to keep a straight face. “Or how about a turkey?” At this she lost her composure and whooped until her eyes teared. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
“Never mind,” her sister said. “It wasn’t important.”
“Oh, don’t be like that,” the chicken scolded. “Come on, now. So if he’s not a rooster, what is he?”
The sister took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, like, maybe if he was, for instance, more like me?”
“Brown?” the chicken said, and in the silence that followed she grasped what her sister had been aiming at. “You don’t mean…”
“It’s just a thought,” her sister said.
“Just a thought?”
“Something that’s passed through my mind a couple of times.”
“A couple of times?” This was what the chicken did when presented with shocking or unpleasant news. If informed, for example, of an outbreak of lice, she’d look at the speaker, saying, “An outbreak of lice?” as if the transformation from statement to question might somehow confuse the situation into reversing itself.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” her sister said.
“Shouldn’t have said anything?”
As they were talking, the farmer’s wife walked in. She was a plump woman but quick, and before the sisters had time to run, she grabbed them by the feet and hung them upside down, one in each hand. The chicken had never seen the world from this angle and wasn’t sure she liked it: an open doorway three feet off the ground. Trees hanging senselessly from a brilliant green sky. Her vision grew hazy, and just as she thought she might pass out, the farmer’s wife released her grip and the chicken fell on her head into the straw. Her sister, meanwhile, with one clean jerk, had her neck wrung.
“At least it happened quickly,” the gray pullet said, and the chicken agreed that it could have been worse.
“You’re just lucky the woman chose your sister instead of you,” the pullet continued, and though the chicken concurred, she knew that luck had nothing to do with it. Her sister had been killed because she deserved it—there was no other explanation. Decent creatures lived until they couldn’t stand it anymore, and then they were ushered to a kind of paradise where they were adorned with jewels and tended to by servants hoisting platters full of grain.
Devious and perverse creatures, on the other hand, suffered untimely deaths and were sent to a reverse paradise where they were the servants, and instead of jewels they were adorned with flaming-hot coals. Her sister was there now, and all because she had entertained unnatural thoughts, which were as bad as unnatural actions in certain circumstances. “I’m sorry it had to happen,” the chicken told the pullet, “but at least I learned something from it.”
At dawn the following morning, the rooster made his rounds. He was a disagreeable character, someone to be endured rather than looked forward to, but to not accept him or to do so with less than a full heart was, the chicken now understood, a first-class ticket to hell. He approached her nest and had just taken his position when she turned to address him. “I want you to know,” she whispered, “that I really love you.”
“Tough titty,” he said.
“No,” she went on, “I mean it. Some of the others, they might put up with you or whatnot, but I honestly treasure our time together, and I wouldn’t trade you for anyone.”
He told her that unless she was willing to talk dirty she should just keep her trap shut, and when she continued he jerked his head forward and pecked out her left eye.
“It was an accident,” she told the others. “He gets excited and, well, you know, these things happen.” Inwardly, though, she was devastated. Had the rooster chipped her beak, all right, no hard feelings, but her eyes were her best feature, and now she had only one of them. The other was just a dank hole, the rim crusted with blood and mucus.
“Cyclops,” her friends started calling her. As in, “Hey, Cyclops, you might want to keep an eye out for that rooster.” The only one who didn’t tease her was an underweight guinea hen whom the chicken had seen around but never really spoken to. “I don’t think it looks that bad, actually,” she said. “I mean, it’s part of what makes you you, right?”
The chicken had never thought about it this way and supposed the hen had a point. Though a missing eye was certainly nothing to be proud of, neither was