Chicken in a Bisket
by Smilin' Jack Costello 

Monday, Dec. 24, 2001
You know, Shorty, we’ve seen some amazing damned things in our day. What with everything being all techmalogicalized and whatnot, it can make your head spin. It seems like just yesterday we was listenin’ to Cracker Barnes on the ol’ phonograph. Now look at us, Shorty! Now we got Cracker Barnes on the eight-track, and we can listen to it in that pickup that’s half-buried in Davey Krupp’s front yard, no less. It buggles the mind, Shorty.

Seems like we turn our back for a minute, and they put a man up there on the moon in his jammy-jams. And then they make up some new-fangled gasoline lawn-mower when my push-mower still works fine. Damn. Then the next thing you know, they’re inventin’ little tiny people to go inside all kinds of things. Remember when Sonny’s cousin Jojo visited from the city last year? An I’ll be dipped in shit if he didn’t have him one of them new-fangled cars with the little small person in the door who tells you when your lights is on or you left the door wide open when you went and passed out drunk in that ditch. Kinda scary, ain’t it Shorty? Kinda spooky is what I say.

But I have to admit, out of all of them techmanalogical whoodangs they gone and dreamt up out there, I am quite a stretch appreciative for one of them, and you know without askin’ that that’s them Chicken in a Biskets. Dang if them ain’t some good biskets, even if they is a bit flat and more of a cracker than a bisket proper. But I can forgive them that since those clever boys still did found some way to fit a chicken in there. They must be Missouri boys since you can’t leave no Arkansas boys alone with a chicken more than ten minutes if you don’t want trouble. And Missouri boys is known far an wide for fittin’ chickens in places you didn’t think chickens should fit.

And believe you me, Shorty, that there’s not one small task. Remember a few years back when the altimenator went out in the Brown Maggot and I couldn’t get it to start, and I couldn’t get to town for no three weeks and I ran plum out of them Chicken Biskets? Remember how I was schemin’ on how to make up my own Chicken in a Biskets here at home for so long? Well give up now, Shorty, ‘cause you just ain’t gonna do it. I tried everything and the closest I ever came was some real flat chickens and a box of crackers stuffed up a rooster’s ass. It was a sorry scene, it was. You know after that I gave up and wasted little time diggin’ an altimenator out off old Sonny’s Dodge when he was laid up with that bout of gully shingles, and I was back in town buyin’ Chicken Biskets before you could say medicated ointment.

How they do it, Shorty? You think they got some kind of machine that goes and minaturesizes them chickens so they can fit them in the little holes in them crackers? Seems like that’d take an awful lot of chickens, which would tend toward the spendy side of town. Maybe they minaturesizes ‘em when they’re just hatched so they don’t got to feed them too much chicken feed before they stuff ‘em into those biskets.

Or maybe they just got great big biskets and they stuff them chickens in BEFORE they minaturesize the whole works! Damn, Shorty, I think that might work! Listen here, I’ll rustle up some chickens from Sonny’s yard and bake up a big ol’ bisket, you find us a minaturesize machine. Hot damn, Chicken Biskets here we come! Those clever Nabisco bastards will never know what him ‘em.