Chicken soul for the soup

Madame Sosotris had blacked up for the occasion, and I was both fighting nausea over how she now looked and revulsion at the unavoidable racist overtones of it all. When she slipped on a couple of large, colourful bracelets and rattled them experimentally to see if they made enough noise I very nearly left. My moral sense told me I should do, my karmic sense told me that I couldn't stay here and disapprove without incurring some penalty from the universe, but my intellect insisted that I stay and watch, and see if what I had been told was true. If Madame Sosotris could truly add chicken Soul to the soup.
Madame Sosotris smiled, entirely to herself as she'd managed to get boot-polish in both her eyes when blacking-up and they were watering so much that she looked like she was crying in silence. I'd moved a couple of times, but she clearly still thought I was stood where I'd started – over by the copper pans – and kept turning that way to talk to me.
"Obviously," she said, her voice cracking slightly as she tried to do cheerful without having had enough practice, "we need a chicken for this recipe. Some people will tell you that they can make do with a catfish, and others claim that any living creature can be used so long as it is properly prepared, but catfish do not have souls and the point of this is to add flavour to the soup, not to overwhelm it with the taste of the soul. Chicken soul is delicate, and can add depth and subtle nuance to a well-made soup, whereas cat soul, for example, is pungent and tends not to work well without carrots. Which have no soul of their own, you understand?"
I nodded, having decided that if she couldn't see where I was I was less likely to be asked to help. She stood there, squinting, tears rolling down her cheeks so fast they were very nearly a continuous stream, and I told myself that her loss of sight and obvious discomfort had to be helping redress the karmic balance somehow.
"Right," she said, realising that I wasn't about to give myself away by talking, "pass me the chicken!"
The chicken was sat on the counter in front of her, its ankles chained down to a chopping board. I felt momentarily queasy as I wondered what kind of cook required a chopping board that had attachment points for manacles, and then another pang as I wondered what kind of cook also had the matching manacles, and when they passed I stepped silently forward, jabbed my finger firmly into the chicken, and stepped back again. The chicken clucked angrily and looked for something to peck, just as Madame Sosotris reached out towards the sound of the cluck. The chicken's anger was lost in the torrent of swear-words that no-one calling themselves a woman should be able to use with such adroitness.
Madame Sosotris tore a length off her neck-scarf and wrapped it tightly around her pecked finger, tying it off with a neat little knot and almost no ends left over to get in her way. I was impressed, but still felt it was better not to say anything. Then, like a snake striking, she seized the unfortunate chicken by its neck and lifted it off the board to wring its neck. The chopping board was far too heavy though, and didn't even budge, so the manacles ripped the chicken's feet off as she twisted with a strength that her withered frame belied, and blood spattered over the entire counter as the dead bird swung to-and-fro. Its body spasmed a few times, and then something pale green and translucent seemed to breathe out of its body, arising around it like a diaphonous mist, so delicate it could almost have been a heat haze. Madame Sosotris must have sensed it, because there was no way she could have seen it with the tears still gushing from her eyes, because she dropped the chicken carcass and seemed to caress the air, her hands moving in sensuous, not-quite-geometric shapes, gathering and containing the essence that the chicken had lost. I guessed this must be the chicken soul and wondered why I'd never it before when chickens were killed.
"When the soul has been extracted," she said, and her voice was now thick and her words were slurring, "we infuse it into the soup. Where is the soup?"
I looked around. There was no sign of any soup on any of the surfaces, or even on the stove-top. Hastily I checked in the oven and the fridge, but there was no soup there either. There was also no food in the fridge, just several crates of beer and a bottle of gin. In the oven though, was a dead catfish on a dish, so I pulled that out and clattered it onto the counter in front of Madame Sosotris.
"Ah, good," she said, and lowered her hands. The barely-visible green mist sank with her hands and disappeared inside the fish as her hands lay flat on it.
"This isn't soup," she said, though there was doubt in her voice. "Is it?"
I couldn't answer before I'd asked myself what kind of soup she ever made that was solid and scaly, and not finding an answer I explained that there'd been no soup around so I'd used the catfish. On the plate, the catfish bucked under her hands.
"What?" She sounded nervous. "You can't put the soul of a chicken into another animal! You get zombie animals then!" The fish writhed in her grip.
"Right," I said, backing out of the kitchen door. "Er, I've just remembered, I left the kettle on back home. I'll see you later!"
As I raced through her living room, noticing as I passed that her tarot cards were spilled all over the floor and that there was a pot of cold soup sitting on her divining table, I could hear the start of a scream from the kitchen. I was fairly certain that this would karmically balance me for a while at least, but probably at Madame Sosotris's expense. And I wasn't at all sure I'd be able to repeat her recipe myself.