Of all the office creatures, great and small, it is the Headless Chicken that is the most difficult to pin down. This is partly due to her speed, but mainly due to her unpredictability. There is simply no way of telling from one moment to the next what the Headless Chicken is going to do; and it has even been rumoured that her destination and purpose are equally mysterious to her. Motion is both cause and effect.
Unwilling to accept that the office universe could spawn and support such an illogical creature, I determined to investigate this strange animal and cleared my inbox of all other tasks: all the better to study her.
Let me describe the beast on the day of the hunt: she stands in the centre of the centre, the office’s busiest point, turning this way and that on her ugly yellow feet. She is getting in everyone’s way and they must swerve left and right to avoid her. I ask myself why she is there and what he is thinking about, but one cannot look into the face of a headless chicken and divine its intentions. The headless chicken has no windows to the soul to sink one’s gaze into.
All I have to go on is the tapping feet and the mysterious white box she carries in her fluffy white wings, stained with the bloody effluent of her decapitation. The ‘Day of the Hatchet’ — as they call the cull in these parts — was before my time, but the Big Bears tell me the chicken ‘had it coming’, and she was rumoured to have been adulterating the chicken feed with gravel, silicone and cat litter.
But they, like everyone else, are at a loss to explain the chicken’s continued presence in the office and her drain on the company payroll. Apparently, the chicken was not aware that a head was necessary for life and that she was expected to shuffle off her poultry coil as soon as her head hit the concrete floor of the post room in the basement. Death held no dominion for the Headless Chicken.
Suddenly, she was off, darting to her right, and then straight ahead, but then backwards, and then to her right again; and then forwards, and so on and so on, as fast as her weedy shanks would carry her.
My eyes twitched left and right, but I stayed where I was for the present, hidden behind the broken photocopier -- seeing but unseen.
Attracted by an open door, she escaped our floor and I had to break cover to pursue the chase. It was broad daylight and there was little time or opportunity for stealth, and I thought I noticed one of the mangier management wolves staring after me, with a malevolence as rank as his breath, but before he could challenge me, I too was out of the office and heading down to another department.
That office dealt exclusively with accounts and was inhabited primarily by owls, who have a penchant for double-entry bookkeeping and an eye for detail. While pleasant enough fellows, generally speaking, I find their incessant jokes concerning depreciation and tax codes to be rather trying, and I am not often seen in these parts. However, they nodded in my direction and did not pry into my business.
The owls, however, had little time for the Headless Chicken, as her incessant futile movement troubled them, and I could sense many a ruffled feather amid the cooing that her presence provoked.
I decided that this was the time and place to challenge her and I waited until she had moved himself into a corner; and then I crept from under the desk where I had positioned myself, and spoke to her.
“What are you doing, HC?” I asked her, wanting her to know I was there, but knowing that there could be no reply, since she was no longer equipped to make one.
“Where are you going, Headless?” I asked again, taking one step closer and warming to the hunt. Another pause, measured in heartbeats.
“What’s in that box you always carry, Ms C?” I asked, dragging out and lisping the final word, the malice growing within me.
“I am the Headless Chicken: Hollow be my name,” came a noise from inside the box.
It was all I could do to hide my shock and fear and maintain a calm exterior, but somehow I managed to question her further.
“Speak to me, oh chicken damned! What task deprives you of eternal repose? Why do you carry this box of woe?”
There was silence for a while and a parliament of owls gathered in a semi-circle to hear the unspeakable speak.
The Headless Chicken addressed the parliament and myself:
“I am doomed to walk the office floor
Till the sins done in my days of youth
Are purged and flapped away.
I am the Headless Chicken: Hollow be my name
Give me all days my daily tasks
But lead me not into task completion
As it was in the beginning
Is now and ever shall be
Office without end.
Amen.”
And with that she hurried away, carrying what became known on the owl’s floor as the Schrodinger box. She can still be seen in the office every day, rushing hither and thither, flying this way and that, but her tasks are never completed, and her torture never ends.
She is the Headless Chicken, and her pain touches all we watchers.
The Office Trinity
(The short story that spawned the novel, The Screen)