by Brittany Redd
She hatched under the gaze of a full blood moon. A crack of lightning hit the tin roof of her coop the very same moment she burst from her shell, feet first. She was an unusual little thing, the runt of her brood, always going left when her brethren would go right. She was nocturnal, always clucking like mad when the moon was full, scratching strange patterns in the dirt when it was new.
Her true strangeness took a fuller form when she started laying eggs. When her owners came to collect, they discovered that every last one of her eggs bore a shiny, obsidian shell.
Being farmers, they knew eggs came in all sorts, so they thought little of it until one of the children tried to make scrambled eggs and gaped in horror as the blood red yolk hit the pan with an unsettling splat! When his mother tried to assure him that that happened sometimes, her words fell silent as every last one of the black eggs revealed a similar sanguine center.
A birth defect, they thought, as they loaded her into a wiry cage, hoping to catch a good price for her as a pet. If her eggs were no good, she would be of little use on the farm.
In the midday before a blood moon night, the hen would meet the witch from down the road. She cackled with glee when she saw the hen in her cage; she knew exactly what that treasure was worth, hardly believing the bargain on offer. They even tried to throw in the cage for free; she told them not to bother. The witch carried the Blood Moon Hen off to her new home in her arms.
That night, when the Blood Moon Hen would cluck beneath the celestial spectacle above her, the witch would join her, dancing and chanting for an auspicious month ahead. For the first time in her life, the world made sense.
Brittany Redd is a teacher and writer in Thailand. Her work appears in Corvid Queen, paloma, Funicular Magazine, and elsewhere.