The room was completely white and with only just sight, you could not tell if it had edges or was spherical. You could not tell how the room was lightened; there was no sign of led, or window anywhere. It was as though the surrounding glowed in itself.

Apart from you, a white hen was the only other thing in the room. Crippled by its weight, the white hen - detectable in the whitish background by its comb and wattle - beaked on the garri around it and remained oblivious to the knife in your grip. Has it noticed the knife? Has it accepted its faith and only aimed at eating more garri before it met the knife?

You moved closer and it raised its streamlined head. Without cognitive abilities, the bird could not tell if your skin was White, Black, Red, Brown, Lemon or whatever. If your hair was straight, kinky, or tangled, it knew not. But its ultraviolet eyes saw beyond the skin; like night vision. It saw your heart but was unable to deduce the jumpy rhythm. It saw your lungs, unsure if it was damaged by smoking. It saw your liver, unsure if it was drowned by gin. Your kidney blinked. It was one, the next moment, another appeared and disappeared.

Normally, you would not hold a knife to slice the neck of a hen. But this one time, a blurred memory when you wanted to show you were not scared of a hen. You had sliced the hen's neck, stepped on the wings and legs to withstand its fight for life, while blood pumped from its slit neck. Your cousins arced behind you, mouth agape.

It was rare, but if you ever had to kill a hen, it would be on insignificant days; on a day you brought a hen back to an empty house. Or when you were alone with your mother and your dad was bedridden, and a hen was to be killed. But never on significant days, like Christmas or Easter, when your other fearless cousins were around. Sometimes, too, your cousins were soft, which gave way for either your uncle or Chimamanda, your feminist, maybe extremist cousin. Whichever. But with all those people around, you never had to kill a hen, but for a few times when you had to prove you weren't scared of it.

You were definitely not scared of the white hen before you. Neither was it scared of you because it kept beaking on the garri and paid less attention to you. What glued your feet to the synthetic floor was not Alektorophobia; the fear of hens, but the mystery that surrounded the hen and the instruction that made you hold a knife in the first place. You knew you weren't killing it for eating.

You took a step closer and it raised its head again and focused its ultraviolet eyes on your jumpy heart. Finally, the hen deduced your jubilant heart as something about to attack it. It entered a frenzied state, with so many failed attempts to lift its weight. The wings flapped, fanning the garri around. After a while, it settled and started beaking garri again.

When you were close enough, you clutched the wings and slipped it under your left foot. The claws paddled furiously, but you timed and grabbed the slim legs, avoiding the claws. You slipped it under your right foot. The bird now laid on its side.

You felt the pressure under your feet; even heard a bone crack a moment ago but paid no mind to it. With the wings and legs safely guarded under your feet, you grabbed the neck. Even with the pressure to set free, the bird remained silent as you picked the feathers off its neck to make its peach skin visible. The knife was safely clipped in between your lips and the moment you reached for it, the hen began to crock low. You placed the ancient knife on its peach skin. You stalled, but your hand started moving. The blood first rubbed the knife before it began to spill on the white surface. You increased intensity, wanting the phase to pass like others that had come. Others that had come?

The hen's eye remained open and blinked intermittently as if you weren't slicing its throat. It maintained a low crock. Abruptly, with a strength that could only be triggered by survival, the wings twitched and almost toppled you. The legs copied the same action. And with that whisp of disorder, your pressure softened and the bloodied hen broke hell loose; trailing its blood on the white surface.

You stood still and watched the hen design the white room with blood. As it rambled, the free head held by a few tendons, dangled from left to right. About a minute later, the chicken's pace slowed, it began to drag itself on the floor, smearing red on white. All the while, it maintained its low crock. The tone was only modified by the disconnected Esophagus. It sounded like air was blown into a busted balloon. It stopped and remained motionless.

Déjà vu came together, but as though fought by external forces, it disappeared.

When closed, the door would completely camouflage with the wall but it hissed and opened. The man who wore a red robe, who had instructed you to kill the hen, stepped in, hands behind him. The hood of his red robe rested over his head. He still looked strange; everything still looked strange.

"Poor, " The man said, "You still have a lot to fulfill."

"Poor?" you enacted. What was he talking about? "I have done my part. Now, tell me who I am, tell me how I came here..."

He interjected, "I will, but first, you have to wash up. It happens once. Over the table, I will tell you. Don't you wonder what that fire in your stomach is?"

How did you wind up in this entity?
The only other thing that clouded your thought apart from understanding the consciousness you felt, was the hotness in your stomach. The hotness, once as little as candlelight, had spread like wildfire and the man just mention a solution to it.

You nodded.