Tales From the Riverbank

The chicken flock waits beneath the porch to say goodbye to me when I trudge off to the office because I always give them tasty tortilla treats.

Only yesterday, when I went out, there were only three of them instead of four.

I went back inside and asked Icky, "Do you know where the other black chicken is?"

Icky shrugged, unconcerned. "She probably wandered off somewhere on her own."

When Icky is in residence, I leave the chicken wrangling to him. They are his chickens after all.

Still, this was weird. The chickens travel in their flock of four. Icky had only let them out of their coop about an hour earlier when presumably, there had been four. I hadn't noticed any feathers around, as one might have had a predator grabbed the other black chicken.

###

I went off to the Montgomery Schlock office where I literally spent three hours gabbing to Gary, my 350-pound coworker, and doing absolutely nothing else because there were no clients. Gary showed me the journal in which he chronicles his weight-loss journey and his financial transactions. He is 29 years old and has already accumulated $40,000 in investments, working Schlock and another job as a residential counselor at a home for adults with developmental disabilities. Gary is very, very smart—and very, very sweet.

"By the time you're 35, you'll have your life entirely where you want it to be!" I told him. "You'll have lost the rest of that weight, and you'll have someone who loves you and a house—"

###

Back at the casa, I puttered. And when twilight came around, I looked out the window and thought I espied all four chickens pecking for insects just outside their coop.

Icky was out.

So, I waited another 15 minutes and then went outside myself to shut the chickens up for the night—

Except there were no chickens at all in the coop.

I left the coop door open, ran back to the house, and began one of my weird, atavistic prayer rituals: Please, Universe, please! Make the chickens be okay!!!

How could this be?

Where could they have gone?

Frantically, I texted Icky.

When he got back an hour later, I accosted him equally frantically: "Did you get my text?"

"No. What?"

"The chickens!"

He went back outside, returning five minutes later, frowning. "Only two are in the coop."

Two?

But that was two more than had been there when I'd checked.

So maybe the other two were still around somewhere? Nesting on a brood of eggs they'd laid in some underbrush?

###

I spent the night reading up on Reddit on True Tales of Amazing Poultry Runaways & Returns. There are a lot of them.

Molly ran away for an entire month shortly after you moved here, I reminded myself. And you didn't see any evidence that a predator got the chickens.

Still, my heart feels broken this morning.

I don't hold up The Umbrella of Protection very well.

I can't take sufficient care of innocent little creatures that depend upon me.

I can barely take care of myself.

Why can't I live in a Universe where innocence & a pure soul are valued? Surely, in an infinity of parallel universes, such a Universe exists! Why am I trapped here in a world where competitiveness is baked into the evolutionary process so that only implacable indifference and occasional cruelty prosper?

###

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.