by Leah Mueller
My mother and I didn’t talk much during the summer of ‘76. She reclined in her bathrobe, chain-smoking and re-reading old Mike Royko columns. Mom hated downstate Illinois. She’d always identified with Eva Gabor in Green Acres, who fervently desired a luxury high-rise apartment.
Thirty chickens lived in an enclosed coop behind our house. Their dwelling smelled horrible on stifling afternoons, when direct sunlight heated the fecal/feather mixture on the floor. The penned birds were terrifyingly stupid, prone to flying in my face whenever I opened the henhouse door.
The coop’s windows were usually propped open halfway, to allow for air flow. One morning, however, my mother opened them too wide, and the brood escaped into an unfenced portion of the backyard.
When I heard squawking, I rose from my chair. “I think you’d better take a look at this.”
Mom put down her smoldering cigarette and scowled at the backyard. “Those stupid birds.”
The chickens were reacting to their freedom in various ways. Some stood in clusters, clucking and twitching. Others scurried about in a panic, wings flapping, as they tried to figure a way back into their prison.
Mom swooped down on the brood like an avenging falcon. Some of the birds sought refuge under the coop. Others remained immobile, trembling. I lunged forward, hugged a chicken with both arms, and hurled it into the coop. It fled to the corner and stared at me with a terrified expression. Then it began to peck at its food dish, like nothing unusual had occurred.
Rounding up the chickens proved to be much easier than I’d anticipated. I scooped up one after another, tossing them unceremoniously into their enclosure. They wanted desperately to return to a familiar environment, no matter how squalid and restrictive.
Finally, only one chicken remained, stubbornly wedged underneath the coop. It peered at me with beady, taunting eyes. The little creep was smarter than we were. I longed to see it on a plate with a nice green salad and a baked potato.
I prodded its feathered behind with the prickly straw end of a discarded broom. The bird squawked loudly and raced into my mother’s outstretched hands. She pitched it into the coop and slammed the door shut. Victory at last! We even had time to catch our morning Beverly Hillbillies rerun.
Leah Mueller‘s work is published or forthcoming in Rattle, A Certain Age, Writers Resist, Brilliant Flash Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Check out more of her work at substack.com/@leahsnapdragon.