of her
surroundings to the rest of the world as she knew it. How did the gargoyle
above her head compare to Scotland? Scotland had had spectacularly attrac-
tive natives and a bounty of fried foods; on the other hand, the cement
gargoyle stood a chance of offering some cover if... ah...
	It began to rain.

	Ten had gotten led astray by the pompous philosophy espoused by the
death metal band who played a benefit concert for a local fringe candidate
that afternoon and was on a bus to Washington, dialling Wanda's cell phone
every so often. Wanda, needless to say, did not learn this until after she
gave up and found another way home, bearing several croissants her bene-
factor had offered in charity and a newfound knack for telling strangers,
"Fuck off! I'm one hell of a chicken!" which after all she was.

written for Mia Rovegno in my living room 10/17/02

This was the first time in quite a while that I felt like I was totally sunk unless I gave up on making it too cohesive and tried to at least enjoy myself. The periphrasis got out of hand -- in some cases because I was clumsily working in one of the requested words, but also because I didn't want to focus too much on the actual narrative, which doesn't make much sense. There seems to be some indication that I can occasionally put across a story idea that depends on unreasonable premises, but there still needs to be underlying cohesion.

So... the things that are wrong with this story are mistakes I've made enough before that I don't feel like I'm learning anything from them. It's interesting; writing this cheered me up at first but made me wonder just what I was writing for. If it's just that I've programmed myself to enjoy the physical act of writing, that's helpful for me but liable to mean nobody will want to read what I (self-indulgently, self-pleasingly) write. And if I want people to enjoy my writing, mixing this improv stuff with things that get edited would be a good idea, to say the least.

So I did in fact go and do some tiny pieces that were edited and revised and all that. Very tiny. Not sure what will become of them. But I'm not going to do the next instant story until I'm of a mind to have this afterword be about the story instead of about me. Sorry about this one.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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