It Wasn’t Really Arson

The chickens were screaming. That should have been my first clue that it was a dream, but I was only 12 and still learning about dreams. Then they were running around the barn without their heads, and this seemed reasonable to dream state me because there really was a saying about chickens running around with their heads cut off. Again, I was 12. Then they all suddenly stopped and looked at me. I know, how could they look at me without their heads. Okay, that did seem a little odd and at that point I woke up. Every time. Did I mention this is a recurring dream? Like, I dream it all the time. I'm pretty sick of it.

So what does it mean? Aren't therapists supposed to know this kind of stuff?

I mean, yeah, our flock of chickens really did die in that barn when I was 12, and yeah, they really did have their heads bitten off, but it was by a badger. Did you know that badgers do that? Out of our flock of nine chickens it only ate one and only two were missing. Isn't that weird? It bit the heads off chickens it didn't want to eat. Maybe it was saving them for later.

Joke was on it though, because my parents made me clean up the mess. I put on a pair of my father's work gloves and stuffed all those headless chickens, and one pile of bloody bones and feathers, into a big, black garbage bag. I don't remember what happened after that. I suppose the bag got buried in some hole I wasn't big enough to dig.

Seems fair that someone else dug the hole. The chickens were my responsibility, and mine alone. I fed and watered them, gathered their eggs, let them out of the barn to forage, mucked out their pen, and put them to bed at night. So everyone got to eat the eggs but no one else had to work for it.

No, that doesn't seem like a lot of responsibility for a 12-year-old and I don't think I resent it. Farm kids do a lot more work than that, right? No, we didn't live on a farm. Not exactly. More like a 2-acre hobby wannabe farm, really. You know. Big garden, fruit trees, chickens, all that.

So, okay, after the first couple of years my parents lost interest in the would-be farm. I mean, the fruit trees kept on fruiting, but wow, do you know how tall an unpruned pear tree can get? The garden just completely gave up though.

But I kept taking care of the chickens. I had names for all of them. No, I don't remember their names. Is that important?

After a while, I don't remember how long, the barn really began to fall apart. Holes in the roof and walls, things like that. It was so bad my sister wouldn't put her horse in there. They built her a shed for the horse. No, they didn't fix the barn. I wanted to put wire or netting or something around the chicken pen in the corner but we never had any wire or netting. Then the badger got the chickens and it didn't matter. At least, not for a while.

About a week later the two missing chickens showed up in the barn. How crazy is that? How did they survive in the woods with badgers roaming around? I put them in their pen and tried to reinforce it with some of the planks that had fallen off the walls. Didn’t work though, and a few weeks later I found a pile of bloody feathers and nothing else where the chickens used to be. Coyote, my mother said.

Tough luck for them, right? They should have stayed in the woods.

No, I don’t think anyone cared about me. No, wait, I meant no one cared but me about the chickens. That wasn’t a Freudian slip or whatever you call it.

I think I felt guilty about the chickens for a long time. Like it was my fault they got their heads bitten off and they got eaten. But, you know, I’m an adult now. I get that these things happen. The circle of life and all that. Accidents happen. And maybe if they’d had a better pen they would have made it, but that’s not my fault either. I was just a kid.

Hey, that’s not fair. My parents left the property to me in their will because my sister didn’t want it, so it was mine. I didn’t know that burning the barn to the fucking ground was illegal. There wasn’t much left of it anyway. It was more like a big bonfire.

Whatever. Since when has life been fair.