I Heard It Happening and
I Closed the Window

The feathers were the first thing I noticed: too many scattered through the low enclosure around the A-frame coop. The silence was next, and in a few more steps I saw the bodies. In the mid-morning light, blood sparkled across the green weeds. My favorite—the one Fisher had named Sniper Cat—was on her back, wings bent at terrible angles, her throat and chest ripped out. Agnes was around the corner, similarly maimed. I stepped over the fence and peered inside the coop at the two survivors. I would have to tell June and Amelia, a bleak way to start Amelia’s visit.

“I heard it happening and I closed the window,” I told them when they’d both joined me outside the coop’s low enclosure.

“Aww, it’s not your fault,” Amelia started out in her tender way, talking to fill the space until she found us sufficiently comforted. “You were asleep! I was right there and I didn’t even hear anything so, really, you did better than me. God, it’s awful. Do you think it was a raccoon? We don’t have to talk about that. How do you think it got the door open? Poor girls, they’re traumatized! They’re hiding in there. But I’m sure they’ll be okay...”

She kept her sweet, nervous monologue going. June said nothing and I hoped she didn’t blame me. I didn’t mention that I was the one who left the coop door open last night.

I refused their help with cleanup, wanting to take responsibility. I would handle this while they started breakfast. June proposed eating the murdered chickens as a show of respect. I dissented, citing disease. But we should do something. The sun had already climbed over the hill and our fence line, heating up the yard. I’d need a shovel, at least gloves, and bags, though I didn’t want to put their heavy bodies in the trash. I wanted to send them off in a more dignified manner.

Inside, I went upstairs to change into jeans. The cat followed me to my room and rubbed against my legs, knowing, so I bent down to give him a scratch and a kiss on the head. Then I started crying. I went over to the bed and flopped down and sobbed quietly into the quilt. I knew it was all my fault.

After a few minutes, I got up to open the window I’d closed in the pre-dawn when I heard the frantic cries of chickens in distress. I heard it happening and I closed the window. I could see Ken’s long, newly built coop from here. I’d squinted that direction in the dark, imagining it was his chickens I heard, and not ours. I thought through what I might have done other than go back to bed, but it didn’t matter now. It seemed to be about so much more than dead chickens.

To delay the inevitable I picked up my phone, but all I saw were distressing, unanswered texts from my cousin and my aunt. I put it back down. I watched the cat jump to his spot by the window to watch birds and I watched with him. We just sat there for what felt like a long time.

Odd peace, to sit there zoning out and doing nothing while the pleasant domestic sounds of two girls making breakfast bled up the stairs; I was a ghost who could still sit and watch, but had shed all responsibility. What was wrong with me?

Mom thought I should wash my hands of this other, crazy side of my family when my uncle died violently, unexpectedly—the latest in an unending string of avoidable melodramas. Not my circus...She didn’t understand why I would go through the stress of that aftermath. I didn’t understand why we so often fail to respond to crises in bloom...I can’t even.

I snapped out of my ghost feelings and self-pity when my work phone rang. The clanging ringtone music and rumbling vibration yanked me across the room—a fishhook in my cheek. I pressed the button on the side to silence it and let it go to voicemail. Someone needs something. The sounds of living birds carried through the window screen.

I remembered my cousin’s latest text, still not knowing how to respond. I just don’t know what to do anymore. Breakfast must be almost ready.

“I heard it happening and I closed the window.” I repeated out loud the lines I’d spoken coop-side and considered writing a poem. A response, however feeble.

This helplessness must run in at least one side of my family, I thought, still procrastinating at the window. I chewed on the grisly, uncharitable notion, resolving to send those texts today. Then, thinking of my hard-edged mother, I went out to clean up the blood and feathers.