by Laura Rock
The coop isn’t winterized, but the birds don’t freeze. Rae-Ann knows how it works: the feathers plump up, wrapping the body in a self-made quilt of air. She’s taught it to her grade fives. Plumped feathers an involuntary response, like shivering in people. She digs her tiny flashlight out of her purse—acquired for urban emergencies, unused until now. The hens rouse themselves with soft chuckling and then fall silent, staring into the light. In her sweeping yellow beam, dust motes suspended in vapour, her breath made visible. Crap on the floor, a hilly topography of isolated brown and white lumps and piles rising like pyramids. An April wind blows in, lifting cobwebs from the exposed two-by-fours framing the coop.
Nine chickens roost on a pole, nestled together. Shared body heat another trick of survival. And the warmth generated by manure must help, although she feels no heat from the floor.
In her haste, Rae-Ann has underdressed for the weather and the dirt. Her flip-flops sink into half-desiccated muck. Wedged into the corner, she wishes for pinfeathers and companions pressing against her.
2. Chicken Feed
Last night in her empty apartment, Rick’s voice echoed, robbing her of sleep. His lame joke while paying the cashier for their dinner earlier that evening, one of many fast-food meals they’d eaten together since she joined the small staff of Elmvale Road Public School in the fall. Rick had been teaching there for five years and made more money than she did as a first-year teacher, but he watched his spending. He always paid cash.
“Chicken feed,” he announced to no one in particular. The cashier seemed to understand she was a backdrop to their conversation and didn’t answer as she handed Rick his change. Or maybe she was just tired of customers who didn’t tip. There was a jar next to the cash register, but it held only a few quarters. They looked for a table, balancing orange trays. “Cheap and cheerful,” Rick continued in a hearty voice. “What’s not to love about food like this?”
Rae-Ann had smiled, ever agreeable. But a different interpretation came at night. His act was meant to show that nothing was going on between them, co-workers eating under fluorescent lights in a public place, not touching. She wanted to touch him for security, to feel his chest, his back. But he drove her home right afterward. He wouldn’t come in because he had an early morning. As if she didn’t.
Alone in her bed, she tried to see the relationship objectively. There had been no fight, just a slow erosion of attention. When they were away from school, it was worse. She had to entertain him with animated stories, or else he fell silent and ate with great concentration, stabbing his fries into little paper cups filled with ketchup. He moved the cups around the tray, lined them up, shot them into the corners. He crumpled his napkin and stood, ready to slide the remains of his meal into the garbage before she had finished eating.
They’d never said love. He wasn’t her first; she could defer the love conversation for a little longer. She could face, with reluctance, her growing need to dissect their “love”—its strained quality, its asymmetry. But she hadn’t anticipated the throwback word, cheap. Cheap was idiotic, and yet it made her squirm. Her value determined by arbitrary, external rules that society had supposedly left behind—but the rules were still in play, imposed by forces that overpowered her. Between shame and desire, caught. She tried to lull herself with distractions. What to wear the next day, what to say to her pupils. And that sparked feverish lesson planning, one idea blurring into another, blotting out Rick.
Who knows what it means to call something chicken feed? One of them might get it, but it’s unlikely—they’re city kids whose chicken comes in buckets, battered and fried.
In the coop, well after midnight, Rae-Ann rocks back and forth, staving off cold. She taps her foot until it connects with the metal tray and pushes it: empty. Even in her submerged state, she can gather facts. A clear intention forms. When the sun rises, she’ll go into the shed and scoop feed for her new roommates. She’ll let it run through her fingers, even taste it. Though she can’t, just yet, imagine leaving this confined, sheltering space.
Chicken feed: a thing of no value, costing little. Synonyms: chicken scratch, chickenshit.
3. Home to Roost
Rae-Ann slides down the wall into a squat. She won’t be able to hold this position. Soon she’ll be sitting in the filth, stirring it with her feet just to keep busy. Chickens roost in the air, flying up for safety. At least she’s not directly beneath them; the droppings won’t hit her. And the stench no longer bothers her. At first, an acrid oppressiveness bore down, unbreathable. She gulped lungfuls of it to stay ahead of her body’s need for oxygen. Now, with her quieter movements, the dust has settled. The air is perfumed with an undertone of sweet rot, unnoticed before; it seems more natural than the harsh ammonia overlay. The whole world is rotting, after all. She sinks into the odour as into a comforter, dozing on and off.
Not for long: her father will be coming. She was careful to park at the road and walk in, but eventually he’ll see the car. And even if he doesn’t, he’ll come to collect the eggs and let the hens out before mid-morning, after he’s read the paper and eaten his solitary breakfast. He’ll want to know what she’s doing here when she should be in the city, earning her publicly funded salary. Never mind what she’s doing here here, brushing straw out of her hair, straining to see shapes in the dark.
She had been circling her apartment all afternoon, reviewing her losses, trying to think. She placed a call to her union rep. Swept floors, tidied up, watched the lights flicker on in buildings up and down the street. She doesn’t remember a decision to drive north, or the trip itself, which normally takes three hours.
Her father will be disappointed, not surprised—he always expects the worst—by her disgrace. He’ll stand outside the hatch-door, demanding facts. Confusion will make him less patient, not more. A vision: his large, craggy head turned sideways as he crouches down, bracing himself against the wood. His ear centred in the square. Her lips murmuring a confession: cluck-cluck cluuuuuck. Him backing away, unwilling to hear it.
In her poultry-themed lessons on language, all will be explained.
Boys and girls, when you play games instead of working, and you fail a test? The chickens have come home to roost.
4. The Pecking Order
Blades of light slice the sky when Rae-Ann’s hunger asserts itself. When did she last eat? Dinner. Not this night that she has passed hiding in a ten-by-ten cell, but the day before, in the burger place.
Some of the hens have laid, getting a jump on the sun with long cackling litanies. She reaches into her purse for the penknife, given by her father so long ago, and flips it open. RAY is engraved on the handle, for Rae-Ann Yarrow, but also for Raymond Allan Yarrow, who carried the knife as a boy and later passed it on to her, never dreaming that it would cost him some of his harvest today. No matter. The flock is a hobby, not a living.
She stands up and stamps her feet. Ducking under the pole, she claps her hands at the hen in the closest nest box, a Barred Plymouth Rock. It’s motionless.
“Shoo!” Rae-Ann waves the knife. It stands, not fast enough. She scoops it up and out—furious squawking and wing-beating, but a show. The egg is warm and covered with mucous. Rae-Ann wipes it. The knifepoint makes a neat hole. She raises the egg to her lips and sucks. It’s slippery, neutral. She throws the shell into the corner.
A school day dawns. Who will teach her class? Dear students with awkward growth spurts and runny noses, unaware of the rough weather of puberty looming. The boys’ dirty fingernails, the girls’ highlighted hair—Rae-Ann is appalled by the many signs of parental idiocy on display in her classroom, yet she still loves her children; they are not at fault. Do they love her back? As much as Rae-Ann would like to believe she’s a fixture in their lives, it’s not hard to envision the supply teacher’s campaign to win them over. Three days, and they’ll forget about her.
What have they been told—that she’s il
l? She doesn’t want to consider whether an illness grips her, something like her mother had years ago, before she died, when she needed a rest and disappeared into the hospital. Her father handed young Rae-Ann all the kitchen duties with none of the instructions. Her sisters cleaned, shopped, and did laundry. She knew how to cook only pancakes and eggs, so they ate that for a month, and no one complained.
When Rae-Ann began her first year of teaching, her new colleagues gushed advice and resources, but she held them off. She had never been able to embrace instant friends. Also, she was bad at pretending to admire their methods, which were at odds with her training. They used pre-fab worksheets and Disney movies. She showed them her portfolio fresh from Teacher’s College. When Joyce suggested that she screen Pocahontas during the unit on Indigenous peoples, Rae-Ann thought she was kidding. She said, “Sure thing, and let’s show Mulan for the unit on China.” It took a beat for the tone to hit. Joyce inhaled sharply but kept her face a mask of professionalism.
Soon, she wished that she’d accepted help. Students chattered as she presented her sweat-offerings, lessons that often didn’t end right. Her legs ached, and she felt shaky, like she was getting the flu. Parents wanted old math; to her astonishment, they wanted the worksheets. She was called into parent-teacher conferences with her principal, Sue, who liked to “build bridges,” but each compromise hurt Rae-Ann. Sue should have backed her up. By January, none of the women teachers would share a cup of tea with Rae-Ann; the staffroom emptied soon after she arrived. They passed her in the halls with bright, empty smiles.
Only Rick kept her from quitting. He coached her through the behaviour problems—kids and parents—and informed her that Joyce was an alcoholic and Sue a control freak. Rae-Ann shouldn’t waste time worrying about Joyce, but she could impress Sue with upbeat reports. One morning Rick left a vase of pink chrysanthemums on her desk, just because. They went out for a coffee that afternoon, and he snapped a photo of them on her phone. He came around the table to her side, leaning his head close as he took the picture, and then he stayed there.
At staff meetings, she sat beside him, flaunting their alliance, cheeks burning. They were jealous, the old hags. Rick was young and slender and strong, the only man on staff, their darling mascot. On yard duty at recess, he enticed the kids into raucous games of keep-away, which ended in a mass tackle and lots of happy screaming. “Come get the ball!” Holding it overhead, laughing. “Try to get it—come on!” He always let them catch him in the end, falling to the ground as they pulled at his clothes. Although there was a strict no-contact policy, the other teachers didn’t object. All they ever did was gawp at him like smitten girls.
Frost covers the coop’s sole window. Rae-Ann scrapes her fingernail against the glass, trying to see over to the house. He’ll be drinking his coffee now. The flock grows restive, scratching around the watering can skimmed with ice. There will be water when the temperature rises, or when her father shows up. They’re at his mercy.
The pecking order is about who eats first. Who’s strong, who’s weak.
5. Ruffled Feathers
Can she explain this to her kids? No, certainly not. She could stay at the metaphorical level: ruffled feathers a loss of composure, being flustered, embarrassed. But the point of the lessons is origin, how figures of speech derive from real life.
She’s seen it many times. The rooster attacks from nowhere, jumping on the hen. She flattens under his weight, sometimes squawking. A quick moment, and it’s over. Her feathers behind are a mess.
Rae-Ann trembles to think of it: sneaking around behind the stage that first time, not meaning to, but not resisting. And then finding more places, daring each other to locate dark corners and closets. The thrill of danger, and secrecy. She flushes, remembering how she was smoothing her hair as they left the gym early one morning; how he tugged at his clothes. How the caretaker summed them up in a single glance as he appeared in the hallway, slowly pushing his floor-polishing machine.
6. Henpecked
After her lesson-filled night, Rae-Ann arrived at school pouch-eyed, planning to cut ties to Rick. The hardest thing would be working with him. Only two months until summer vacation. She could hang on.
She threaded her car through the parking lot—late again, school buses arriving. Gathering her bags, she failed to see Sue standing by the car. She pushed the door open, almost hitting her, and then toppled back into the driver seat.
“Sorry! I didn’t realize—”
“Come with me.” Sue walked toward the school, not waiting.
“What’s going on? What about my class—?”
“You should have thought of that before.”
She took a seat in the principal’s office. Behind the desk, Sue fired each word with extra space in between. She was quivering: something big happening, and she wasn’t sorry. When had she begun to dislike Rae-Ann so much?
Only a few phrases pierced her consciousness: shocking behaviour, suspension until the hearing, union informed.
“Do you have anything to say?” Sue sat forward, fingers spread across the desktop.
Rae-Ann gripped her knees and leaned over as though trying to stop a nosebleed. A disciplinary hearing for her: that was rich. Discipline was what the overfed, overscheduled, overpraised students needed instead of parents who indulged every passing desire and argued with teachers every day of the week. She snorted, clapping a hand over her mouth, and struggled to sit up straight and speak calmly.
“Where’s Rick?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss other employees.”
So he wasn’t getting suspended. No discipline for him. She was the easy target; he’d work the system, dodge and deny.
She tilted her head toward the desk, looking at the floor. Sue flipped a pencil between her fingers. There was a lot of traffic in the main office, just outside Sue’s door. Rae-Ann glimpsed more than one teacher bustling around the copier. The door open for maximum humiliation. Her skin tingled and tightened with heat as she realized that everyone must know about her and Rick, that they’d known all along.
“Listen, I’ll admit I’m disappointed. Absolutely, profoundly disappointed. I thought you were a good teacher. Too smart to carry on like this with a married man. And at your own school, of all places.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard me—” The pencil flew across the room, clattering. “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me that’s news.”
She stared at the framed graduation certificates on the wall behind Sue, willing herself not to break down before she could get off school property.
Sue clasped her hands together, working them, and sighed heavily, shaking her head several times. She said, “Oh, dear.”
They sat in silence while Sue shuffled papers.
Finally: “I am a good teacher.”
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
Henpecked: often misapplied to husbands. Excited by weakness, hens will peck an injured sister, drawing blood, until death.
7. Playing Chicken
Soon after they feather out, young chickens challenge each other, hopping higher, brandishing wingspan, and staring each other down. Human variations exist. In the swimming pool, friends ride on each other’s shoulders, wrestling until someone is pushed off, shrieking and splashing. On the road, two cars approach each other in the same lane until one finally swerves. And in love, a woman can fight back, if she gathers strength. There’s a wife—a wife!—who would benefit from knowing more about her husband. There’s a union to press Rae-Ann’s cause. The steward she’d spoken with had mentioned workplace harassment. Tentatively, with a question in his voice—had she thought of it? Well, no, she hadn’t. So, what did that make her: cheap, naïve, clueless, or harassed? Her fault or not her fault? She’s wounded now, too stunned to know. But later, these are possibilities: the wife and the union. Can she play the game? Who will blink firs
t?
When you play chicken, there is only one winner.
8. Fox in the Henhouse
This farmyard predator is sneaky, but its behaviour is predictable. It occurs to Rae-Ann, as she ponders her life from inside the coop, that she might also construct a series of lessons around foxes, starting with fairy tales. In terms of poultry, though, it’s accurate to say that a fox will take a hen cleanly, without trailing any feathers. It chooses, excises, leaves, and later comes back for more.
The proverbial fox is harder to identify. Rick in the staffroom could qualify. So could she, carrying her penknife. But she’s not a threat, not really. She intends no harm.
Children, a fox in the henhouse means danger.
9. A Chicken with Its Head …
Her father installed the first chicks when Rae-Ann and her sisters were teenagers, giving them a job to do. Since that time, on reaching maturity, the meat birds have been packed into crates and sent away for processing, coming home in plastic bags. Laying birds can stay as long as they’re productive.
While they’ve never done the slaughtering themselves, Rae-Ann thinks of an easy twist of the neck, quick and painless. She could manage it. There’s something essential about blood, though. She’ll have to cut it. A dramatic smear of blood on the wall, a spattering arc as she throws the carcass at him: this will be her statement. Disappointed he may be, but let him also be surprised.
A hen turns its head to look at her, coming closer. She admires its black and white plumage, the red face and comb. Skeletal feet opening and closing, delicate yet strong. She could never hurt this living work of art.
“Thanks for the egg.” Rae-Ann raises her hand slowly. The hen skitters away, wings flapping. Leaving her.
Why is she reduced to talking to animals? What is she doing in this stinking prison? Rae-Ann heaves her purse across the coop. It lands in the far nest box with a thunk, striking a sitting hen, which flops to the floor as the other hens squawk and beat their wings, making clouds. She rushes over to the limp bird. It doesn’t move. An unrecognizable wail rises, filling the tight space with all her misbegotten impulses and the wretched places they lead her.