This morning I was in my study, and it occurred to me to scan my shelves for red books. The Eustace Diamonds . . . The Seven Sins of Memory . . . The Uninscribed . . . ah, The Circle by David Eggers! The title of the book reinforces the "egg" in his name, and an egg is the sort of thing that might be described as "unhenned" -- that is, without a hen to sit on it and incubate it.
Most of my books are in cabinets with glass doors, but two small shelves are behind opaque doors. I don't usually keep books on those shelves, but today I thought I'd better look inside just in case there were any more red books hiding there. And there, sure enough, I found a bright red three-ring binder containing selections from the Scarlet Notebook, a collection of Tychonievich juvenilia. The full Scarlet Notebook (still so called for historical reasons) is currently in a massive white binder in America somewhere, but I have PDF scans of the whole thing. As soon as I saw the red binder on my shelf, I remembered that among its contents is a little fragment called "Hatched by a Monkey," written by one of my brothers as a child. It didn't make the cut for inclusion in the small red binder in Taiwan, but I looked it up in the PDF. Here it is in its entirety:
Desnor wondered, as he often did, why he had to be the one who was hatched by a monkey! His long, flexible tail still hurt from his last entry into the chicken-house. The other roosters had nearly murdered him, but he had escaped, with the helpy of his two extra lages and usable wings.The only person who really cared about him was Henry. Tomorrow, they were going to run away. Henry was an orphan birth, trying to survive until he was old enough to get a real job, not just assistant chicken-keeper.Suddenly, all the chickens started to squawk and run around, flapping their wings and causing a general ruckus. Then Desnor saw the reason: The butcher was coming, equipped with a large axe and a miniature crossbow.Immediately, Desnor flew down, opened the gate, and flew into the top of a pine tree.Amongst all the mess of chickens, the butcher dropped his weapons and tried to get all the chickens in the pen at the same time!Desnor flew down and took the crossbow and quarrels onto the roof, where he stayed.When the butcher saw this, he yelled, "Chicken's out!" so loud that the shutters rattled.
This lines up with the dream pretty neatly. It's from an unpublished book with a red cover, and it's about a creature that apparently hatched from an "unhenned" chicken egg that was incubated by a monkey.
In the context of William Wright's interpretation -- that "unhenned" refers to the House of Israel, with the absent hen being the rejected Jesus Christ -- the idea of being "hatched by a monkey" made me think of the prophecy that "the kings of the Gentiles shall be nursing fathers unto [Israel], and their queens shall become nursing mothers" (2 Ne. 10:9) -- i.e., that the Gentiles will raise Israel in the absence of the father hen. Gentiles essentially means "barbarians," of which monkeys or apes would be a natural symbol.
Desnor is an anagram of Red Son, which came up in my 2020 post "Robin Hood."
