“Oh, don’t be like that,” the chicken scolded. “Come on, now. So if he’s not a rooster, what is he?”
The sister took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, like, maybe if he was, for instance, more like me?”
“Brown?” the chicken said, and in the silence that followed she grasped what her sister had been aiming at. “You don’t mean…”
“It’s just a thought,” her sister said.
“Just a thought?”
“Something that’s passed through my mind a couple of times.”
“A couple of times?” This was what the chicken did when presented with shocking or unpleasant news. If informed, for example, of an outbreak of lice, she’d look at the speaker, saying, “An outbreak of lice?” as if the transformation from statement to question might somehow confuse the situation into reversing itself.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” her sister said.
“Shouldn’t have said anything?”
As they were talking, the farmer’s wife walked in. She was a plump woman but quick, and before the sisters had time to run, she grabbed them by the feet and hung them upside down, one in each hand. The chicken had never seen the world from this angle and wasn’t sure she liked it: an open doorway three feet off the ground. Trees hanging senselessly from a brilliant green sky. Her vision grew hazy, and just as she thought she might pass out, the farmer’s wife released her grip and the chicken fell on her head into the straw. Her sister, meanwhile, with one clean jerk, had her neck wrung.
“At least it happened quickly,” the gray pullet said, and the chicken agreed that it could have been worse.
“You’re just lucky the woman chose your sister instead of you,” the pullet continued, and though the chicken concurred, she knew that luck had nothing to do with it. Her sister had been killed because she deserved it-there was no other explanation. Decent creatures lived until they couldn’t stand it anymore, and then they were ushered to a kind of paradise where they were adorned with jewels and tended to by servants hoisting platters full of grain.
Devious and perverse creatures, on the other hand, suffered untimely deaths and were sent to a reverse paradise where
At dawn the following morning, the rooster made his rounds. He was a disagreeable character, someone to be endured rather than looked forward to, but to not accept him or to do so with less than a full heart was, the chicken now understood, a first-class ticket to hell. He approached her nest and had just taken his position when she turned to address him. “I want you to know,” she whispered, “that I really love you.”
“Tough titty,” he said.
“No,” she went on, “I mean it. Some of the others, they might put up with you or whatnot, but I honestly treasure our time together, and I wouldn’t trade you for anyone.”
He told her that unless she was willing to talk dirty she should just keep her trap shut, and when she continued he jerked his head forward and pecked out her left eye.
“It was an accident,” she told the others. “He gets excited and, well, you know, these things happen.” Inwardly, though, she was devastated. Had the rooster chipped her beak, all right, no hard feelings, but her eyes were her best feature, and now she had only one of them. The other was just a dank hole, the rim crusted with blood and mucus.
“Cyclops,” her friends started calling her. As in, “Hey, Cyclops, you might want to keep an eye out for that rooster.” The only one who didn’t tease her was an underweight guinea hen whom the chicken had seen around but never really spoken to. “I don’t think it looks that bad, actually,” she said. “I mean, it’s part of what makes you
The chicken had never thought about it this way and supposed the hen had a point. Though a missing eye was certainly nothing to be proud of, neither was it a reason to feel particularly ashamed.
“We’ve all got our little quirks,” the guinea hen offered. “Some are visible, and others are on the inside, where no one can see them. Me, for instance, I’m super compassionate, was born that way, I suppose. If I see someone suffering, it just bothers the heck out of me, no matter who it is. This worm, for example, got bitten by a centipede, and I sat up half the night, comforting him until he died.”
“But he was just a worm,” the chicken said. “Why didn’t you eat him?”
“Oh, I’m a vegetarian,” the guinea hen explained. “Grain is good enough for me, but even then I never have more than a few kernels a day. What with all the starving songbirds struggling to feed their families, it hardly seems fair to take more than we need.”
“But songbirds are trash,” the chicken said, and the guinea hen laughed, saying, “Well, then, I guess we could all use a little more trash in our lives.” She turned to admire a lark who perched singing on the low branch of a tree, and the chicken was struck by how thin she was and how her weight corresponded to a kind of inner peace. “Hello, little lark,” the guinea hen said. “Are you having a nice day?”
“What’s it to you, what’s it to you, what’s it to you?” the lark sang, and as the guinea hen offered her calm, beatific smile, a hawk swooped in and seized her in his mighty claws. The motion was fluid and almost beautiful. No beating of wings, just an effortless glide back into the sky and toward the distant treetops.
The lark roared with laughter, but the chicken used the incident as an opportunity to reflect and learn something. The hawk could just as easily have abducted her, but it did not. The question was, why? A less spiritual being might have taken a practical approach: the guinea hen was smaller and easier to carry. But that wasn’t the answer, and the chicken knew it. The hen had been killed because she empathized too much and was strange to boot. “Everybody’s different”; “Larks are worthy too.” She should have spent more time eating and less time running her mouth, that was the lesson here, and the chicken intended to follow it. From now on she would consume twice as much and be twice as ashamed of her missing eye. On top of that she would love the rooster with all her heart and go out of her way to criticize songbirds, who were all a bunch of thieving hillbillies.
A month after the guinea hen’s death, the chicken was so heavy her thighs chafed. Her ankles hurt pretty much all the time, and her neck had been completely denuded by the rooster, who’d had it with what he called “That pissedy-assed love-talk shit.” Something had moved into the hole formerly occupied by her left eye, but she refused to dwell on it. What few thoughts she allowed herself to entertain were reserved for the big things: death, mainly, and what might be learned in its aftermath. A fox stole into the henhouse one night and carried off the gray pullet, who screamed that she was too beautiful to die even as he was tearing a hole in her throat.
“Gloomy,” they started calling her, and she spent more and more time alone. She was by herself in the henhouse one morning when she saw a snake glide toward a nest and swallow an egg, the entire thing, whole. It hadn’t been hers, but still she had to wonder what the unhatched chick had done to warrant such extreme punishment. It hadn’t existed yet, so harboring unnatural thoughts was out, as was being excessively vain. Having lived alone inside its shell, it could hardly be accused of being too social or of eating any less than its fair share. The egg’s crime, as far as she could see, was that it had been brown and roundish.
The Parrot and the Potbellied Pig
When asked why she’d chosen to become a journalist, the parrot was known to cock her head a half inch to the
