You Should Have Finished Serving Your Sentence, Chicken On Sale

I found him today.  I should say, my daughter found him.  Hannah was waiting for her turn at piano lessons (the piano teacher comes right to the school and charges a whopping $4 a lesson).  She didn’t feel like tackling biology, so I put her to work in my classroom.  She got down to business pulling plastic tubs out from under the shelving and fishing out the most amazing plunder.  Lost pencils, folders, erasers, markers, and a plethora of other unclaimed items. 

She suddenly stood up.  “It’s a frog,” she declares, as if she and I had been discussing amphibians and their habitats.  “Eww.  It’s a frog,” she states again, as if I am hard of hearing (my kids keep asking me if I want a walk-in shower for Christmas, so it is true that they think I have one foot in the grave).

I walk over to where she was and stooped down to take a gander with my old lady, rheumy eyes.  Sure enough, lying in state was a very shriveled froggy, on his back as if he had been laid out in a casket for viewing.  His little legs were stretched out perfectly.  He was very, very thin. 

Chicken On Sale never made it past “the yard.”  What you were thinking, you green fugitive, you??  Crime never pays… you surely knew that!  You should have done your time, eaten the delicious reptile pellets we served you daily, and put up with sixteen eyeballs staring at you all day, tapping on the side of your pretzel jar habitat, shouting at you to “WAKE UP!’…. oh, never mind.  You are probably better off now.

Well, anyway, mystery solved.  He must have tunneled to freedom when the kids added fresh vegetation that fateful morning. 

It’s a wonder he didn’t stink to high heavens.  He’s been gone for weeks. 

We now have eight very cool Walking Stick insects in our possession, so we did not mourn for long, but forgotten he is not.  His name comes up often and as each of my eight first graders chose a name for one of the Walking Sticks, Chicken On Sale was a very popular name.  We settled for names such as Chicken Junior and Chicken On Sale Redux. 

His memory lives on...