There was darkness. All around darkness, the kind of darkness you could never adapt to, not a single pinprick of light for your eyes to catch onto. No moon, no stars, only the blackness of infinite nothing.
Yet there was also light. The warmth of a low autumn sun through glass, the brightness of a clear winter's day.
Day by day, she followed her routine.
Awaken, feed the chickens, walk around the house.
Awaken, feed, walk…
The day lasted a hundred thousand years,
The day lasted forever.
Until, one evening, it ended.
-
The sun was bright above her cottage, the morning air fresh and bright and the grass soft beneath her bare feet as she circled towards the coop, a bucket of food scraps under her arm.
There were five of them, her girls, all resplendent in their spring plumage. Each with different colouring and good layers one and all. They greeted her at the gate, and she felt joy as she looked upon them. They were her last chickens, she would have no more after these, and she loved them with all her heart.
Somewhere in the distance a cockerel called, but he was a wild thing and she had determined to stop feeding him.
A frown creased her face, pulling at the wrinkles around her eyes, furrowing up her forehead like the first draw of the spring plough.
Straightening up, she finished dumping the contents of the bucket out onto the floor, casting an eye first down towards the chickens, and then up, out into the woods.
She had determined to stop feeding the cockerel… When? Part of her knew it was either yesterday, or weeks ago, or many, many lifetimes before, but she couldn't-
She stared down again at her chickens, as they chuckled and gossiped over the food.
She had given them scraps, but what had she eaten the night before, what were they eating? She leant in for a closer look-
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
-
She awoke, she circled the cottage, and she fed her chickens. The day was warm, but the nights were starting to draw in, the last day of summer.
They all had names, her chickens. There was Gertrude, the big orange one. There were Jenny and Jeremy, the two white girls with black spots, originally destined to be dinner but deemed too beautiful to destroy. There was Samantha, small and red and half the size of the others, but the uncontested head-hen. Then, last, there was Sightmind, a name from another time, another place.
She didn't know why Sightmind was named what she was, only that it had seemed right at the time. She was a fairly unobtrusive chicken, the smallest of the bunch and firmly at the bottom of the pecking order, but she was by far the most beautiful. A chicken sculpted in miniature, a rich mottled orange, with sharp black ringing the edge of each feather.
As she thought about the day she had bought them home, she realised that, although she had once remembered the event, she no longer did. That knowledge was gone from her, and had been for a long, long time.
A frown, creased across her forehead, like bunched-up clouds on a winter's eve.
She had known once.
That thought should have bothered her more than it did.
-
There were only five chickens today, and the cockerel in the woods crowed a mourning call. Had she lost one overnight? to a fox attack, or…
She had woken weeping, but she couldn't articulate why.
Outside, she placed her bucket on the floor, kneeling beside it and scooping Gertrude up under one arm. Jenny and Jeremy went under the other, and Samantha followed behind, in consternation at this upset to her endless routine.
She had lost one, but she wouldn't lose another.
Sightmind watched, from her perch atop the chicken coop. No fox would take her, no fox would dare, but she would follow anyway, on her own terms.
That night she settled them down in the kitchen, in a box next to the wood stove she barely remembered how to use. They would be safe there, she wouldn't lose another.
-
When she awoke the next morning, it was with Gertrude under her arm, chuckling gently in her sleep. Samantha, Jenny and Jeremy were perched on the end of the bed, and Sightmind was outside, keeping watch from atop the roof.
Gertrude had always been too heavy to roost like the others, spending her life grounded, in more ways than one.
Looking out of the window and into the woods- she had taken down the curtains years ago and never put them back up- she did a double take. Checking her eyes and then looking again.
For where before there had been woods, the playground of her childhood, the sites of her teenage trysts and the final resting place of probably too many of her chickens, there was woods no longer.
Climbing out of bed, she stared up at the tall, grey buildings, which had replaced what she had always known.
She felt awake for the first time in a long, long time. As if she had spent the past days drifting through a dream. She absentmindedly petted the ball of chicken under her arm, and stared up at the blank, sightless eyes of the buildings. Grey concrete and empty windows, stretching up towards the sun.
It was, she thought, another kind of forest.