the guez

At the end of the day, I went into town and stopped to say hi to the guys at the pizza place. “They killed a rooster today. This man just went into the closet in the house and hugged it upside down…” I think I was in shock or I didn’t tell it right because the guys just stared at me. Later that night they got into a drunken debate. “Is Bat-Sheva hot in spite of being really strange or is she hot because she’s really strange?”

Ok, so this is part 2. If you’re just signing on, go back and read part 1 first. Also I put in names of folks- only not their real names. Cause, well…      The chick didn’t die that day. And it didn’t die the next. By the third day, the kitchen reeked of the acrid scent particular to chicken excrement. It was around that time that Alexandra decided to reintroduce the bird to the flock. Where only two days before, the chick’s head had been a mess of bone and tendon, its scalp was now covered with a heavy plate of scab. How quickly the young things heal, I thought, looking at the bird, trying to calculate how long it would take my own skin to scab after such a wound. Meanwhile, the chick found the box to be terribly boring and declared its indignation vocally. It was time.      When dusk came, Alexandra tucked the tiny thing into the henhouse next to its mother and siblings who were already sleeping in their warmth of feathers. Chickens are blessed with a deficit of short ter

Ok, ok, one more chicken story, and I’ll stop. But this one has two parts. Part 1: Dusk was approaching. The path to the chicken coop was a wash of dusky brown earth, golden leaves and darkening sky. All of the birds were gathered around the henhouse, getting ready to crowd inside, pecking at the dirt, gossiping with each other about the day. Then there was another sound- a tiny, high-pitched shriek. We rounded the corner to discover a circle of full grown chickens ganging up on the tiniest, runtest, baby chick of the bunch. They pecked at her till she bled, chasing after her when she ducked and screamed and tried to flee. Her mother and the other peeps were already inside the henhouse ruffling their feathers, and none of them bothered to come to the rescue. As we looked on in horror, the big orange rooster jumped on top of the runt’s tiny frame. She buckled under the weight while he pecked, heedless, into her head. That is when a human shriek joined the sound of animals tort