“Where do they have those? How did you even hear about it?”
Theo was hunched over his laptop computer, staring at the screen. Stewie moved closer, imagining there was something about chicken flying contests up for viewing. With pictures, he was hoping. But it was just a page of search results that didn’t seem to contain the word chicken. At least, not that Stewie could see.
“It was weird,” Theo said. “I wasn’t looking for it at all. I was doing this thing for school, and I pulled up this news story about a state fair. And it was the headline of another story on the same website. It was about a chicken flying contest.”
“You’re saying they have them at state fairs?”
He leaned closer to the laptop’s display as he asked, staring. As though something chicken related would appear, responding to his sheer will.
“I guess.”
“We don’t have a state fair anywhere near here.”
“We have the county fair in July.”
“Think they’ll have that contest at our county fair?”
“Dunno,” Theo said. “Worth finding out, I guess.”
Stewie hovered over him for a moment without speaking. The tingle of excitement had morphed into a sort of electrified trembling all over.
“Know who’d be perfect for that contest?” Stewie asked.
Both brothers answered the question at the same time. Near-perfect unison.
“Elsie,” they both said.
Stewie would have been the first to admit that chickens were notoriously poor fliers. In fact, he noticed that people tended to be confused regarding whether they flew at all. Well, they did. And Stewie knew it as well as anybody. They just didn’t fly very far, or very high.
Elsie was a potential exception to that rule. Granted, Elsie also did not fly far or high. But, on the grading curve of the flight limitations of chickens, she did surprisingly well.
Stewie had discovered this talent in her more than a year earlier.
He had been walking through their outside pen with a tray of dried corn, which was Elsie’s favorite treat, when he realized he was just about to step on poor old Mabel. He had allowed his attention to be distracted by a bright bird in a nearby tree, and when he looked back, his foot was just about to land on her. He jerked backward so suddenly that he fell over onto his back, flipping the tray wildly. As he fell, he watched the bulk of the dried corn fly up onto the corrugated tin roof of the henhouse.
He lay there a minute, scanning his body to be sure he was unhurt.
Then he heard a wild flapping, and turned his head to see who it was, and why. That was when he saw her. Elsie was gaining a surprising amount of altitude. The effort on her part looked enormous, but she was doing it. He watched in wonder as she landed on the tin roof and began pecking up the spilled corn.
He’d gotten up carefully and walked to the edge of the henhouse, his eyes more or less level with the talented bird.
“That was amazing,” he’d said.
But Elsie had been too busy eating to pay him any attention.
Now he walked into the yard to get her, his pockets filled with dried corn, to begin the training that would make her the star she so deserved to be.
“Come on,” he said, scooping her up and pinning her gently to his torso with his left arm. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Stewie set Elsie carefully in the dirt of the henhouse yard and reached into the pocket of his shorts for a handful of dried corn. He had been putting things in his left pocket—money, interesting rocks, loose change—because that way it hurt less to go digging around to fetch them again.
He showed the hen the contents of his left hand, then stretched up on tiptoes and reached up to scatter the corn on the henhouse roof. It made a rattling sound, like heavy drops of rain on the tin.
Elsie launched into the air immediately, flapping wildly against the sheer force of gravity. For a moment it seemed as though gravity would win. But the hen mustered something within herself, and lifted up boldly toward the low roof.
Her talons scrambled for purchase against its edge.
They did not find what they were looking for.
She tumbled backward and began to fall. Upside down, which made it very hard for her wings to help her.
And there was so much flapping. Oh, the panicky sound of the flapping!
Later Stewie would realize that it wasn’t outwardly different from the flapping of her rise to the roof. Or, at very least, it shouldn’t have been different. But it was. He heard it the way he would hear a scream.
In those split-second impressions one tends to have in the midst of panic—the ones that seem as though they shouldn’t fit into the time frame—it struck Stewie that he had been around the hens long enough to read and understand their wingbeats the way other people read in a second language. Certainly not in those words, maybe not in any words at all, but it struck him.
His heart seeming to sail up into his throat, Stewie dove in to catch Elsie. He winced as he did, because he knew it would hurt his burned hand. It all happened very fast, almost faster than Stewie could move. He was almost too late. But, amazingly—and probably because he was not prepared for things to end any other way—he managed to dive in and get his hands under her in time.
He did not literally succeed in catching her. His burned right hand resisted much movement, and she tumbled off into the dirt. But he had sufficiently broken her fall.
And yes, it hurt his hand.
He dropped into a sitting position in the dirt and sat with his arms around the hen, his forehead against her feathered back. His heart pounded so wildly that he thought it might kill him, and there was a deep, disturbing trembling in the cores of his arms and legs.
Granted, the hen would have survived such a fall. But if she had landed wrong, she could have broken a wing or a leg. And then what would Stewie have done? Everybody would say she should be put down. Stacey had told him that people didn’t do a lot of advanced veterinary medicine on their hens. The world viewed them as easily expendable.
He pushed those dark thoughts away again.
He would have to build something safer for them to use in their training. A raised platform, lower to the ground. With something she could really grab onto, like a nice thick perch. And he would have to get something to put on the ground to cushion any future falls. A mat, or a thin mattress. Or maybe even folded blankets would do the trick, though he couldn’t help feeling that more padding could only be better. If not for Elsie, then for his own poor heart.
Stewie raised his head to see the hen looking into his eyes, as though aware of something in him.
“That’s enough flying practice for today,” he told her. He couldn’t help noticing that his voice was trembling. He wondered if hens noticed things like that, too. “That was scary, but, anyway, you’re okay.”
He pulled to his feet and reached as high as he possibly could, gathering the corn off the henhouse roof. He gave half of it to Elsie and scattered the balance in the dirt of the yard to give the other hens something to do while she ate.
Then he left them in the yard and walked into the house. But he didn’t go inside feeling as though it had all turned out for the best and Elsie was okay. He moved like a person rattled to his very core. His heart seemed to work unevenly now, and there was a trembling in the very deepest parts of him.
He lay on his bed and waited for the dreadful feeling to subside.
It never entirely did.
He literally ran through his egg route after school the following day, jogging down the sidewalks. Jumping over the cracks.
When he had sold the last dozen, he sprinted to Marilyn’s house, where he stood on her landing, panting desperately.
He knocked, still panting.
He leaned his hands on his own knees and gasped, and gasped, and gasped.
When he looked up, she was looking down on him.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, this is odd.”