Guts
by Fran Turner
They cluck quietly in their not very deep, not very peaceful, one-eye-open sleep. Vigilant but blind in darkness. Even protected inside the closed henhouse door, they worry, clustering close for comfort on the roosts. Worries infiltrate the dreaming part of their brains and they dream a collective horrific dream—chickens with flesh denuded, caves of their bodies slashed open.
The dream tears at their gizzards insistent and frightening, perhaps an omen that with the dawn, the sun will not rise on a normal day. On normal days they wander around the spacious yard, claw the dirt, seek out nesting boxes to lay their eggs.
With Lester’s tight-throated reveille the sun will rise. Will it rise on a killing day?
Killing days are a reality in the lives of the henhouse inhabitants. Killing days happen in broad, unflinching daylight.
Halcyon, henhouse matriarch, the only one to dare exposure away from the clustered flock, hunches alone on the lowest roosting slat. Golden eyes closed, head tucked under her warm wing, Halcyon dreams of all the yellow peeping chicks she might have raised, dreams of the multitudes of eggs stolen from beneath her through the years despite her protests. Dreams of many lost friends. Most of those lost friends laid fewer eggs than Halcyon. But now she is older, and sometimes the nest underneath her is empty when the featherless two-leg comes.
Halcyon and all the others have watched friends disappear, the backs of their wings pressed tight together, hurting, helpless, and sadly squawking, carried away by the big featherless two-leg on killing days.
The sun hints its rising through the crud-encrusted windows. Miniscule motes of dust float through the warm air, heavy with chicken shit ammonia. Even worry burdened and suffering from a troubled sleep, Lester can’t stop the muscles in his neck and breast or the air in his lungs from announcing the dawning of the day.
Cock-a-doodle-doo! Killing day!
The henhouse door swings open and the flock rushes out into the bite and fresh tang of morning air. Today as every day, the big featherless two-leg pours pails of grain into a trough where Lester takes his place at the end. Two-leg brings fresh water. Even on a killing day bodies demand sustenance. A burst of hens surrounds the trough, heads bobbing, beaks pecking at the grain, pok-pok-pokking. Happy for a generous meal, they can not extinguish the reality of killing day.
Halcyon absents herself from the trough, searches beyond the familiar landscape of hard gray dirt, looks for gaps in the fence that imprisons them. This morning, she refuses to weigh her body down with the comfort of food in case she is the one chosen to disappear. But no escape gaps can she find. She knows the featherless two-leg comes after their meal. The creature clutches a dangerous, shining implement that smells of blood in what should be the tips of wings. If the worst befalls her, Halcyon is determined she will fly although she’s never flown before.
Lester signals the deadly approach with a “brawk.”
As golden eyes bulge, necks lengthen and screw from one direction to another, silence shivers through the flock.
Then the explosion.
Squawking, the cyclone of feathered bodies and sharp claws running past one another, over one another, darting here and there here and there with no safe place to go.
The featherless two-leg moves heavily through the storm of down feathers and dust. Halcyon has been chosen to disappear. Two-leg’s naked wing tips swish at Halcyon, drive her to the corner, then lunge at her. Halcyon’s wings flap, flap, flap. Neck arched in attack, she drives her beak viciously toward the unfeathered wing tips. She jumps in a cloud of dust, drives her claws at the covering on the featherless shanks, eludes the grab.
Lester watches astounded as the old hen now leaps above the creature’s head, her nails gouging streaks of blood into the featherless flesh. Halcyon’s wings beat, beat, beat. She leaps, leaps, leaps higher than even Lester has ever leaped, high enough that Lester believes she might fly.
Her inevitable capture is rough and brutal but Halcyon pecks and pecks and pecks at the creature. Upside down, shanks gripped tight together, she is carried away. Her comb flames a brilliant, furious red.
The flock hears not distress but protest as her growl fades in the distance. They cluck in quiet shock, cluck in embarrassed relief their lives are spared once more. Cluck in quiet admiration, old Halcyon’s defiance has imprinted itself deep inside them.
On killing days, the guts are always dumped in the pen and the flock crowds around, beaks pricking at the pale, blind head and twisting ropes of intestines. But always, there is an aftertaste of shame. Today, as they peck at the still warm innards, they carry the memory of Halcyon letting her courage fill them.
Letting her courage fill them and just maybe, like in their dreams, they can learn to fly.
The Molotov Cocktail 