Losing it in the chicken yard

Yesterday I was down in the chicken coop, my usual haunt on a Sunday afternoon (go, me), when I noticed that one of the hens was a bloody mess. Her face was all cut up around her eye and her feathers were caked in red. I have no idea what happened. Either she caught her face on an exposed piece of wire or — and this is totally plausible — one of the other birds attacked her. Chickens are extremely hierarchical — it’s where the term “pecking order” comes from — so she may have received a beatdown for breaking rank or eating out of turn. If she was attacked, I have a feeling the victimizer was Plumpy, our oversized buff cochin who has the temperment of Mo’Nique (whose site is an example of the audacity of she-power, BTW, don’t skip the intro) in Precious or even Rosie O’Donnell. You Do Not Mess With Plumpy. She’s large. She’s menacing. She will cut you. None of the other hens hang out with her and the roosters dare not mount her.

So I saw this hen, who looked like Two Face in Spider Man — one half of her face was bloody and raw, the other half was fine — and I don’t know what happened but I became very emotional and started crying. I picked her up and carried her over to the other side of the yard to show Jake when our dog Sunnie ran over to me, bounding with excitement. She started jumping all over me to get at the bloody bird, which caused the bird to panic, which caused Sunnie to become even more excited, which really put me in foul mood so I started screaming at the dog, which caused the bird to become A-1 hysterical. The hen started scratching and clawing and she beat her wings with such ferocity that I eventually lost my grip and had to let her go. I ran after her trying to catch her, but she was too quick and besides, I had chicken blood on my hands which made me feel like I was in the that movie The Saw so I stopped chasing her and just laid down in the grass and bawled like Jessica Simpson probably did after losing Daisy. It was one of those hyperventilation cries where you can barely breath; I had snot all over my nose. My eyes felt like two red, swollen slits in my forehead. Thoughts were running through my head, like: “This is it. It’s all over now. My time here is done.” Jake’s face suddenly hovered over me, going, “Hon. Are….you okay? What’s the matter? The chicken….she’s okay. Look, she’s over there eating bugs. She’s fine. She looks happy.”

Ongoing train wreck that I am aside, that chicken must have tripped some psychological wire in my brain because I could not get a grip. My Sunday was DUN. Over. Finito. It was only 2 p.m. I went went back inside and crawled into bed.

Point: Universe. Me: Zero.