The House We Rented Came With Four Chickens

Henrietta, Hennifer, Henedict Arnold, and Doug

If you liked reading this, please push the LIKE/HEART button at the top, because it helps other people find the piece, which helps me gain new subscribers 🫶

The house we’re renting came with four chickens:

• Henrietta

• Hennifer

• Henedict Arnold

• Doug, who has gender dysphoria

“You can take care of the chickens if you want the eggs,” said Debbie, the owner. “Otherwise, Andy across the alley will do it.”

The chickens live in a coop, a 4ft x 4ft home with a single door that we close at night to keep them safe from predators.

And chickens have a lot of predators:

• Hawks

• Coyotes

• Foxes

• Dogs

• Cars

• Water

• Cold

• Heat

• Mites

• Fear

Yes, chickens die from fear.

All the time, actually.

They’ll be walking around eating worms when a small bird flies too close and too fast overhead and BOOM, their hearts explode.

They’re also dumb.

They get stuck in fences. They drown in buckets. There’s an old farm saying: “If a chicken can find a way to die, it will.”

Still, for the past two months, we’ve started to like them.

My mornings all begin the same: I open the blinds, look out the window, hear the clucking and cooing, and then walk across the wet grass to the coop, where, upon seeing me, they purr and shake, excited to be let out.

And I like how that makes me feel.

I place my hand on the coop door and release them into their pen: a 10-foot by 10-foot chicken backyard.

Although the area is fenced, two of the chickens can fly. Not very high, just high enough to get over the pen.

The other two cannot, and so Andy from across the alley told me that I should leave the gate open because all four like wandering the neighborhood together and eating the worms and shitting all over neighbors’ yards.

The chickens have started to trust me.

When I walk to the fig tree in the alley and yell “chicky chicky” while making loud chicken noises, they come sprinting and clucking from all directions, and then they sit at my feet under the tree, waiting for me to feed them the freshly picked figs by hand.

Well, at least Henrietta and Hennifer do.

Henedict Arnold and Doug will not come within arm’s reach.

They seem afraid, which I understand for Doug, because the other hens bully her, which is another way chickens can die, queue: meaning of “pecking order,” but for Henedict, I don’t understand it, as the other hens and I are nothing but kind to her.

I’m aware of how much the four of them rely on Ben and me.

How, the other night, we got home too late, and a gust of wind had blown the coop door shut before the chickens had a chance to get in.

When I tried to herd them inside, I spooked Henedict, who flew straight into the coop wall and then dropped to the floor with a thud.

It was terrifying.

And that’s when I learned that chickens are blind by nightfall.

Thank God she stood back up, but from then on out, we started propping the coop open with a stick, so they could roam in and out on their own, and nest themselves into their little chicken sleeping spots before dusk.

I don’t have kids.

I don’t know that I want them.

But I believe caretaking to be an innate human urge.

And no matter how much I tell myself that I can have just as full a life without children, it doesn’t change the fact that I believe our brains are evolved to reward the act of having children with a false sense of purpose in an existence where we otherwise might have to face the fact that there is none, and though I can think these thoughts and write these words and know that not taking the bait might destine me to a life without meaning, I am still not sure that I want them.

But chickens.

Chickens, I think I can do.

And so I was excited to get better at this.

This new act of rearing and taming. To dip my toes into being more needed.

But then, Ben’s dog, Ralph, returned.

Ralph had been living with Ben’s parents in Massachusetts for the past few months while Ben and I got settled in North Carolina, mostly because it was hard for us to find a house with a fenced-in yard, walking distance to downtown, owned by a landlord who was excited to rent their fully-furnished home, month-to-month, to two men with a pit bull.

And though Ben tells everyone that Ralph is a Vizla mix, I think the most true version of this is that Ralph once played with a Vizla at a park.

Ralph is sweet.

He gets along with all dogs, people, and babies. Never barks nor bites, and will sit under a table at a coffee shop so quietly for so long that I have left the coffee shop, forgetting he was there.

But Ralph is also a murderer.

When Ben first adopted him, Ralph was sitting in the car, his pink-spotted nose sticking out the window, with the sun and the smells flooding his tiny dog brain, and, at 30 MPH, he jumped out to catch a squirrel.

A few months later, Ralph was in Miami, and I watched him climb a tree to kill an iguana.

And then, a month after that, while staying with Ben’s sister, in pursuit of a rabbit, he leaped over a 4-foot cement wall and was struck by a car and kept on running, “But he didn’t even notice getting hit,” Ben’s sister said to me on the phone. “And there were rabbit brains and rabbit guts. And they were everywhere.”

I fear our chickens will soon fall victim to the rabbit’s fate.

I remember being on a flight with Ben a few years ago, talking with a woman in her 60s, named Marissa, who was flying to see a dance recital for her grandkids.

“Will they be good?” I asked.

“As good as a 4-year-old can be,” she said. And then she told me that in the 90s, she missed her daughter’s dance recital because “the O.J. Simpson car chase was playing on a TV in the recital hall, and that was much more interesting.”

We got to talking, and she told me that her daughter lived in Boston and her son lived in Florida.

Ben and I needed more friends in Miami, and so I asked a bit more about her son. But then her face twitched, and, in a softer voice, “He’s troubled,” she said.

“Every family has stuff,” I replied.

And then I told her about my uncle who fell two nights ago and called out for help to his 47-year-old daughter, who was asleep in the next room but didn’t wake up because she’s addicted to mixing downers with alcohol, and so he just lay there on the cold rose-colored tile for six hours, until the cleaning lady found him in the morning and called 911. Only then did his daughter wake up.

“My son’s incarcerated,” Marissa said.

“Oh that sucks,” I responded.

“No no,” she said back, “It’s for the better,” she whispered, not really believing it. And then, “Since he was 16, he started getting in trouble. Calling us for money. We ended up spending most of our life savings trying to hire lawyers to help him. Try and clean him of felonies. “

“Felonies from what?”

“Mostly drugs. Started with Xanax. It’s still mostly Xanax, actually.”

“That sucks,” I said, and then there was a small pause for silence as we stared at the sliver of space between the two seats in front of us.

“I took Xanax last week, actually,” I said. “I was anxious about getting sued.”

“I’m sorry you’re getting sued,” she said.

“Oh no, I’m not. I had just decided that I was, and then I couldn’t sleep from it.”

“It was actually two nights,” Ben said, chiming in from the seat next to me. “Two nights in a row.”

“That is true,” I said. “It makes me a not-so-good boyfriend. Makes me…absent.”

She nodded along, probably thinking about how Xanax can do much worse things to someone’s life, beyond sometimes making them a not-so-good boyfriend.

She stayed quiet, and it felt like I was supposed to say something more. Maybe about how my doctor, who prescribed me ketamine a few weeks ago, told me that he’d much rather me be taking ketamine than Xanax because getting people off of Xanax is harder than getting people off of heroin. But I didn’t say that.

What I did say was, “Sorry about your son,” and then, “it’s not your fault though. You know that, right? Like, have you gotten better at not blaming yourselves?”

“Yes,” she said, “we’ve gotten better…but…it’s hard. When it’s your kid, you will always blame yourself.”

And then there was nothing for me to say.

Because I also don’t have that — that ability to move past a core part of your life being gutted and not spend the rest of your life replaying the script.

Just like her, I’d forever be stuck, running through the maybes.

Maybe I shouldn’t have told my son it was okay to try weed.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so strict with her about the tattoos.

Tiny missteps of over- or underparenting that cause a daisy chain of personality modifications or risk sensitivities that result in my child turning out different from how I had hoped they would be, with me, forever being certain, no matter what any therapist, r/parenting, or stranger on a plane ever said, that it was all my fault.

Last week, Ben and I were in the yard, walking Ralph past Hennifer, trying to make them friends, when Ralph lunged.

I tried, as quickly as possible, to pull him back. But I’m no match for a bred-for-murder machine.

“CLOOK CLOOK CLOOK!” Hennifer yelled, wings flapping and feathers poofing as she ran as hard and as fast as a little hen could.

“RALPH!” I screamed, and either he stopped because he heard me or, perhaps, he stopped because he never intended to actually eat her. Or maybe he gave up because she was just too quick.

But it doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that this was the last day I ever heard her cluck or coo.

Word spread, and now the other chickens follow suit. One must stay quiet to avoid attracting four-legged death.

These days, in the afternoons, when I walk into the alley and yell “chickey chickey,” they no longer run to my side to eat the figs.

When I wake up and open the blinds and stare across the yard, I see them pace, but they pace in silence, and though I’ll do my best to try and protect them from all the ways that chickens die, sooner or later, they will.

Ralph will make his move when I’m not looking, or a fox will be out before dusk, or maybe a sparrow will simply fly too close overhead and BOOM.

And when that day comes, I don’t know how I’ll feel.

Sure, they’re just chickens, and so, my life will probably very quickly move on, but in this gratifying cosplay of being needed, I can’t help but imagine what it would be like if they were kids.

Because not all chickens who slam into walls stand back up, and many kids who try benzos never stop.

“Better to have loved and have lost,” they say, but if I had been sitting next to Marissa from the plane, and if no one else was listening and she thought no one else could hear, and I leaned in, and I asked her, “Do you think your life would be happier if you had never had your son?,” I’m not sure that she wouldn’t say yes.

And I don’t know that I’m ready for my life to end up like that.

If you liked reading this, please push the LIKE/HEART button at the top, because it helps other people find the piece, which helps me gain new subscribers 🫶

Thanks guys.

Questions from you, my lovely readers (please answer in the comments by clicking here):

1. Do you know anyone who has ever said they regret having kids? (I only know one person. I wonder if having kids breaks your brain and makes you biologically not regret it.)

2. For those of you who have kids, do you take credit for their accomplishments while NOT taking credit for their flaws? My mom does this, lol, but I feel like it’s only fair to do neither or both.

3. For those of you who didn’t have kids, do you regret it? (Sorry if this is a big one to ask you to expose yourself in front of strangers.)

If you’re new here, here is a piece about a homeless man who was stalking me