Probable-Possible, my Brown Hen

     For a few years I lived in a strange slapdash house stepping itself down the side of a canyon in a dangerous downtown area. It was set behind another house, with a narrow walk along the neighbor’s fence, so it was oddly private for where it was and less likely to experience such day-to-day calamities as a random bullet coming through the wall (although once I did have to call in to tell work I would be late as the police had someone face down on the hood of my car and were applying handcuffs, and I wasn’t sure how long they were going to be).

     It was at this house that I had my rescued flightless raven Quoth, it was there that I found the tiny, days-old kittens right before we were leaving the country forever and had to find them a foster home in a hurry, it was there that we met, when an amazing group of musicians and artists moved into the front house, some friends we still have today. It was also there that we had, briefly, a chicken.

     One day I was out in the yard trying to find a way to get anything to grow in the rock-hard, flea-ridden dirt of which it consisted, and I heard someone calling out.

     “Hello? Hello there? Hello?”

     It was a musical, elderly, kind voice, very soft, and it took me a moment to realize that it was coming from the other side of the wooden fence, too tall to see over. As was the way in this kind of urban jungle, people didn’t go to any kind of lengths to go anywhere but in and out their own front doors, in and out of the car to go somewhere else entirely before moving about in the open air. I therefor didn’t know anything at all about the other side of that fence except that it was a parking lot over there between two apartment buildings with grim, filthy little windows overlooking my “garden”. I went over there and asked how I could help, and the voice explained to me that she, the voice’s owner, had a little bit of a garden along the fence, just some flowers that she was proud of, protected by a low strip of chicken wire. When she had gone out, just now, to water said garden, she had found, inexplicably, a baby chicken in it.

     Again, this was a very urban area. It was one of those blighted poorer collections of streets jammed in behind the downtown area where everything was actually happening, a place where posher people parked their cars once to walk to the opera house or convention center, the marina or a restaurant, feeling clever at dodging the parking meters of only a couple of blocks closer to their venue of choice, but did not make that mistake again. There was literally nowhere this chick could have come from. The lady with whom I was speaking figured someone had dumped it in her little garden out of a misguided attempt to put it somewhere safe (this was not safe: the neighborhood was full of feral cats, dogs, hawks, ravens, rats, snakes, malicious human beings, even foxes and possums). She, however, had no way to care for it and only the tiny sliver of flowers to call her outdoor terrain. She had observed that I had a large yard with a couple of trees and so on, and wondered if I might like to take on the responsibility of this fluffy bit of new life. When I assented, a pair of ancient, tissue-paper-skinned hands rose tremblingly above the fencetop, bearing a struggling and cheeping fleck of yellow fuzz.

     We named the little thing Probable-Possible even though we had no indication it would be black when it grew up (it wasn’t), nor a hen (it was), and set it up in a wire cage attached to an old doghouse until old enough to roost in one of the trees. She grew quickly, proving to be a meat variety and so genetically predisposed to charge headlong toward maturity. She was friendly enough, but not cuddly like some chickens can be. If we went outside she’d follow us around, or hang out with us on the porch, but she saw to herself most of the time. Her favorite perch was in the empty rectangle of the screenless screen door, where she would sit facing into or away from the living room depending on what was going on. At some point she grew up all the way and started presenting us daily with one large, brown, delicious egg placed just outside the front door on the porch. I almost stepped on the first one.

     There are two stories that really stand out about her.

     This bird did, one day, one of the funniest things I have ever seen any bird do, and when my husband ran in to find out why I was completely helpless with laughter, and I managed after some effort to breathe again and try to tell him about it, setting the scene with the prop involved, she did it again. He couldn’t stand up for a few minutes either. After that… never. It had lost all interest for her, for all time.

     The front door was open. I had just taken my hair down. It had been held up with one of those double-rubber-band-with-two-plastic-balls affairs, purple. This I accidentally dropped on the floor and as I started to stoop for it I saw Probable-Possible. She’d come onto the porch and was looking through the door at the hair tie. I’d never seen her look like that. She was frozen, pin-eyed, predatory. Stalking. And then she started for it, but some deep instinctive cunning, some element of flock life, led her to sneak up on it. Not, mind you, as though she was concerned about frightening it off – it was hilariously obvious that she didn’t want to attract my attention to the prize. She was being sneaky. I stood there watching this chicken keep that hair tie fixed in a steady side-eye gaze while she very unconvincingly pretended to scratch at the carpet elsewhere, making repetitive and entirely fake-sounding throaty groans, edging her way over here. When she deemed herself far enough away from me and close enough to her prey, she made her move. Leaping suddenly upon the tie, she snatched it up, triumph and avarice in her widened eyes, spun on her breastbone, and ran for the door. Only she didn’t, not right away. She was flattened against the carpet from her spring, with her legs splayed wide out to the sides, and she couldn’t get any traction. Her feet pounded wildly at the floor and her wings flapped but for the first several iterations, she didn’t move one centimeter forward. I was choking on laughter by the time she got her feet under her and charged out the door, where she held the tie proudly aloft, strutted about for a moment, and then realized it wasn’t, after all, whatever her ancestral programming had signaled her it was (a beetle of some kind, maybe?). As I said, she repeated the whole performance for my husband, for which I’m eternally grateful, but never again showed the slightest interest in the hair tie or anything that resembled it.

        I need to set the scene for the next story. This was in another world, on another continent, well over half my life ago. It was late evening, no work the next day, and we were relaxing. A quantity of a strong psychedelic had been ingested and I was working on some sketches while my husband, naked, was painting at an easel. We’d put some music on, and were having a good time. Then the doorbell rang.

     Answering the door while under the influence of psychedelics can be an interesting experience, but I assumed it was one of the artists from the front house. Who else would just come by like that, after all? My husband threw on a robe while opened the door – to a policeman. I was immediately aware that to my right, just off the side of the porch, was another one, and that one had a gun, and it was out, and it was pointed at me. Not, as some of you may know, a psychedelic-friendly setting. That said, if I was the kind of person who freaks out I wouldn’t have been taking psychedelics in the first place; that’s a bad combination. Additionally, the moment I opened the door they could see that I was an early-20’s girl in a nightgown, and the cop was already putting the gun down again. I’ve mentioned that the neighborhood was a bad one; there was every chance that door could have been flung open by a gigantic crack dealer with an uzi. I understood the policemen’s caution. We also had a big “Beware of Dog” sign although we at that time had no dog; it was that kind of area.

     The police relaxed, I relaxed, and I concentrated on acting like a normal person although I was aware that my pupils were probably about at my hairline by then. “What seems to be the problem, officers?” I ventured, genuinely puzzled, and the older one said there had been a complaint about the music. “All right”, I said, “We’ll turn it down.” I could see from their faces that they were delighted. An easy call like that doesn’t come around often in that kind of urban dump. They thanked me and wished us a good night, and started to turn to go… and that’s when a brown mass of pecking, clucking, clawing, enraged feathers attacked their feet. I have no idea why she chose this of all times to defend me from a visitor. She’d never done anything like it before. I had a brief moment of panic before I realized that the cops weren’t going to stomp on or shoot her, then I managed to grab her and stuff her under one arm and somehow, somehow, keep a straight face. One of the policemen asked me wryly if this was the guard dog, then, and we had a chuckle and they left. Whew!

     We only had Probable-Possible for a few months. Eventually a neighbor turned in a complaint, for no good reason we could think of, and it was indeed against the law to have a chicken in the heart of the city so she went to live with a friend of my mother-in-law on a free-range farm, where she joined a small flock and a few llamas. I’m still glad for that time with her; she was a fun little soul to have around.