The Adventures of Cr. X

He ate raw egg and mud to breakfast, and looked at the stolen chicken as a tumultuous option that if accepted would bring about his end. A fire would only bring scavengers and the time it would take to kill and de-feather the fowl would waste valuable daylight. It really didn’t matter, the police had his sent and where three miles away. He hadn’t lost them through the river.

It takes a man three years to become a chicken wringer and ten if you wanted to be an egg collector. X was a slop pusher, an alcoholic and depressed. It wasn’t uncommon that one was an alcoholic. For the price of a fried egg and potatoes one could fill his canteen full of protein enriched liquor. This kept the population full, thirsty, compliant and only mildly suicidal. The world needed slop pushers and X was one of the best.

After two years pushing slop, X hadn’t failed enough alcohol tests to keep from advancing. You had to be drunk to advance in the company. On the posters that collaged the walls read a variation of the aphorism, “A sober eye cannot but lie.” One of X’s favorites was, “wanntoyah get mar % WiT the booozze!?” which was either a wonderful joke or had been conjured by an executive marketer. X liked to think it was the Temperance League supplanting a ridiculous piece of propaganda that would snap him out of his drunken stupor.  It would take the wind out of X’s sheets to know that not only did the TM not exist, but  the CFO of Chicorp (pronounced chick-orp) came up with his little piece of defiance.