Good Husbandry

By Jennifer Walker

It started with two colorless hens, maybe escapees from the processing plant right outside town, or fallen off trucks filled with birds lolling between the grates of their cages, so fat they could barely walk. They slowed traffic on Alison’s street as they ran in and out of the road in front of the cars ahead of her. Because of the way the street dipped and rose she could see the chickens clearly, how they weaved through moving tires like blinking blocks in an old school video game. Then one was sucked under a wheel and the other ran full force across the road and into a fence, headfirst. Alison had chickens of her own, most of her neighbors did, but they were breeds like Plymouth Rocks and Golden Phoenixes and Dark Brahmas with feathers that were striped and patterned and frilled and eggs that were brown and blue and pink, nothing like these dingy, waddling things. Still she winced, that same, involuted yelp she always gave whenever she drove by the industrial chicken houses along the highway and thought of her four girls holed up in those lightless tunnels of hell.

Alison stopped her car completely when the second one, only dazed for an instant after hitting the fence, ran back out into the road and between another car’s wheels, it’s companion’s broken body fluttering with each passing tire; and she screamed as it too was pulled under, a moment there, looking like it could perfectly navigate the timing and distance, and the next vanished until spat out the backside of a wheel. Then, for good measure, run over again.

“Why are you yelling mommy?” her three-year-old Mabel asked.

Her seven-year-old Rose said nothing. She was tall enough in her car seat to see through the windshield. In the rearview mirror her little face was stuck in a bloodless, Munchian O.

“Nothing sweetie.” Alison shook the words out. “Everything’s fine honey.”

When she drove by she controlled herself and did not look. She saw that Rose did.

Rose brought up the chickens later, when they were driving home from school.

“Mommy,” she said and looked sideways at Mabel and dropped her voice, “where did the chickens go?”

“What chickens?” Mabel said.

“No chickens,” Rose said. “It’s just a question for Mommy, not you.”

“You said chickens,” Mabel said.

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Girls!” Alison said, too loud for the moment. The shock stunned everyone and the car passed the few remaining feathers stuck to the asphalt in penitent silence. Alison found a more reasonable voice by the time they got to their driveway. “Who wants some egg custard for snack?”

The girls had almost finished their apricot-colored custards, made that deep orangey-yellow by the eggs their hens laid every day, when Leah and Shenelle came over with their two boys. While the kids played in the backyard Leah got right to it.

“Did you hear about the chickens?” she said.

Alison’s husband Dan came downstairs then from his office in their bedroom and joined the group around the kitchen table looking out through sliding glass doors at the coop in the backyard.

“What about the chickens?” Dan said.

“I saw them,” Alison said. “It was awful.”

“What happened?” Dan said while Shenelle added, “We heard they’ve got some kind of disease.”

“From who?” Alison said while Dan said, “What happened?”

“From that guy Joe, the kind of prepper guy across the street,” Leah said. “He was walking his Doberman, the one with the muzzle, and we were in the front yard getting ready to come over. He’s like, there’s some kind of outbreak on the chicken farms.”

“Outbreak?” Alison said and Dan, now agitated, twisting in his chair, said, “What the fuck happened?” and peered at the coop, the one Alison had built from a kit made of recycled barn wood and painted a distressed gray, as if they were talking about their chickens, their robustly plumed Rhode Island Reds and sleekly speckled Barred Rocks that were, to his relief, complacently pecking as the children ran and screamed. Alison squeezed his hand and told him about the morning.

“That’s what we heard,” Shenelle said. “We were running late today so by the time we drove by there were only some people in uniforms and stuff cleaning the road. Can you even imagine one of our girls getting out like that and in the street?”

A shudder went around the table, an involuntary spasm of flesh and bone as if suddenly the sun went out. Alison had helped Shenelle and Leah build their coop from the same kit she’d used and they’d painted it a lemony yellow. It housed their Java, their Wyandotte, and their two Silkies. All the kids loved the Silkies best, especially Mabel, who called them Silfies and had just gotten tall enough to reach up and open both coop doors’ latches. She did that in the backyard now and ran inside and chased the chickens out.

“Mabel, no!” Alison said and all the adults rushed outside and tried to round up the squawking birds, their feathers flared in protest, and the children screamed even louder and then, finally, when the adults caught the chickens in their hands, they cradled them to their chests, and murmured close to their necks, and carefully held them until they were all safely back inside.

The next day the news was worse. Alison and the girls were over Leah and Shenelle’s and the women sat in the backyard around a wooden table made of repurposed Indonesian boat wood and watched the kids pet the Silkies. Birds like that could be trusted outside the coop. Sometimes Leah and Shenelle even let them in the house.

“Did you see what that guy Joe posted on Facebook?” Leah started. “That thing about the county coming for our chickens?”

Alison actually had but ignored it just like all of Joe’s posted conspiracy theories and healthcare rants and politically charged rhetorical questions.

“I mean,” Leah continued, “it’s not that I believe him. Our chickens have nothing to do with the commercial ones. Can you imagine? How could anything that happens in those concentration camps affect our ladies? I did see this thing in the Gazette though about how they’ve started clearing out all the chicken farms.”

There was a pink and yellow woven basket, one of those found at a thousand high end supermarkets supposedly made by a woman in some cooperative in some developing nation, sitting in the middle of the table and Leah stopped speaking when Rose ran up and grabbed it. Only afterward the girl paused, already half-turned to run back to the coop, and remembered to ask.

“Of course you can look for eggs sweetie,” Shenelle said. “Just be careful not to let Wynona out. That Wyandotte can really fly.”

“God, remember when we had to go to the store to buy our eggs?” Alison said. “All those sad bleached things sitting in all that styrofoam. Our kids are so lucky they get to grow up seeing where their food comes from and getting to eat real, fresh food instead of some processed, packaged, industrially farmed, no nutritional value bullshit. I could never go back to eating supermarket eggs.”

“And they learn so much about the environment and animals helping to take care of them. They’re already these amazing little citizens of the world,” Shenelle said.

“But seriously guys,” Leah said, “what if this chicken disease or whatever is like airborne or something, or super highly contagious, and this dude Joe is right? What would we do? I mean, I love my girls sometimes more than my own kids.” She laughed quickly, like barking.

“Nobody’s taking away our chickens,” Alison said. “That would be totally insane. It would be like taking away someone’s dog or cat.”

“They took away the Peterson’s dog last year,” Leah said.

“That’s different. Wasn’t it a wolf?  It killed like seventeen cats.”

“Well our chickens haven’t killed anyone. If anything they’re probably saving lives, making all of us healthier and better people anyway.” Shenelle put her arm around her wife’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Alison’s right, nobody’s coming for our chickens.”

“Yeah but what if they do? Shouldn’t we have a plan or something just in case?”

“Come here Silfy Silfy, Silfy,” Mabel called, her stubby legs struggling through the grass in devoted pursuit of a Silkie that slipped under the table.

“Give Cleopatra some space,” Alison told her daughter. “Remember to let her come to you, okay?”

Mabel ignored the advice and soon was out of earshot when the chicken darted back out into the yard.

“I’d never let anyone take my girls, no matter what,” Alison said.

The two other women, shoulder to shoulder, agreed.

***

The letter came two days later. It was Saturday and Rose found it first, reading it out loud as she walked up the stairs to Alison and Dan’s room, her little voice stumbling and mis-inflected as she sounded out the words between stacking breaths. Alison sat up in bed at the sound, dread stuck in her ribs.

“...remo-val and exterm-i-nat-ion of any and all chickens…Mom!” Rose climbed on the bed with the paper held carefully so it would not crinkle. Alison saw the blue and gold state seal seeping through the back of the page. “Mom! It’s something about chickens. Here. Look!”

Now Mabel was up and coming into the room and even Dan rolled over to see what was going on. Alison handled the paper as if only the edges were cool enough to touch. It had official letterhead and two succinct paragraphs and the governor’s—the one she’d voted for—signature at the bottom. Dan sat up and read over Alison’s shoulder.

“What does it say?” both girls were asking, Rose bouncing on her knees and Mabel jumping full force, bounding around the bed with abandon, so that the words were hard to follow. It didn’t matter. It was obvious what the letter said.

Alison pushed between the girls to get out of bed, the comforter following as she fled the room. The girls were yelling, whining and yelling, and they tripped over the comforter as they tried to keep up with her and Dan all the way down the stairs and out into the backyard. But the only time Alison looked back was when she shut the sliding glass doors in their faces.

***

 They didn’t come until later that night, having worked through the other neighbors all day. Rose and Mabel were already upstairs, asleep, and Alison opened the front door holding her pre-bed cup of chamomile tea. There were three: a cop, young, with the warrant, hair barely grown out of his cadet’s buzzcut, and two health inspectors. The cop wore a white mask already grey with smudges from the way he couldn’t stop touching it, pulling it down and up, down and up, like a tic while he talked. The inspectors were in full hazmat suits, Department of Health stamped across the back in a rush job, the ink smeared and dripping. They stayed silent.

“Sorry to bother you folks so late,” the cop said, again, once they were inside and moving through the kitchen, pulling out every drawer and swinging every cabinet door wide. “But we’ve got to check every house within this neighborhood today. Cannot wait until tomorrow. They’ve got lots of other teams out too, all across the county. They’re saying we cannot miss one chicken. Nope, not one. This whole chicken thing is real serious.”

The cop nodded his head toward the inspectors who were searching the dishwasher, heads and torsos swallowed inside.

“Must be,” Alison said. She spoke between deliberate sips of tea, each loud slurp a protest against this legal invasion. Dan remained silent. “Kind of crazy to think somebody would hide some chickens in a dishwasher.”

The cop’s mask did a quick down and up, like a magician’s hand during a trick. “Hey, I’m not saying I don’t believe you folks. You seem like nice, normal people and I want to believe you don’t have any chickens and just call it a night. I’m telling you, I’m ready for this day to be over. Some of the things I’ve seen today you could not even imagine. You know,” he pointed to the refrigerator where the inspectors were now crouched down, opening the vegetable drawers, “these two ladies down the street—I think they were together if you know what I mean—they had put their chickens in the freezer.”

Alison missed a swallow and started to cough.

“See, what’d I say? Totally insane, right? Yeah, in the freezer. Each chicken had their own shelf, like some goddamn mausoleum or something. Said they put them to sleep with some Benadryl and then froze them so they could thaw them out once the chicken flu stuff was over. I mean, you got to be kidding me. Right? And they were some strange looking chickens, I’ll tell you that much. Had these fluffy looking faces, beaks all covered with frost. I almost called for back-up those ladies were so crazy. Hey, you need a tissue or something? You got something stuck in your throat?”

Alison recovered—her face at least— behind a napkin as she followed the inspectors and cop into the living room. The cop kept talking, his voice modulated by the moving mask as if it was going in and out of range.

“Mostly, I guess, I just don’t see what the big deal is,” he said. “I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about somebody’s dog, or even a cat. You know? Chickens don’t give you affection. Right? You can’t teach a chicken any tricks. Nobody ever called a chicken man’s best friend. You know what I mean? All they do is lay eggs and you can just go buy those at the store.”

The inspectors were lifting up couch cushions now and Alison pretended she still had more tea, the last drops cold on her tongue. The cop took in the u-shaped leather sofa, new last year from West Elm, and the cowhide ottomans that had been Alison and Dan’s first splurge and now worked so well as movable coffee tables, and the seventy-five-inch flat screen that took up half the living room wall, nodding at each item as if he was clicking off a mental checklist. The mask did a few more traverses. “Nice place, nice place,” he said.

The inspectors moved onto the powder room and the cop and Alison followed until they were squeezed into the small hallway outside it. Her palms were wet and sliding down the mug, she’d almost dropped it twice, so she gave up and put it down on the hall table too quickly. It chattered like teeth on edge.

“So what’s the deal anyway with this chicken flu,” she sputtered, then held the napkin to her lips in imitation daintiness. “Like, is it just affecting chickens or can it jump to humans?”

Now the cop moved his mask in a circle, scraping his cheeks with a faint shurring sound and letting Alison see the baby fat still there. “To tell the truth I don’t really know. And I’m not supposed to say anything anyway. But,” he watched the inspectors bent over trying to see behind the toilet, “I get the impression it’s real contagious and it could be, like, the big one, you know? Like the one that takes us all out. Who knows though, right?”

Next it was out to the garage with all its musty mess, too crowded for Alison and Dan’s hybrid SUVs, and Alison gagged thinking that maybe Dan put the chicken coop they spent the morning dismantling in some corner under a tarp, because he could be like that, lazy. They’d find it at once. The cop asked if she was alright and waited for her to get herself together so she had no choice but to trudge on to the garage behind him, clutching the napkin to damp shreds in her hands.

But there was no tarp covered pile and after the inspectors had looked at every baby carriage, and tricycle, and bicycle, and Big Wheel, and holiday decoration, and chest freezer, and piece of broken outdoor furniture Alison was going to get around to repairing, and waterslide, and badminton net, and tennis racket, and rollerblade, and ski, and boot, and helmet—all those different helmets—they finally wanted to see the backyard.

Alison led them back through the house, a strange confidence starting to set in as if in getting this far without discovery she’d won something, that her chances were somehow better than they were before, and even Dan stepped out from where he was trying to vanish into the wall and flipped on the outdoor lights as they marched over the sliding glass door track that had, if anyone had looked closely, one fine, fluffy down feather crushed in a corner. Outside the light turned the yard into a dimly lit stage, ghostly and forlorn, like any empty stage, so even the new inflatable kiddie pool with its hastily scattered water toys lying about, that concealed the barren ground the chickens pecked clean, looked abandoned and old. The inspectors walked through quickly, like they were walking through a graveyard, and even the cop was unwilling to break the haunted quiet of a dark and deserted suburban yard.

Once inside, though, he started up again. He talked nonstop through the search of Alison and Dan’s bedroom and bath, and then through the Jack and Jill the girls shared, so that by the time they got to Rose’s bedroom he was really on a roll. “Like I said folks, I’m really sorry about this.” The mask bobbed down and up, down and up. “You really seem like nice people and you have a beautiful house. Really. But man, you just never know. A guy down the street seemed like a good guy, had a pretty nice house too. Big TV, nice furniture. Stuff I really wish I could afford one day. But you know what? When we got outside there was just blood and feathers everywhere. Come to find out the dude shot all his chickens to death! Shot ‘em up with an automatic rifle because they just exploded everywhere. These little comb-y things and claws and guts and feathers just smeared all over everything. And saying the whole time we’re out there, ‘I’m not letting the government get their hands on my chickens,’ while the poor DOH guys are trying for hours to bag everything up.”

Rose was sitting up in bed listening with her mouth in that same O Alison’d seen a few days ago in the rearview mirror. Alison spun toward the cop but it was Dan who said, perfectly, “Could you please?” and reached for the little girl so that the cop stopped, mask down, and dropped his eyes to the floor. Then he popped the mask back into place and spoke louder than he had all evening.

“Hey guys, are we about done here? These people and their kids really need to get some sleep already.”

The inspectors shook their heads and pointed to the last room on the floor, Mabel’s room.

“Well let’s hurry it up then, huh? No one wants to be here all night.”

So the inspectors moved a little faster across the hallway and were already at Mabel’s bedside when Alison and Dan entered the room behind the cop, holding hands without realizing they’d grasped onto each together. Mabel was up and crying and the cop was saying some more things, sharp things, half blunted by the moving mask, but all Alison heard was the thunder of fear. Then Mabel’s arms were up and it was easy to go to her, to pick her up and sit down heavily with her and Dan on the trundle bed, even Rose running in and joining their huddle. Now the inspectors and the cop had to work around them, Alison and Dan’s feet reaching the floor, legs pressed firmly against the trundle as Mabel’s dresser drawers were pulled out, and her bookshelf rifled, and her chest of toys pried open and plumbed. And that’s exactly how the cop and inspectors left them, with apologies unheard over adrenaline, until finally the sound of the front door closing broke through.

The children stopped crying and everything was quieter than it had ever been. Then everyone was off the bed, even Mabel, and the trundle pulled open, and the chickens lifted out, and the makeshift muzzles clamping their beaks carefully untied. Finally freed the birds roamed around the room, pecking and scratching and shaking their feathers, while the family watched in silent exultation. Their beautiful girls.

 But it was late, so Rose gave goodnight hugs and patted the chickens and walked with Dan back to her room. And Alison picked Mabel up, surprised at how leaden the little girl had become now everything was alright, and placed her back in bed. The child’s eyes were red and her cheeks were flushed and her nose was running, but she smiled as the chickens strutted about. “Goodnight wittle wadies. Goodnight,” she whispered and her eyelids dropped.

 It was only after Alison gave her a kiss and turned off the lights and shooed the birds into the hall that Mabel began to cough and cough and did not stop.

THE END

Author Bio: Jennifer Walker is a short story writer who grew up in a strange and unsettling place called the suburbs. Her stories can be read in recent or forthcoming issues of Arcturus Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine. She now lives in the Virgin Islands with her girlfriend, two dogs, and an untold number of increasingly suspicious roosters.

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