Chicken House

This afternoon I saw Chicken Boy from across the street, older but still himself.

It brought me back to the days we used to watch him, Sydney and I, back when he lived across from us in that dump of a house mom and dad always told us never to go near. There was a tall gate of warped driftwood out front, beyond which you could hear the flapping of clipped wings and the low chatter of chickens. 

Sometimes when mom and dad were out, Sydney and I would carry a chair from the kitchen to the upstairs hallway and pull down the ladder to the attic. Up there, in that narrow room of dust and nothing, we’d crawl like worms on our stomachs under the slant of the roof to a tiny window at the very top of the house. And with our faces pressed to that small square of glass, we’d have a clear view over the front gate and into the yard of our neighbors across the street.

Except it wasn’t really a yard at all, only a wide patch of dark cement. There was some kind of flimsy mesh barrier in one corner, presumably once meant to house the chickens, but whenever Sydney and I gazed into that gated space the plump brown birds looked free to roam as far as their confines allowed. There were maybe a dozen of them, each wandering its own aimless coarse, beaks jutting into feathers or poking at the ground, at the faint white patches of their own sun-dried shit. 

But what we really hoped to see when we looked over our neighbor’s fence was Chicken Boy. 

He was a few years older than either of us and yet it seemed clear that he thought he was a chicken. Crouched low to the ground, he would move among them, hands to his chest, elbows out in an awkward approximation of wings. And he would imitate their sounds, too. It was difficult to hear from behind the attic window, which wasn’t the kind that opened, but if we lay still enough then the strange birdlike noises from our neighbor’s throat would quietly reach our ears, mingled with the voices of his feathered kin.

I have no idea what his reaction would have been if he were ever to have looked up and seen our faces watching from the window. His own face was always pointed to the ground as his head jerked this way and that, as though he could read some pattern in the cracks of the cement he walked upon. 

Nor can I say exactly why we kept returning to the attic in the hope of finding him in that bizarre environment, why we would feel real disappointment if, after having made the journey, we discovered only real birds beneath us. 

Because after the initial novelty, there was nothing interesting to see. Chicken Boy never seemed to do anything in that bleak stretch of cement aside from imitate the chickens surrounding him, and it was rare that our attention was held for more than a few minutes before we grew bored and turned to crawl away from the window.

And once we had descended the ladder and replaced the chair at the kitchen table, our interest in Chicken Boy would have vanished; we never seemed to talk about him outside of the attic. This might partially have been due to mom and dad’s obscure resentment toward the house in which Chicken Boy lived, as well as toward the man and woman who took care of him. They were not his parents, they told us, but only strangers who were paid money to pretend to be his parents for a certain amount of time, after which Chicken Boy would be sent to a different house to be taken care of by a different set of pretend-parents.

The only question I recall having asked in light of this news was whether there would be chickens at the next house Chicken Boy was brought to, and I still remember the almost angry way mom had looked at me when she said, “No—of course not.” 

Sure enough, some weeks or months later, Chicken Boy stopped appearing when we climbed to the attic and looked out the window. Instead, there was a new boy we sometimes saw going in or out of the house across the street, one who seemed much more convinced of his humanity and therefore of no interest to us. It wasn’t long after then that we stopped escaping to the attic when we found ourselves left alone by mom and dad. There no longer seemed any purpose to the place.

And until this afternoon, a lifetime later, I’d scarcely paid any mind to the memory of that boy who thought he was a chicken. A part of me recognized him before I knew exactly who it was I was looking at. His face was to the ground as he pushed the accumulations of unimaginable years down the scorching pavement in a rusted shopping cart, the wheels quietly screaming beneath him. 

For a moment I stood still and watched as he went by, wondering at all the things I’d never wondered at years earlier. Like where he came from and where he’d ended up after Chicken House. Like who else’s monetized affection had been bestowed upon him. Like what shape his aimless course had taken to bring him here. 

Like why his wings had been clipped before he was born.