In September 1945 a Colorado farmer, Lloyd Olsen, killed a chicken for supper with an axe-blow, or so he thought until the headless beast mysteriously reanimated, its head missing but its jugular vein and brain stem intact. ‘Mike the headless chicken’ enjoyed a lucrative career for his owner as a circus attraction until his accidental death in March 1947. According to his Wikipedia page, galline Mike’s mishap is ‘a good example of central motor generators enabling basic homeostatic functions to be carried out in the absence of the cerebral cortex’.1 In All That Fall Mr Slocum runs over a chicken, immediately after which Mrs Rooney expresses a fear that Tommy, helping her out of the car, will ‘have me beheaded’;2 and if no actual decapitation occurs on this occasion, examples of this grisly fate are in plentiful supply elsewhere in Beckett. In the early poem ‘Text 3’ Proust’s cook kills a chicken more cleanly than Lloyd Olsen managed: ‘she hunts down the pullet with oaths, / fiercely she tears his little head off’;3 in ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ Beckett envisions a ‘paradise peopled with virgins and the earth with decorticated multiparas’;4 ‘soleil cou coupé’ ends Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’, or ‘sun headless corse’, as Beckett translated it in 1950;5 ‘What’s the matter with my head’, the speaker of Texts for Nothing asks, ‘I must have left it in Ireland, in a saloon’;6 and That Time features a disembodied head, that of the Listener, mutely absorbing the acousmatic memories of three offstage voices.