This past weekend, Mister Earl, a meat cutter at a Harm City grocer, was working a heavy volume of chicken. He had an entire pallet of 20-pound cases of chicken breasts, chicken wings, chicken quarters, and chicken drumsticks to put on display at wholesale price.

As he emerged from the meat room door with a dolly load of chicken, he saw “a brawl,” and actual indoor riot over chicken, conducted on an appropriately small scale, consisting of between seven and ten customers, “wrestling, pushing and punching” in the quest to possess the last box of chicken. These were mostly females, with a couple males, the white people circling like jackals as the blacks went at it like lions and hyenas at the kill.

Mister Earl stood disgusted when he saw the behavior of these pillars of his ghetto community ransacking the meat case over in the working class neighborhood where he worked.

The meat doors swung shut behind them, their hollow echo sounding down the aisle like “the Devil’s own dinner bell.”

Slowly they turned, a big fat mamma hauling the last box of chicken under her enormous breasts, the lesser beasts of urban decay locking their binocular vision in on Mister Earl and his 400 pounds of chicken, precariously balanced on two wheels.

As he made his way toward the now empty case the ravenous little pack lunged forward for a double envelopment, forcing Mister Earl to establish his dominance.

“Ya’ll back off! I come from the same place you come from, en I’ll give it right back! You do me like you done these folks en I’ll be forced ta lay about!”

An imposing, broad-shouldered figure, Mister Earl, glared this way and that as he stocked the chicken. Then, when he stepped back and motioned with his great hands that the way was clear to shop, the two ton chicken riot reconvened.

And so it go, another day in the ghetto.