by MJ Huntsgood
I meet my stepmother’s chickens while my father is in the ICU. They’re fluffy and small and smell like the inside of a sewage system but she puts one in my hands and I smile for her Facebook photo because that’s what you do when a loved one is dying. You pose.
“Are you going back to the hospital tonight?” she asks me.
I nod. “You can just stay in our hotel room if the house is too much.”
She thanks me and I head down the dirt Tennessee road towards the only hospital in five hundred miles. Had the ambulance been faster, my mother might have died here ten years earlier.
“I’m pretty sure the chickens are the reason he’s been shooting feral dogs out there,” I tell my husband when I scoot in next to him. “Putting them down. To protect the chickens.”
“Yikes.”
“He did what he had to do,” I say.
“That’s brutal,” he tells me.
We watch my father’s heart monitor go up and down. It’s late and my husband has been watching movies. My father didn’t want to die alone, so I’ve been tasked with the overnight shift in case he takes a turn for the worst.
“What does he do with the dogs, after they’re dead?” my husband asks.
I don’t know what to say. My father is—or rather, was, since I know he’s not really in the bed we’re watching anymore—brutal, but he’s too efficient to have just left dead bodies somewhere.
“Buried them, I’m sure,” I say. “Away from the chickens, to deter predators.”
“Twisted.” My husband cues another movie. “Like a dog-I-killed cemetery.”
“Put down.” I suppose I don’t owe my father the distinction, but it feels wrong, being this kind of tongue in cheek while he’s there, tubes strapped to his every orifice. I suppose he’s beyond really giving him pride. But, well, there it is.
My husband takes my hand. “What are you going to do?”
I don’t know, not really. But there’s only one thing to do, I guess.
“I’ll do what I have to do.”
MJ Huntsgood is a speculative horror author who enjoys exploring the use of perspective and deep POV in her work to find the nightmare not just in a situation, but within ourselves. She lives in Washington DC with her ever dwindling number of underwatered plants, 2 cats, and trophy husband. Find her on Instagram @mjhuntsgood