Chicken

FICTION Chicken Holly Harold Sarah Chicken shit. The whole place smelled of it. The acrid fumes hit her nose the minute she stepped out of the car—and placed the spiked heel of her new Prada boot squarely in a fresh swirl of brown and white crap. She hadn't taken a clean breath since. Chicken shit. Yet another of the many reasons she never came back here. Not that the chickens were solely responsible for the intolerable air quality. The coal fumes were so thick you could taste them—or at least you could if you were a connoisseur. Oil from the local pumps seeped out onto the breeze as well, layering the scent with a greasy topnote. Eau de fossil fuel. And the lifeblood of the small community. Sarah had long since realized that if you wanted to hide something —like a big, messy strip mine—all you had to do was bury it in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Stash it somewhere like Shear's Hollow, whose inhabitants had nothing, including education, and you were guaranteed success. The big bad mining company didn't have to worry about environmental lobbyists here. To a person, the whole county depended on some kind of pumping or drilling or digging for survival. Those gaping scars on the land provided money for food, clothes, and the occasional Trans-Am. There wouldn't be any complaints about the smell from the mines or the pumps—or from the chickens, either. Leaning down to scrape the shit from her shoe, Sarah realized just how much she didn't want to be back here. How much she'd grown to hate this place in the years since childhood. It wasn't just the smell, the lack of a mall, or the fact that her cell phone signal had faded fifty miles ago. It wasn't even her fear of what was waiting for her inside the ramshackle house. It was the fact that one lousy bird could strip away twenty years of city-living in a single moment. One well-placed crap had her teetering in her designer boots as her carefully constructed adult identity slipped away, leaving a backwards mountain girl trembling in her place—the same girl she'd spent the last two decades running away from. Finished wiping off her heel, Sarahballed up the filthy Kleenex, clutching it tightly in her hand as she turned to face the house. Taking 57 in the chipped paint and sagging screen door, the battered washing machine sitting out on the porch, she was suddenly terrified. She tooka step backwards, away from the house, filled with an abrupt, uncontrollable urge to drive straight to the nearest Saks and shop until she'd regained complete control ofher suburban self. Unfortunately, the closest shopping mall was three hundred miles away, and based on the noise it made coming up the drive, the Beemer wouldn't make it back down, let alone back to civilization. Besides, she couldn't leave, not this time. Not until her mother did. So she squared her shoulders, swallowed her fear, and picked her way across the rickety porch to the kitchen door. Reaching for the worn handle, she took a deep breath of courage—and inhaled it all over again. Forcing herself to step across the threshold and into the house, she almost laughed at the irony. Chickenshit. Sallie Her hands weighed ofstone. As she looked down at herself, at her body, she could see them resting gently on the coverlet. Ghostly pale in thefading afternoon light, they laid there lightly, lookingfor all the world as ifthey were light asfeathers. But thefeel of them, on the ends ofher tired arms, was the cold heaviness ofmarble. The rest ofSallie's body seemed to her little more than an empty cornhusk, ready to be borne away on the slightest breathe ofair. It was as if, butfor her ponderous hands, she would have already blownfree ofthe earth, danced away on the breeze like the wisps ofa dandelion. Perhaps that was dying, then. Just giving in. She might simply exhale, and the wind would lift her up and carry her off, beyond the mountain and awayfrom...