Faulkner Chicken

"Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?"
As told by William Faulkner

The asphalt steamed in the sun’s unblinking glare with a misty evaporation of the rain from before, a mist tainted with the smell of oil from untold leaking cars and trucks, soaked in (like the rain) from the numbing repetitions of Man’s vain journeys, as the Chicken on its own enigmatic journey approached the two-lane blacktop bobbing its head as chickens do, its motion reflected in the few remaining shards of glass in the spiderweb shattered window of the rust triumphant ramshackle abandon of a Gulf station, its faded orange sign no longer orange, its ICE machine speaking a lying promise of cool relief from the relentless heat of the all-surrounding New Mexico emptiness, yet indifferent to this evidence of human futility, the Chicken approached the unforgiving road, ignoring the heat steam mist rising up from the cracked alligator skin of the blacktop, ignoring the flickering mirage oasis visible far distant in the road’s converging perspective lines, (mute testament to the road’s futile pursuit of the horizon, ever unreachable), ignoring also the flies blowing around a dead thing in the road's shoulder, the Chicken without ceremony crossed. Why?

The Chicken who was a talking chicken gave an answer that was no answer. For no reason he clucked. Because no road is ever crossed. And no road is truly a road, for all roads take you nowhere. The road only reveals to chickens their own folly and despair, and crossing is an illusion of philosophers and barnyard poultry.