Becoming a chicken, and a giant one no less, is a rather dark process indeed. It is a curse concealing a blessing, a burden to lighten the load and the consequence of Buck’s vanity that ultimately serves him.
Dark, isolating and painful. Buck goes through this alone, drowning in feathers, clouded with cynicism.
The interesting thing about pain, as we know it and attempt to conceptualize it, is that it seems to elude our language. We cannot acutely nor accurately convey what it is, but rather what it is like. We can only hope to use artistic depictions and creative descriptions to try to dance around the concept, but in the end the nature of pain itself is well beyond the reach of any words we can ever hope to muster. It evades science, too. It is ever intangible, dodging labels left and right, yet universal and understood intrinsically.
Love cannot be described directly, either. We can only hope that the pain, or love, we may feel is understood innately by the fundamental human interconnectedness we all seem to share. We reside within our minds, but these concepts coax us out of them to reach a middle ground with another.
For Buck, words are the last thing on his mind as he sheds his outer core and steeps in his sensations.
He writhes in agony as he is bombarded by the witch’s magic. He knows this feels wrong. This is not the healing, soothing kind of magic poetically written about in novels or valiantly portrayed in movies. This force he reckons with threatens to tear apart every fibre of his being. Every molecule of his body protests, ripping and shifting and moving inside of him. His soul shrieks and his head is pounding.
This is not what he was promised.
His flesh burns. His arms are stabbed again and again. Pins and needles cut along the edges of his feet. His legs ache, dotted with a multitude of bruises a punching bag might complain about if it could talk. His ears are throbbing and his eyes are stinging, tears pouring out of them along his face involuntarily.
It is all too much.
He prays to a goddess or two or whoever is up there he does not believe in. He begs for this madness to end. He pleads to return to a time when he could not fathom how such blinding rage and pain exists.
Yet it persists, ebbing and flowing in intensity, but always there, bubbling and brewing under the surface. Like a glass overflowing with liquid, so, too, do his emotions run amok until he is drained.
He feels everything and nothing all at once. He cares about it all while processing nothing with denial.
Time marches on despite seeming to be frozen in place. Through the blistering and scorching suffering of it all, a thought manages to escape him as to whether things can ever go back to the way they were.
The pain remains even after he sprouts wings and grows feathers, his bones cracking and enlarging to accommodate a beak that squawks in confusion and squeaky uncertainty of one who just got braces.
More unfolds, but the crushing weight of these initial changes alone ultimately cause him to pass out…
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