The Motherfucking Chickens

I walked into my kitchen and yes, the Motherfucking Chickens were there. I don't mean that these chickens fucked any one's mother, but they were chickens and they're in my kitchen unraveling the Idea rug with their beaks and making everything unsanitary; so, these were the Motherfucking Chickens.

"Fuck!" I said.

I'd been thinking about the Motherfucking Chickens a lot. There had been a number of years when the chickens were constantly in rooms I'd just cleaned. They were domesticated chickens, to be sure, what with their cleanish feathers and rested expressions, but they still shit on everything and laid eggs in hidden spots to be found much later. They fought, these birds- they fought like mountain lions, or like any other aggressive, adolescent big cat (like a Puma or Ocelot) except they were feathered and louder and could only see things by turning their heads back and forth, presenting one eye at a time toward whatever it was they wanted to look at. The object of their interest frequently changed while they were pivoting their little heads, so that they became confused and more than a little peeved. This led to fighting. It was a terrible cycle, and I had to end it.

"Look" I said to my group of kitchen chickens, "You all have to find somewhere else to go. I don't have anything for you." Some of them turned their heads to stare at me with one skeptical eye, and some of them took up different areas of the Ikea rug to pull at. "I do not have anything for you. I DO NOT. All  I have in here is raw meat. I have a raw, plucked chicken in my refrigerator- YES- so you'd best leave before I decide to take a cleaver to one of you. One of you might make me do that." I made the last bit as creepy as I could, bringing my voice to the low-and-damaged octave of a TV serial killer. None of those birds took my meaning. They made a lot of noise and flapped around, and some individual fights broke out. It made me wonder if Leonard Bernstein had been visited by the Motherfucking Chickens before he wrote the Sharks/Jets scene.

I had discussed the chickens with a few people, and they'd been rife with advice at the time, so I gave one of them a call.

"Hey, Kendra."

"Hey- what the hell's up with you?" She was my friend who was the most accomplished life-planner, so it was natural that I'd called her first.

"Oh it's that the chickens are here again, dammit."

"Motherfuckers!" She said.

"I know, right? I have to get them out of here. They have eaten up my rug, I swear." It was halfway gone. They were going to be some sour-bellied fowl in an hour, but that was their business because the chickens and I would have parted ways by then, I thought. "But they're not going anywhere- there's one who keeps attempting to mop up my dishwasher with her feathers. I'm pretty sure she's going to nest in there. Or fight. It would be the cage for their cage matches."

"Did you leave the door of the dishwasher open?" Kendra asked. She was also the most annoying of the friends I'd told about the chickens, because she was the type that cannot help but point out what you did wrong while you were still experiencing the effects of your own poor decisions.

"Yes, I left the door of the dishwasher open."

"And you tried a rolled-up dish towel, right? All locker-room style?"

"These are not those kind of chickens, Kendra." I rolled my eyes a little.

"Yeah, yeah, but it's worth a try sometimes. Ok, here's what you do: I think you should get the hose from your garden, attach it to the kitchen tap, and then just hose them down like they were unruly demonstrators." Kendra had a point- the MF Chickens were acting like protesters, being both idle and restless and in a group, but I couldn't figure out what the hell they'd be protesting. And she'd forgotten something crucial about my environs.

"I live in an apartment, remember? There's no garden hose." I didn't hear her response because there'd been a really awful round of hostile pecking, so I had to break it up by walking between them. One of them- the chicken with the upper hand, going in for the final, potentially blinding peck- stabbed me on my ankle. "Shitballs!"

Kendra was saying "are you all right?" when I picked my phone off the slightly bloodied floor. "Kendra, I have to go. I'll come up with something. Thanks-" and I hung up, and called someone else.

"Hey Tom, it's me. The Motherfucking Chickens are back. One of them stabbed me with his beak. Or her beak. I'm bleeding."

Tom said "Oh my god honey! That must really hurt. I was pecked once at my aunt's house when I was feeding them, but hers weren't the Motherfucking Chickens. Do you need me to drive you to the hospital?" He was my most empathetic friend, which is why I'd called him.

"No, I'm ok, but how do I get rid of these things?"

"Well, what are they trying to say to you? Are they indicating anything, or circling some furniture in particular or something?"

"No, they're just stinking up the kitchen and ruining my Ikea rug."

"Oh, I know how much you love that thing." Tom was generally a great listener, but I was thinking that his input wouldn't send the MF Chickens away. He might have me create some group therapy circle for them, because that's how he works with conflict of any kind- it was a hobby of his to start therapy circles.

"Ok, I just thought of something. I'm going to get off the phone now."

"What are you-" said Tom, but I hung up.

I looked at each chicken. One of them seemed to be the leader. He (or she) was the same one that had punctured my ankle, and appeared to be the one that was strutting rather than flapping or pulling at the twine that was once my floor covering. I thought of the shopping trip when I'd bought that rug: I'd looked online first, and narrowed my search to four rugs before I drove out to Schaumberg with my bungees and credit card. Once I saw that rug I didn't bother looking at the others on my list: I loved it with all my might. My ankle dribbled as I stood there, remembering.

I leaned over and grabbed the leader, then opened the back door and stared marching up the porch steps to get to my building's roof. I held him (or her) under my arm like an obnoxious, clucking football and the rest of the MF chickens followed me. We got to the roof and I stood still and waited for them all to cluster around me. "Look here, birds. Don't come to my place anymore. I don't want you there. You clearly cannot come to a peace and while you're trying to ostracize each other I can't trust any of you. You got that?" Again, none of them appeared to take my meaning- in fact their attention was diverted and they were walking around, pulling on tears in the tar paper.

"CHICKENS!" I shouted, and then, in a rage, I threw the leader over the edge of the roof.  All of the MF's suddenly ran to where I'd thrown him over and scream-clucked. Their little heads swiveled furiously, looking as fast as they could. I looked over the edge: the leader of the MF Chickens was flapping hard with and craning it's neck up ward so that he (or she- whichever) could look at where it had lost it's long game of dominance. In that moment, that particular moment, I realized: Oh my god, I just threw a mostly-innocent chicken off my roof.

I live with the flock, now. I never replaced the Ikea rug, or any subsequently destroyed rugs, because they'd just be destroyed anew. It was penance, before- letting them build their little keeps and use the dishwasher as their personal fight club space seemed like the best way to assuage my guilt. I've come to really, really tolerate them now, in their own right: they have genuinely taught me some lessons, like patience and to not get attached to material objects; on the other hand, they still lay disgusting eggs in nooks and will occasionally stab their beaks at my feet for, say, stepping between some of them on my way to the bathroom. They are still Motherfuckers.