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gertrude

we watched her kick feebly out of her egg in a glass box of intense light, wanting to help her out of her shell and unable to, the wet silky insides of the egg remaining on her face and beak, born apart from the other chickens, the ones who were clucking wildly, dissatisfied, in the moment of her birth. we had watched the little rough triangular shards of eggshell dry on her downy immature feathers in the heat of the lamp, and seen them finally fall off, her eyes pushing back the eyelids that looked so thin, the veins thicker than the skin, purple and white. i stayed up late to watch her begin to walk, and soon we put her under another lamp, this one a miniature sun that was further away from her, it's rays allowing her soft feathers to bloom. i am not allowed to touch her yet, my hands are too young and rough. so i watch her walk around blinking, her tiny white-red legs coholding up her yellow cotton-ball of a body.

she grows, her eyes opening, and i'm allowed to let her walk all over me, her tiny splayed feet tickling me with their cutely small weight, her claws never trying to scratch but padding peacefully across the rug and up my leg, i can't wait for her to walk on me, for her to let me hold her, and now i can give her a bath, watching her feathers puff out again after i place her under the lamp, every time hoping that i haven't hurt her fragile little bones when i scrub her, each time seeing the slight confusion in her eyes when she's in the big silver sink. she makes my little hands look big on the smallness of her body. i hope i am forgiven if my eager hands, so loving of her pretty body, suddenly squeeze tight around her middle or around her neck that is like a matchstick inside a shredded piece of towel. i almost cry when i pet the soft of her downy feathers that haven't grown stiff with age, that haven't yet been outdoors or covered with grit.

she grows to be a medium sized hen, and i walk her out into the sunlight, there she follows me like a puppy would, twitching her head that looks independent of her neck now shapely in it's strong stiff reddening feathers. she follows me into the woods, her head bobbing with frantic curiousity at the overload of mushroom and bark and fern smells that await her there, pleasant brown smells cut to pieces by sunlight. she is yellow and reddening when i turn to see her following me on the path, her peaceful claws silent on the pineneedles carpeting the path. she follows me through the sigh of the woods as i talk nervously to her about good places to pick blueberries and about how she will be able to follow me anywhere because her feet are naturally more calloused than mine, so anywhere i can walk will be bearable to the pads her feet were equipped with at birth. but i will soon see her claws bleed, though now she follows me fearlessly even on the tar, her feet clicking softly in the dimming sunlight behind me.

one day she strays innocently into the territory of the other, undomesticated hens, pecking her way along the ground into their midst where they stalk next the oppressive green smell of the garden, the pea-pods slit open by a sunlight that turns green upon them. one by one they raise their numb heads, noticing a foreign smell, and they begin to peck at her and kick her with their feet that are rougher than hers, full-sized hen-feet almost the spread of a large man's hand to her, chasing her over to the compost heap, at the foot of which lay glass shards of broken beer-bottles that make her feet bleed. i run angrily into their midst, kicking them neatly with the front of my feet as if they are soccer-balls, their squawks rising over the rooftops of the house and their coop, as they fly with bent necks several feet into the air, their cries scraping the shingles, a huge baby mouth grabbing at the skies above the emptiness of the grass. she huddles, hiding her feet on the couch, the blood absurd on her clawed feet, her crotch hurting from my desperate roughness, i pick her up, our love consummated too soon. the compost heap smells of discontinued eggs, the soil isn't yet soil but still trash, the bedroom smells like us, the odors of us drifting out of it and under our noses in the living room in the sunlight on the aching grass.

we have many days of happiness after that, she heals quickly, and we take many more walks, me talking nervously, trying to make her beak respond, and one day it occurs to me that there is something strange about her for a chicken--she never clucks, much less squawks. even when the hens attacked her, sensing the alien presence among them, she kept her beak shut, the air hissing out of her hard little nostrils with white suppressed river-sounds. she makes me laugh until my stomach hurts sometimes, with the absurdly cute way she tilts her head at my voice, with the obliviously awkward yet poised way that she runs across the rug across the grass. the blond halo surrounding my face is a lie when i fall from laughing so hard and see my reflection gathered into a puddle dark in the black soil of a dip in the path. there is something dangerous that has been sown into my love for living. sometimes i play with her in the overgrown lawn, the floorboards crackling beneath us, the wood that won't settle until the house is torn down, afraid to get too enthusiastic for fear that i might crumple a wing or make her crack her beak in her eagerness. there is something eerie about her, something different from any animal i have encountered. she walks on the tar behind me as if it were natural for her to leave the soil. i want the feeling of destiny, of fate, that already surrounds each moment, to leave me, to let me sit in the grass without trying to read the suppressed messages in the face of the people i know not at all and of the animals that i love.

one day as the family sits on the porch a neighbor child with an impish grey-red face under hair brown like dark dry sand leads his dog into the yard. i like the dog, a dachshund, i've played with it before and it's pointy face is friendly. i laugh happily at the amusing hot-dog shape of it's body, at it's legs small as matchsticks that somehow support it's body with weird grace, never wobbling. i like his originality, the way he doesn't look like the other dogs in the neighborhood. the child who holds him loosely on the leash talks to me, but i am too shy and uninterested to know what he's talking about. i was happier before the boy arrived, and i'm annoyed by the way that he yanks the dog back on it's leash when he lunges at a smell or at a movement, his cruel little face so smug in it's pathetic temporary authority. my body is perfectly clean, and hairless, barely scented. the chicken plays in the garden peacefully, it's head twitching with inner clucks that don't escape.

the boy lets go of the leash, and a warning that i don't understand makes my heart jump above the shingles and the dry smells of flowers in a draught. then i see where the dachshund is headed; he slithers with disturbing urgent quickness through my legs and under the picnic table, and i try to grab him helplessly as the direction of his movements is made clear to me. he heads into the garden and my vision blurs with the stress of my pursuit, grabbing at his hind legs that are too tiny and furiously bunched with the wormy muscles of their action to be held. the flowers tremble frantically in his wake, the bees that were feeding there scattered in a frenzy around our heads, all of us trying to grab at the dog and at the leash that drags behind him like a tease telling us that we can drag destiny backwards, stall fate in the very soil. the leash stops dragging for a moment and finally the neighbor drags it back. but the reason that the leash stopped is that he's already got her in his jaws, his black and white jaws that are barely big enough to hold her. she finally squawks now that it's too late for us to protect her, and i'm angry at her for not crying earlier as she is dragged back in his aching teeth, as i hit the dog in the ribs with a whiffle bat, crying with terror and anger, ignoring the bees that swarm around me that i would usually be terrified of. we separate the incongruous animals only made a part of each other in death, and see her laying unnaturally on her side, panting, in a posture that no healthy chicken takes, her tiny frame taking in too much gravity, swallowing all our weights as we stare at her and they drag me away from the dog, trying to soothe me and telling me that it's not right to attack him with the whiffle bat, it's long thin plastic raising hollow sounds from his spine, him undeterred in his pursuit of blood. we surround her with our sad helplessness, her feathers wet and pink now, like a mockery of the way they looked when she was young and undeveloped. someday i will be the predator, despite my wish to heal, despite my desire to protect, to create, i enjoy the sight of the green ferns and i cut them down with a stick anyway, i throw bones at the dogs, seed at the eyes of the chickens. someday i will be the predator that i hate, for a moment, paths of snow covered with menstrual blood that lead to her legs, the soil frozen.

that night we watched her die quietly in warm sawdust under the lamp of her childhood crib, leaving the one squawk of her life hanging out in the garden where the bees are settling. she lies quiet, the water that i brought her showing it's stagnation with the dust that settles on it's flatness, and then she is a girl.

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