Chicken.

When I went to their pen I would holler and bang on the gate, and they would run through the square opening to the smaller coop outside. Then I would make a mad dash with my white, plastic bucket scooping up their eggs, trying not to touch the icky brown stuff that was dried to the surface. Daily, I risked my life for the fifty cents I would be given at the end of each week.

I had taken on the job of collecting our chicken's eggs even though I was afraid of them. Somewhere in my perverse, melodramatic, already paranoid, 11-year-old mind, I believed they could kill me. When Dad would first bring them home from Hank's Feed and Seed, all yellow and fuzzy, I would stare into the box for hours. I would pet them and love them, but they never stayed innocent or lovable. As they grew they became cruel, ugly, selfish with beady eyes and loud, gut wrenching cackles. I watched them turn on each other, gang up, corner the weak ones. I saw the blood on their beaks, the victim of their rage torn and mangled, and I knew, understood as a child should not, the evil they were capable of.

I did not feel guilty then when it came time to kill them. I liked it. I liked the drama of it, the blood, the guts, their naked, goose-pimpled bodies hanging limp on the clothesline. While my older sisters stayed inside, refusing to have any part of the Spring slaughter, I, gladly, volunteered to help. It became my job to hold the fated creature by its feet as my brother aimed for the neck and swung his ax. Even on the clean shots, ones where the head went flying, the chicken still struggled afterward, flapped it's wings blindly, blood pouring out while I ran with it's frantic body to the pot of boiling water beside Grandma. I would plop the bird in, neck first, and finally it would be still; it would be silent.

I knew better than to tell my friends about the weekend massacres. I knew it would just be one more oddity to add to an already too strange girl. I wasn't like the others, hard as I tried to be. I didn't have the right stuff, the right look. In 1981 that meant 501 blue jeans, Nike's or triple-stripped Adidas, a big comb sticking out of a back pocket, always available for the combing of perfectly feathered hair. My hair was neither perfect nor feathery. My hair hung limp, with tangles underneath I couldn't possibly get a comb through. My jeans came from the Goodwill or off a sale rack at Alco, and my teeth, well they were adorned with metal while ridiculously thick glasses slid regularly down my nose.

The way I looked was not my only problem; I wasn't cool enough. Spending first through fifth grade at St. Michael's Catholic School resulted in me knowing only two cuss words (damn and hell) that I was afraid to say, and when the other kids made jokes about what went on between boys and girls, men and women, I had no idea what they were talking about, but I laughed anyway. I learned quick that it's important to appear as if you know things.

At one of the few birthday parties I was invited to, everyone wanted to go to the one movie theatre in town to see Star Trek. It was rated PG. I was not yet allowed to see PG movies, but Catholic guilt or fear of punishment was no match for peer pressure. I spent the two hours in the darkness of that movie house praying that I would not be found out and gaping at Anne Roberts and Jamie Stevenson who made slurping sounds as they made out beside me.

Even though I didn't really like the popular kids, they were mean, I wanted nothing more then to be one of them. When they passed the cooties of Diana Happ, the girl from the same trailer park as my Grandma, on to me, I quickly passed them on. I didn't tell them that I had played with her once when I was bored and had seen her riding her bike past my house. I never let on that I had given her some of my clothes the fall before when her trailer burned down. That next day when she came running up to me, I brushed her off, pretended she didn't exist. I denied her. And when the others gathered around her and began the tormenting, "Look at her pants. Did ya get those at the dump?" "You stink. You too poor to buy soap?" Or begin their chants of "Dumb Diana!", I did nothing. I didn't join in, but I did�nothing. I didn't think that Diana Happ had cooties, but I was busy, myself, trying to stay off their radar, busy laughing at jokes I didn't get, laughing off the cruelties that sometimes landed on me. It's hard being 11. It's hard trying to fit into a world you don't get, a world that doesn't seem to want you.

One evening it was nearly dark when I got my plastic bucket from the barn. Dad had just done the chores so the chickens were already in the outer pen pecking away at the seed and dirt. I went through the horse's stable and quietly let myself into the inner coop. There were almost a dozen eggs in my bucket before I saw it, a chicken, bleeding and broken, in the shadows. I squatted down without moving closer. It was still alive. Its eyes focused on me; I turned away quick. I was headed toward the house to tell Dad or one of my brothers, when I heard the screaming behind me. Squinting in the darkness, I couldn't make out their silhouettes or beady eyes. They had gone in. I hesitated before I started running. Inside the coop I yelled and kicked; a drop of blood flew up and landed on my cheek, but by the time I had scared them off, their victim was already dead. I had not come in time.

That night, lying in the darkness less than 100 feet from the killing, I dreamt of blood and exposed bones. My own. Crouched in a corner of the coop, chickens tore at my flesh, and in my periphery I could see others were there watching�Jamie, Anne� and there was Dumb Diana, pointing and laughing beside them. Beneath my nightmare screams, I could hear her taunting. "Chicken."