Mighty

"If anyone has survived this starvation, it is this chicken. She survived my knife through nine displacements. Every time I reached for her neck, someone stopped me: my wife, Ayloul, and Zein [my children], who found in his chicken friend something worth saving. In a tent whose thin strips were colder than the hunger surrounding it, she felt she was a burden to us—eating anything, moving so lightly no one could hear her. Even her clucking was faint, and her gaze seemed to apologise for still being alive. But what truly saved her wasn’t us. It was the egg. Every three days, she laid one egg—warm— in a time when even a loaf of bread had disappeared. We would divide it: half for Zein, the other half for Ayloul, and I would postpone my hunger, filling myself just by watching them. And between one egg and the next, a question circled in my mind: Do I slaughter her, so we can eat for two days, or keep her alive… so we can endure longer? Even when my friend Hamed broke his arm and needed any protein in this void, I decided to slaughter her for him. He looked at her for a long time, then said: “No, Malek… I can’t bear this guilt. I won’t drink her broth… I won’t be the reason.” In that moment, I understood: we were saving ourselves from ourselves. It was a test of the last part within us that had not yet turned savage. We could not bring ourselves to harm a chicken— yet this vile world found it easy to abandon our children." - Malek Shinbary, Palestinian from Gaza