My parents crowbar the chicken feeder in the storm’s residual murmurs. We’ve trodden quietly among the acreage’s mangled bones: the coop’s a wreck, the concrete feeder bottom-up. Beaks of pink dust peck the silence where a cacophony of chickens should be.

The trough lifts slowly, like a laboured breath. My mother and I count eleven combs and one sickle feather: all twelve birds, alive and peeking. In fine weather only weeks ago, a fox slunk in and killed a hen. Soft clucks speckle up from the remaining huddle, held safely in the wind’s giant cradle. 

A memory from my childhood. Anomalies in weather were rare and far between back then. We’ve had storms (to say the least!) in my neck of the globe this week, it’s my birthday, and one of my beloved backyard chickens just passed on to the Great Field in the glittering ether, so this is the memory that met me while I sharpened my pen this morning.

#a draft #a drabble (sort of) #never learn