Attention Please by Carolyn Divish

At 3:30 am, the chickens in the backyard coop were squawking and flapping something fierce. 

“Alarm clucks,” thought Anita Benjamin as she pressed a pillow over her face, reminded in a flash of their little boy who’d had such a way with words for someone who rarely spoke. Everyone said so.

She lay still, hoping the sound would stop. The ruckus was loud enough to hear in the bedroom sealed with blackout curtains and a white noise machine. And her husband’s snores. Her arthritic left knee began its morning complaints, not that she had gotten much sleep anyway. Getting out of bed never got any easier. 

Anita spoke into the pillow. “Something’s not right out there, Harold. Something’s after the chickens.”

Harold’s snores paused for a moment, then roared back with a gut-rending saw. 

Just yesterday, Marilyn Rushman told Anita and the other ladies about how she’d lost her whole flock. Heads ripped clean off. Carcasses flung willy-nilly. Feathers sprinkled over the coop like jimmies on a scoop of ice cream. A river of blood, she’d said, reaching for another one of the petite turkey sandwiches that the Parliament Tea House was famous for. Taking the one with the most generous heap of sliced lunch meat, Marilyn wiped away the tears that had welled in her eyes. “Terrible, just terrible. I don’t know how I’ll ever forget that sight.”

The other ladies gushed with sympathy. At the large round table in the center of Parliament’s cozy dining room, the women wore their red hats and purple dresses. They patted Marilyn’s hands with the impractical satin gloves.

“So awful. Just terrible. Not your chickens, Marilyn. You love those chickens. They’re practically your children. You gave them all names,” they’d all said. “Bless your heart, you poor dear.”

Anita had futzed with the front of her deep purple sweater. She’d just been telling the ladies about how Harold never listened, and she’d only wanted a moment of attention for once. It really wasn’t so much to ask. Marilyn had children. Real, living children and grandchildren, too. She didn’t need those chickens. Even so, Anita didn’t wish that bloodbath on anyone. She simply wanted to feel like a headliner for once. To have the attention of the group the way that Marilyn always did.

As Marilyn sobbed into her linen napkin, mourning each chicken by name and taking delicate bites of the petite sandwich, she pinched carefully between two fingers. The other ladies cooed their condolences, unaware of Anita’s silence.  

Now, Anita elbowed Harold’s back. Her knee throbbed. Movement wouldn’t be easy for at least another hour. She started on the exercises that would loosen the joint. Bending one knee at a time and then pulling each leg taut, Anita listened to the increasingly frantic flapping and squawking outside. Surely, the neighbors would hear. However, they never had time to chat with Anita, not even when she offered them free eggs, so maybe they wouldn’t care at all.

“Harold, the chickens.” She kicked him, pretending that it was in the course of her exercise. 

When their son was young, Harold barely reacted to his cries. Each time he fussed, Anita dutifully got up while Harold continued snoring. She’d rock and bounce him When he died, she never regretted those moments, but she did miss how her son could make her feel like the most important person in the world. That was a special gift her son gave her. 

After the brunch, Nancy, the informal leader, had texted the group. She’d found a website with full-on pictures—headless birds, ripped-out throats, and pools of blood, all just as Marilyn had described. In a photo on the website, the murderous weasel, an adorable little critter, sat on its haunches, front paws clasped together, looking willowlike and vulnerable but smiling with sharp teeth. 

“A weasel kills indiscriminately,” Anita quoted the article through the pillow, imagining the scene in their own coop.  “Marilyn’s whole flock was gone in ten minutes.”

Harold grumbled something that sounded like, “That’s Marilyn’s husband’s problem.” 

Anita wondered how long the chickens had been under attack. Surely not too long. If the chickens were still making such a racket, they could be rescued. She could make the trip out to the backyard herself, limping until her aching knee loosened up, but what would she do against a predator, even a tiny one? Ask it nicely to leave? Swing a broom at it? Images of gore flashed in her mind. Headless chicken corpses sprawled obscenely. Intestines pulled out like heaps of unwound yarn. Pools of black blood in the dirt. 

“Harold, please?” She pleaded. The sound of flapping wings grew louder. The squawks more frantic. She pulled the pillow from her face. 

“Let me be.” He groaned. “Nothing out there but your bunch of old birds locked up tighter than Fort Knox.”

He hated the damn things, but something was out there. She knew it. “Harold, it sounds dreadful.”

“I don’t hear a goddamned thing.” He hunched over protectively, curling away from her. His t-shirt had Swiss cheese holes in the armpits and showed a smile of pudge at his middle. “Nothing but the spring rain and frogs all night long from that machine. It’s all in your head.” 

At brunch, Marilyn had said she’d suspected the varmint had been by before.

“Scoping it out,” she’d said, using her satin gloved hand to describe the paw prints she’d seen the day before it attacked. “Clever little guy tested the lock and then the egg box. Little paws got on everything. It’s like he knew just how much I loved those things. I think he drew them out. The attack was almost human. It’s like he knew.” 

Nancy, being the more practical sort, only shook her head. “It’s just a dumb animal, Marilyn. It’s only thinking about food.”

Anita had tried to take advantage of the pause to steer the conversation back to herself, but Marilyn had already started up again. 

“I just should have gone with my gut feeling when I saw those prints, you know.” She wiped her eyes. The last bite of her turkey sandwich lay on her plate. “I would still have my girls.”

Anita knew about guilt. She knew about missing the signs. It had taken years to get over Colton’s death. Harold said that she never really did. While it was true that sometimes she did see him in crowds, after the first time she was confronted by an angry parent, she stopped. That one time had caused quite the stir at the church picnic. She was crying. The boy was crying. The father had shaken her until she was dizzy. Harold had wrenched her away to the car. All the people were staring. It really had been a simple mistake. She knew now that she couldn’t chase children. No matter how much a little boy looked like her Colton. Her little boy was long dead and not walking through crowded street fairs, browsing the quiet stacks in the library, playing in the trees at the parks, or sitting on benches waiting for the school bus. Even though his death was a long time ago, mothers are never quite healed from the death of a child. Colton would forever be eight. The mind does play tricks, especially when stressed. Anita could attest to that. 

Unsettled, Anita pushed the quilt off her legs. That afternoon, she’d looked for paw prints around her coop, but with the grassy yard, she doubted she would have seen any. The cold air bit into her naked skin, blanketing her body with goose pimples. Her nailbeds looked blue, reminding her of dead bodies, clouded eyes, breathless infants. 

“Where are you going?” Harold grunted.

Anita sat on the edge of the bed. She continued her exercises to break the stiffness in her legs. Her knee creaked with each stretch. She winced. “Somebody’s got to check out the chickens.”

“Woman, there’s nothing out there.”

“There is.” Anita snapped. She was tired of his nonsense. “I hear it. If you’re not going out, I will.”

Her glasses had tumbled off the nightstand and landed in the folds of yesterday’s pajama pants that she should have thrown in the hamper. She bent down to pick them up, groaning as she balanced against the edge of the mattress.

On the other side of the bed, Harold pushed himself up. He tugged his stretched-out shirt over his belly and scratched his back. “All I need is for you to fall down the stairs and break your neck,” he said gruffly. He scowled at her, wearing the look of annoyance that was almost a daily occurrence now. 

He shuffled out of the bedroom and clomped down the stairs.  Since she’d already worked her stiff knee, Anita decided to take a quick trip to the bathroom before returning to sleep. She took plodding steps down the hallway, her stiff knee still mostly locked up. She touched the picture frames along the way. In her favorite picture of Colton, he wore his brown hair cut in a bowl cut that was so fashionable at the time and the striped shirt she’d picked up on a whim at K-Mart, and it had become his favorite shirt. He held a fuzzy chick. She’d forgotten that part. A living one that had been so squirmy that the photographer had had to chase it down each time it escaped from his hands. It would pop out of Colton’s hands and waddle around the room with the balding photographer chasing, his arms out wide and his legs in a comical squat. She stopped to admire his dimple, his green coveralls, his thick lashes, crooked smile, and distant gaze. She wondered what he would have looked like as an adult, but he’d forever be her little boy. One day, she’d see him again. 

When she returned, having taken much longer than she’d intended, the bed was empty. She expected that Harold would have returned by now. The room was strangely still. The chickens had fallen quiet. There were no sounds from downstairs or outside.

“Harold?” 

She padded to the curtains and gingerly pushed them open a crack. The motion light was on, but the coop still looked closed up tight. The chicken yard, bounded by a fence and the garage, was empty. Beyond Anita’s backyard, the neighboring houses were dark and sleepy.  The living world seemed distant. 

When the motion light clicked off, Anita turned. She’d seen no sign of Harold. Maybe he’d decided to start the coffee machine or go for a walk. He could be angry if he wanted. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d slept on the basement couch. He chose anger more often than not these days. She wasn’t having it. 

“Have it your way, Harold.” She thought about telling her friends over next week’s brunch. They’d grown tired of her issues with Harold just as they’d grown tired of hearing about Colton. She knew that her life had reached late-stage boredom. Each day of her retired life was just like the one before. Ennui after Ennui until she died. With the right framing, this story might grab their attention. 

Just as she reached her bed, the motion light burst through the opened curtains. She squinted against the bright light as she tiptoed closer. The chickens were squawking again. The wings beating in terror. Feathers rustling.

A boy stood in the center of the yard between the fence and the coop. Illuminated from the back by the security light, his features were impossible to make out. 

“Colton?” Anita whispered. How many times had she thought she’d seen him? How many times had she been wrong?

There was nothing special about this boy’s clothes or his shoes what she could see of them. The boy’s brown hair was cut in a plain bowl shape. A fringe of bangs framed his face. He stood with his arms held stiffly at his side. His face pointed up at the window where Anita watched. 

Her husband’s ragged old tennis shoes, the ones he’d used to tend to the lawn, take the trash to the curb, and close the coop each night—one of them lay tumbled against the fence. The other lay on its side between the boy and the garage. The shadow of the garage seemed misshapen, wrong. Something about the stillness felt wrong. 

The boy slowly stood up tall. He brought his hand to his mouth. His elbow bent carefully. He brought a hand to his mouth. A brown egg held gently in his fingers. One of Mattie’s brown ones, or maybe it was Chloe’s. Anita didn’t know. The other six birds laid colorful eggs. This one was not one of those. 

Anita shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. This was not Marilyn’s experience. This was something altogether different. She checked the garage shadow again. Could she make out the swell of Harold’s stomach? Were those his legs poking out? 

The boy stared blankly in her direction. His lips curled away as he put the egg against his glinting white teeth. A row like knives. He bit into the egg, crunching into the shell and letting the liquid ooze over his chin and dribble down his front. A thick glob rolled to the patch of wetness that had soaked into the breast of his shirt.

The boy’s dark eyes stared at her with an intensity her son had never done. 

She wiped her eyes, and the strange boy was gone.  

Her son had never made eye contact or allowed his clothes to be wet. This was something altogether different. She had no explanation. 

The motion light popped off, leaving the coop and the yard in total darkness. 

“Harold?” His name was beginning to sound strange to Anita’s ears. In more than 48 years of marriage, they had never used a pet name like dear, darling, or honey. Never a nickname like Harry or Har. Always the full name—Anita and Harold.

“Harold, honey?” She put a hand to the glass. Her breath flowed out slowly. “Darling?”

Maybe in the retelling, when she wore her purple dress and red hat and told the rapt audience of ladies, she would add this detail. She would tell them that they had always called themselves pet names. Marilyn would not steal her spotlight this time. 

Carolyn Divish is a resident of Indianapolis where she earned her MFA from Butler University, Carolyn Divish enjoys spending time with her husband and three teenagers, who sometimes let her hang out with them. Her short stories, poetry and essays have been featured in Coachella Review, Kit Magazine, Jack and Jill Children’s Magazine, Silver Birch Press, The KeepThings and more.