‘Fate of Chickens’ by Krista Jane May

“Plucked chicken,” she told William as he headed up the stairs to bed. Not loud enough for him to hear, of course. He’d only accuse her of being drunk, which she likely was. He was probably already disgusted, but it didn’t take much these days; or perhaps — and perhaps this was worse — he wasn’t thinking about her at all.

“Plucked chicken,” she whispered to the empty street from her perch just inside the enclosed front porch, the door cracked open just enough to accommodate the slender bare legs she extended across the wide top step and her need to inhale the thrill of a near-tropical early autumn rainstorm. Plucked chicken. Where had that come from, after all these years? It could only have been the sight of those two women strolling down the otherwise deserted 11pm pavement, rainwater rushing stream-like on either side of the slightly raised debris-built-up centre where they’d walked in a cursory attempt to stay dry, avoiding — of course — the elevated and therefore relatively puddle-less sidewalk that flanked only her side of the street. Distorted by the filter of the squalling rain-mist beneath the spotlight of the lone overhanging streetlight, their image briefly conjured a moving Renoiresque painting; this vision-like emergence of the two animated figures — as though entering a stage — had submerged Lorena into a painful longing that threatened to simmer on ache. Yet the well-past-middle-aged pair — one scrawny in a jaunty massive-flower-embellished flapper cap, the other portly with long white hair lifting in the gusts that rendered futile the umbrellas they were fighting to control — couldn’t be more incongruous to the two young women who insisted on intervening, their superimposed image crowding Lorena’s agitated state of consciousness. Where are you now, Muriel?