The chicken lived for months like that, or so Aunt Mildred said.
``We fed it doughnut crumbs and sandwich scraps. Once in the morning when we got to work and once before we left. There was a graduate student who came in on week-ends and fed it. Just once a day though.''
``Where in the world did she get that story?'' her nephew Ian said.
Aunt Mildred was seventy, she went square dancing five nights a week and she belonged to a group of aged show girls who toured the old folks' homes with a tap dance and comedy show. But the story of the chicken was a little hard to believe. Beheaded on a Nebraska door step the chicken had run around in circles as headless chickens do, but this chicken was running around hours later and Mildred had brought it to work with her at the university the next day. She worked at a low temperature lab that had no interest in headless chickens, so the chicken was put in a milk crate in the secretaries' office, but it wouldn't stay there. It fluttered out and struggled about on the floor. Its neck healed in a day or two. Mildred had used straws to keep the airway and esophagus open.
Aunt Mildred said the chicken died nearly three months later, probably of malnutrition, she said. Doughnuts and white bread just didn't match a normal chicken diet, and no one had thought of getting special feed for the poor creature. They had not named the chicken. Even chicken eyes connect when you look into them. There was no focus on this chicken.
One morning when she was seventy five Aunt Mildred awoke to do her tap dancing work out and she found that her left foot would not respond. She could walk, but she couldn't tap dance. They told her she had had a small stroke. They told her to take an aspirin a day. It was downhill after that. She died at eighty.
At her memorial service Ian told the story of the headless chicken and every one laughed because they knew how Aunt Mildred liked to tease Ian.
She didn't leave much. Five square dance outfits that stood on their own petticoats. The black leotards she still often wore. A picture of her with Mickey Rooney, her forties smile blasting out of the photograph. Among the other photographs was a smudged and dog eared black and white of a piece of floor and a foot and something else that no one recognized.
``Why would she have kept this?'' a niece asked.
Ian looked at the picture carefully. He turned it this way and that.
``Its the headless chicken!'' he said. ``Look, can you see it?''
But the niece could not see it.