Phoenix Cross
by C.S. Malerich
The only look I ever got at the full-blood phoenix was this photo Tommy sent from the lab. He said she’s twice the length of a Heartfields Cobb—mostly the tail; the tail is real long, like a pheasant’s—but half the body weight. Phoenix were never bred for meat, of course. They were never bred, period.
In person, she must be like a miracle come to life. Even in the photo, the feathers on top of the head are flaming orange, with red around the neck that gets darker and darker until the tail is black as coffee.
That wasn’t the first time I envied Tommy. He always got to do things I didn’t. College. Grad school. He even went skiing one Christmas.
*
I remember when Dad and Mom plowed over Gramps’s spent cornfield to build the first grow-out barn. The whole county was going into chicken then because Heartfields had bought up the hatchery and the plant and modernized everything. They could process 2,000 birds an hour, which meant they wanted a lot of birds.
Not just any birds, though. Patented Heartfields Cobbs, engineered so their legs were perfect drumsticks and their breasts were perfect TV dinners. Plus, with the company’s mix of supplements, they hardly ever got sick—Dad explained it all at dinner after the man from the company came around. Heartfields would supply everything, Dad said: the stock and the feed and the supplements. Eight weeks later, the company’s trucks and the company’s men would come get them. All we had to do in the meantime was make sure the automatic feeders were working. Gramps couldn’t understand why such little birds needed a building as big as a football field, ’til Dad explained there’d be 20,000 birds in there.
“This is modern farming,” Dad said. “Mechanized. State- of-the-art.”
We’d get paid by the ounce, and then everyone, even us kids, could see why he’d signed on.
I was what, six? The spring before, Mom was teaching me and Tommy to hit whiffle balls in that cornfield, but now I can’t remember what it looked like before the barn went up. I can’t remember a time when we couldn’t see the shining Heartfields plant from our porch, or when the company trucks weren’t most of the traffic on our road. And every eight weeks, give or take, they stopped at Gramps’s cornfield—what used to be Gramps’s cornfield—to pick up the birds we baby- sat for them.
It didn’t turn out the way Dad thought.
The stock wasn’t as healthy as the Heartfields man let on, and someone had to walk through the barn at least once a day, checking on the birds and clearing out the dead ones. In every flock, some died of sickness or wounds, or just because they couldn’t get to the feeding troughs and starved. Dad kept a tally next to the door of how many died that day. Sometimes flu hit, and we lost thousands.
Every dead bird counted against us once the company took and weighed them. After the trucks drove away, Dad and Mom would hose the shit and leftover carcasses into the lagoon at the end of the property. Then the barn would be empty for a couple days while we all held our breath.
Finally the Heartfields man would show up. He’d hand Dad the check that was always less than we hoped and a clicky pen to sign the contract for the next flock, already cheeping inside the trucks behind him. Dad hated to sign—I know he did, ’specially right after seeing that last check. But if he didn’t, how were we gonna keep the lights on another two months?
“The next one will be better,” he always said.
*
After Mom died, there wasn’t any discussion about which of us would go to college. Tommy’s grades were a hundred times better, and we didn’t have the money to send us both.
“Maybe in a few years,” Dad told me.
Well, in a few years, Tommy was in graduate school and Dad’s lungs were sounding as bad as Mom’s. So it was me who cleaned out the barn after the company trucks left. Me who picked up the leftover carcasses and hosed the chicken shit into the drains. Me who met the Heartfields man the next day with his check and his contract and his clicky pen. It was me who paid the bank and old hospital bills and Tommy’s student loans. It was me watching us slip further and further into debt, all after building a state-of-the-art farm on Heartfields promises.
When we got the third bad flock in a row, I called Tommy.
Before I could say anything, he was telling me about the phoenix—a real live phoenix. Now him and his Abnormal Biology team could study what made it resurrect. Something in the genes? Something in the environment? If they could break it down, step by step, that could change the future.
It all seemed very far away from the farm. I imagined him in a pristine lab, long white coat with shiny stainless- steel tools, learning how to make life re-make itself. It was like thinking about a different universe.
*
November was the first bad flock that year. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Dad how bad.
Some of the stock died right off the bat; the rest clumped together under the heat lamps, making fluffy pyramids out of themselves. The ones that were too slow or too weak—well, they ended up on the bottom and got crushed. I got in there to try to clear out the dead ones and space out the live ones. They were dying so fast I’d find the bodies already putrefying. I puked a few times—more than a few times—and I have a pretty strong stomach.
Heartfields sent a field vet out to take a look. “They’re cold,” he told me. “Raise the heat.”
*
“Every flock since Thanksgiving has been like that,” I told Tommy. They came to us sick, and I could barely keep half of them alive to fatten up. I called Heartfields over and over. Field vets came out, and I followed their instructions every time: I turned up the heat because they said the stock was cold. Then I increased the ventilation because they said the stock was hot. Then I installed a new water system because they said the stock was dehydrated. We took on more and more debt and kept sending back fewer and fewer broilers.
And we weren’t the only ones. Around here, people come off friendly until you ask something too personal, and then it’s like a brick wall. But word was getting around town about problems with the Heartfields Cobbs. Mrs. Zwacky down the road had already gone bankrupt. I went to the estate sale and watched her sell everything in her house—the beds and the coffee table and the kitchen appliances, even that lawn ornament that looks like a woman bending over. Me and Tommy stole it for a prank once in high school.
No one said why she went bankrupt. No one had to. Bad flocks.
“I think the company’s doing it on purpose,” I told Tommy.
“How come?”
“It’s the hens. Hens get older, their chicks get weaker. But they won’t replace them now because the price of chicken is down. So they’re stringing us along ’til the economy’s better.” If half the stock died, they didn’t care; that was less chicken on the market to drive the price down and less they owed the growers. And they knew they could do it to us, too, because we’re a Heartfields county. Hell, a Heartfields region. No other game in town.
I wanted to punch someone.
“They still have to feed the stock,” Tommy said.
“Fuck that. The only thing cheaper than chicken is chicken feed.”
Tommy whistled. “Quite a theory there, Joe. But you can’t criticize the company. They’ll cut you off.”
There was no point in running up the phone bill to hear things I already knew. “One more bad flock,” I told him, “and I’m gonna to have to choose—Dad’s medicine or your student loans.” Then I hung up.
He was the one to call back. You might’ve expected him to be angry or worried, but no.
“I have a solution for our problem.” His voice was smiling, that usual stone-cold-cool smile of his, but I could tell he was serious for once. Really dead serious. That’s when I started to hope.
“What?”
“It’s what I’ve been working on out here,” he said, getting close to the phone and speaking low. “Adding phoenix genes to the Heartfields Cobb.”
*
A week later I got the photo of the phoenix. Two weeks later Tommy himself showed up in a refrigerated semi.
“Where’d you get the truck?” I asked.
“Grant money,” he said, with that smile.
In the trailer were racks and racks of eggs. I was too wired to hold still, and I couldn’t help picking one up. It was light, like someone had sucked the yolk out, but looks-wise, it was your average chicken’s—brown as toast, with a few freckles. Just for a moment, I thought I felt movement inside, maybe responding to the warmth of my hand.
“Are you sure no one will be able to tell the difference?” I asked.
“They’ll look just like Heartfields Cobbs on the outside,” Tommy said. “Honest to goodness.”
“And you’re sure they won’t, you know, explode?” All the stories I heard, this phoenix thing was playing with fire. Like real fire.
“Nah, Joe, it’s been tested, over and over. The Crosses don’t immolate themselves. You can slaughter them like any other bird.”
Then he pulled out gloves and a mask from the truck’s cab and asked me where to start.
We’d agreed to keep it between us two for now, like somehow that’d lower the risk. It didn’t make me feel better, though, that we’d have to flush the Heartfields stock before we put the Cross eggs in the barn. Sick as they were, that stock was all that was standing between us and bankruptcy if Tommy’s plan didn’t work.
“You’d think I’d risk you and Dad and the farm if I wasn’t sure?” he asked.
And me, I believed him. So we got started.
The grates over the drains came off easy, and then with rakes and shovels, we made piles of stock and pushed them in. They were cheeping as soon as we started, getting louder and louder as we went. It was almost deafening.
The thing is, when a chick cheeps, it never sounds like pain to me. It’s some cutesy, cartoon noise. It definitely doesn’t sound like a death scream, though I knew they were drowning and dying in there.
I stopped for a second to push sweat out of my eyes. Tommy had the hose, ready to flush them down the drains to the lagoons.
“Hey,” he called to me. “They’d all be dead in eight weeks anyway.”
I nodded. Then he turned on the water.
We didn’t finish until dawn. Once the barn was clear, we put down the Cross eggs, turned up the heat lamps, and locked the doors.
Tommy parked the semi behind the barn, where no one would see it from the road, and headed back to the university.
One egg I took home with me. I planned to put it back later, but for a little while I just wanted to look at it. Touch it. Maybe even see the chick when it came out.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept dreaming I was trapped inside a small space, smaller than a closet, suffocating and trying to push my way out.
When finally I woke up Monday morning, the egg had hatched.
*
Chicks are always cute, I guess. I hadn’t paid too much attention to them since I was a kid and they’d become a chore and then a product. This one, though—since it wasn’t surrounded by thousands of others—this one I took some notice of. It was covered in yellow fluff, just the same as the chicks I was used to. It was restless, stretching its little legs and flapping its useless wings, slipping around the bottom of the plastic hamper where I’d put it. I laughed out loud a few times, just watching it.
Its beak made me nervous, though, when I looked hard. The chick had the usual scowling baby-bird face, but that beak was twice as long as normal. Was there something wrong with Tommy’s gene-splicing? Then it hit me: I’d never seen chicks with their full beaks before. Heartfields always cuts them down to keep them from pecking each other and scarring the meat. I started to relax. We’d have to rig up something to de-beak the Crosses ourselves, but how hard could it be? The knuckle-draggers at the hatchery did it all the time.
As I was getting dressed, a sound rang out. I spun around. Cheep! It was the clearest note I’d ever heard, like a bell. Cheep! Cheep! It went on singing, and the craziest part was, I could have sworn some of the notes didn’t come from the bird in my hamper.
Right away, I drove out to the barn. I didn’t even have to unlock it. As soon as I got within earshot, I could have told you all of our eggs had hatched—the singing was that loud. We had a flock of Phoenix Crosses.
Shit, I thought.
*
“They sound like a fucking angel choir,” I told Tommy on the phone.
“That’s your imagination.”
“They don’t sound like normal chickens.”
“Look, who’s going to hear them? And if anyone does ask, just tell them I’m experimenting with the breed. Tell them Heartfields approved it.” In the meantime, he said he’d talk to a friend in Ag Science about equipment for de-beaking.
No one asked. Dad never went down to the barn anymore on account of his lungs, and I think he was just happy to hear our new flock was healthy. It was the first day ever, in the history of the Jablonsky farm, that there wasn’t one dead bird on the premises. Unless you count the flock of Heartfields Cobbs we’d flushed to the lagoons.
Which I guess you would.
I decided to keep the hamper chick, at least for a while.
“This because we never got you a dog?” Dad wheezed, his idea of a joke, when he found me feeding her. The only way to keep her quiet was to keep her fed.
“Just trying to learn more about them,” I told him, the best I could come up with.
“Put it outside,” Dad said. “They aren’t housebroken.”
But I kept the chick in my room for a week, even though the third day she flapped her way out of the hamper and ruined the rug with her shit and scratching. Hell, I never liked that rug anyway. I put a screen over the top of the hamper to keep her in after that, and I checked on her five times a day to make sure she hadn’t figured a way out. The third night, she ate up all the Heartfields grain I’d brought from the farm, so instead of driving back out for more, I gave her table scraps. Bread crusts, apple cores, corncobs. That kind of thing. She pecked it up like it was a banquet.
*
Tommy brought the equipment for de-beaking, along with a couple of assistants. When it came to it, I didn’t much like the idea of doing it ourselves, but he showed me the technique for holding a chick’s head with your thumb so the nippers reach the beak. They were red-hot, cutting and cauterizing in the same stroke. At first I expected a bigger reaction from the chicks—and yes, they sang like a bunch of jingle bells right up to the moment they got their beaks sheared—but then they were quiet. I didn’t know if they couldn’t sing anymore, or if they just didn’t feel like it.
There were so many for us to do, I got into the rhythm of the work and forgot to notice anything else.
When I got back to the house late that night, there was my chick, hopping around the hamper, singing for food. I’d forgotten about her, and she still had her beak, but I was done for the day. She could keep it. If I kept her apart from the others, she wouldn’t get in any fights, and it wouldn’t matter.
That night, I dreamt I had half my face burned off and woke up screaming. Dad came running and wheezing to find out what was wrong. From the hamper, the chick was still singing to me.
*
“Do these things have powers?” I asked Tommy on the phone.
He laughed. “They have a wholly unique biology that lets them resurrect themselves. Is that a ‘power’?”
“Could they give me dreams?”
“You’re having bad dreams?” He sounded surprised.
“Nightmares,” I said. I was sweating. “I think it’s the birds.”
“Yeah, could be,” he said, without giving it too much thought. “You’re thinking about them a lot.”
“No, Tommy, I mean the birds are giving them to me. Like on purpose. Like—the evil eye or something.”
He laughed again. “Joe, they’re just birds. Try sleeping pills.”
*
By the end of the first week, my hamper bird sprouted white feathers like an ordinary Heartfields Cobb. I nearly took her down to the farm then, but instead I set up a coop outside the house with a screened-off run. There I could keep an eye on her, and maybe get a better night’s sleep.
She got round and plump, with just that bright red comb to tell you that you were looking at a chicken and not a snowball. She was also strong, scratching and digging with her blue scaly feet, until all our grass was gone around the coop. Dad and me saw her dust-bathe from the porch. She’d scratch herself a basin in the ground and then flap and roll and get filthy dirty.
“You know, your great-granddad used to keep chickens,” Dad told me.
“Yeah? Why didn’t Gramps keep it going?”
“Not to sell. He had ’em for the eggs, and they ate up the pests in the garden. I used to name them.”
“Name ’em? Like what were their names?”
“Oh, let me see ... there was Pepper, uh ... Spots. Um ... oh, Sparky. Sparky was my favorite.”
I laughed.
“What’s this one?” Dad asked me.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. She won’t tell me.” Dad snorted his laugh and went back to watching.
If she wasn’t digging, then she was flapping—launching herself from one corner to the other. Finally I did an experiment and let her out. She walked around the driveway, pecking and scratching and whistling—she never just clucked like a normal bird. She got into the garden and hopped in and out of Dad’s wheelbarrow, and I kept an eye on her the whole time, wondering what the hell I’d do if I couldn’t get her back into the coop. But at dinner she came back on her own.
I tried it a day at a time, and finally I just let her wander while the sun was up. I’d’ve worried about coyotes and raccoons, but I had a feeling she was a scrapper. She looked like a Heartfields Cobb, but she grew spurs on her feet, which I’d never seen on a hen, and she still had her beak, too. If there’d still been cockfights out at the Nablach barns, I think I might have taken her, just to see what kind of damage she’d do.
We were feeding the Crosses more than Heartfields rationed for their flock, so I knew we’d run out of feed before the eight-week cycle was up. Once the birds went hungry a couple days they’d lay their eggs. Tommy said that phoenix brood and prepare for their rebirth when food gets scarce or the climate gets harsh. The Phoenix Crosses would work the same way, he said.
Meantime, I saw my bird fatten up like the others. Every day, she moved less and less. I think she got too heavy for her own legs.
*
In my dream, I was restless. I wished I could scratch and dig, like my bird in the yard, and feel dirt under my nails. But the ground below me was too hard. I wanted to build, too—the urge was so strong it hurt my knuckles—but there was nothing to build with. I was standing in a crowd of others like me, and we had nowhere to go.
I felt full. Not the same as when you eat too much or you’re backed up, but something was pressing against my insides. It was like nothing I’ve ever felt awake. What the hell could it be? I could imagine it getting bigger and bigger, like an inflating balloon, until my whole body just burst open. The others’ eyes were on me, watching me start to panic, like they understood but they couldn’t do anything to help me. What the hell was it? This horrible burning, pressing thing?
It didn’t matter. I had to open myself and let it out, whatever it was. There was no room to maneuver, to split myself in two, but I had to try. I was terrified the thing would rip me apart as it left my body but more frightened of living with it inside me. More frightened that I wasn’t me anymore, that—I know this sounds crazy—that it was me, and I was going to die if I couldn’t get out.
Relief, finally. All of a sudden I felt the thing leave me and the pressure inside disappear. All my muscles went slack. I became hollow as an empty bottle.
The others were watching—impressed, maybe. Or just curious. After a moment, I turned to see what it was I’d birthed. It was brown, oblong, with freckles. An egg.
Crazy thoughts and feelings rushed in to fill all that empty space inside me. I’m a bird. No! I’m a man! No! I’m a mother. That’s me. I’m nuts. I was proud, I was ashamed, I didn’t know what I was.
In the middle of all that, there was this: That egg was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I woke up listening to Dad cough in the next room, and I cried, actually cried, into my pillow.
*
Soon as the sun came up, I went out to my bird.
“What the hell is happening?” I yelled at her. She didn’t even get up.
“What are you doing to me?” I opened the door of the pen, but she ignored me.
“Hey!” The dream hadn’t worn off yet, and now I was worried something was wrong with the bird. I whistled to her. I called her names and tried to lure her out with bread crusts, but she didn’t move a muscle.
It hit me: She’s brooding.
For a minute, with the dream fresh in my head, I couldn’t think what to do. Then I remembered—we’d agreed on a plan, Tommy and me. I phoned him to get him out here. We’d have to collect the eggs and hide them in the semi until Heartfields came and took the birds to slaughter. Then we could clean the barn and wait for the whole thing to start over. There’d be another flock of the Heartfields Cobbs to flush before we could set the eggs out, but I tried not to think about that yet.
While I waited for Tommy, I decided to take my hen’s egg. When I went to move her off it, she went wild. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not that. She twisted and flapped her way out of my grip, then she attacked me—I mean, really attacked me. She was scratching with her spurs and pecking with her beak. I had to kick her twice just to keep her from opening an artery. While she was dazed, I grabbed the egg and got the hell out of there. When I closed up the run behind me, she threw herself down with her wings spread out, screeching like Mom’s old opera records. I told her if she didn’t stop, I’d have to put her down in the barn like the others.
She didn’t stop. So I got my thickest gloves, caged her up, and took her to the barn with me. I couldn’t listen to that racket anymore; I just couldn’t.
*
Most of the time, the chickens just sat around the barn like blinking pillows, but the minute we tried to take their eggs, the Crosses turned into flapping, scratching demons. We had to work together: I’d grab the bird, and Tommy’d grab the egg.
It took three days to get them all, and we were really racing the clock by the end because the Heartfields trucks showed up just as Tommy was locking the trailer. We came back to the house exhausted and scratched and starving, but when I lay down, I smiled to myself, just thinking about the surprise on the Heartfields guys’ faces. We’d filled the trucks to busting—we hadn’t lost a bird from this flock, not one.
This check was going to be big, probably our biggest ever. That’d make all the nasty stuff worthwhile, all the work, the scratches, and the lost sleep. We could start paying down our debt again, and I wouldn’t have to choose which bills to pay. For the first time in a long time, I thought about the future and it didn’t make my stomach shrivel up.
*
In my dream that night, there was no egg. I was hanging upside down—me and the others, all in a line, something pulling us forward by the feet. I wanted to get away, but I couldn’t pull myself upright. The smell was disgusting. And, one by one, we passed a blade that sliced our throats open.
I woke up thinking I was choking on my own blood.
Half-awake and coughing, I stumbled past my hamper, down the stairs, and out the back door to the old coop. Taking the eggs and seeing the trucks drive away yesterday—I wanted that to be a dream, too. My bird was in that crowd. If it would have done any good, I would have driven to the plant right then, right to the shining Heartfields complex, to find her.
I found Tommy instead, awake even before me. It was at least an hour to sunrise, but there he was, heading down the driveway. The way I remember it, he had on his button-down shirt and his pressed-front pants, and he was whistling.
I flipped the porch light.
“Joe?” He turned. “What’s the matter?”
What did I say? I was furious and desperate, but I didn’t know why. I knew we’d sent 20,000 birds to their deaths, but so what? We’d done it before, dozens of times. Hundreds of times. Thousands of birds, millions of birds ...
Even without the dreams, I think I would have understood then how you’d hate us.
“Calm down,” Tommy said. “Let me get you a drink.”
Inside, I let him sit me down. “It was just a bad dream, Joe. You’ve been thinking about them too much.”
I got calmer. What he was saying made sense, and I wanted him to be right. I drank the beer he’d given me, whatever time it was.
“Where were you going?” I asked.
He smiled. “I wanted to be sure I don’t miss the check.”
Sure, that was why he’d stayed at the house last night. The Heartfields man had never shown up before breakfast, but I thought I understood him. This day we’d find out if all our work had paid off.
I told him to wait. We could all go to the barn together— Dad, too. His lungs would be all right if he took his oxygen and didn’t go inside.
Later, as I hosed away litter and loose feathers, I kept an eye out for any eggs we’d missed, but our work was good. From one end, I looked down the whole length of the barn. It was like a football field, yeah, but no turf, no field lights, no excitement. Just concrete under my feet, the food and water pipes, the dark propane lamps overhead. I thought about my hen, how she’d tried to fly around. The ones in here had it even worse. They couldn’t even see the sky. They didn’t have dirt to dig in, or room to go flapping their wings. I knew what that felt like, because I’d dreamt it.
There were tires on the driveway. Just four tires. Dad and Tommy met the Heartfields man as he stepped out of the pickup with the company logo, holding the two pieces of paper that would decide our future.
“Mr. Jablonsky?” he asked, looking past Dad and Tommy because I was the one he knew. I jogged over, even though I didn’t want to.
Something was wrong. The trucks should be here with him, carrying the next flock. Without them, that check in his hand was nothing—a stay of execution at best.
“This is your check.” The Heartfields man looked at me oddly as he handed it over. Dad and Tommy crowded around, impatient for me to open it. I did it without taking my eyes off the man’s face. He held my gaze, too, like he was the one waiting for some explanation—from me, of all people.
Tommy whooped when he saw the amount. Dad pulled it out of my hand and kissed it, then I felt his hands on my back, patting me, congratulating me. Who knows what Tommy was doing—turning cartwheels, probably. I just kept staring at the Heartfields man, waiting for him to accuse us of something.
After a minute, he broke his stare and smoothed the other piece of paper over the hood of his pickup. Then the clicky pen came out. “You need to sign this for the next flock.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The stock. You ain’t got them in your cab, do you?”
The Heartfields man gave me a nervous smile. “I was told you had them here already.”
By now Tommy’d come back from his touchdown dance and he jumped in. “That’s right,” he said. “They’re here already.” He took the pen out of the man’s hand. “I can sign.”
The Heartfields man breathed out, glad he hadn’t screwed up. In another minute the deal was done and he was back in his pickup, driving away. I hadn’t moved a muscle. The way Dad looked from me to Tommy, with his brow scrunched up, I knew he wasn’t in on it.
“Son?” Dad asked. “What’s going on?”
“I saved the farm,” said Tommy. He smiled and smiled.
*
There’s just flashes of what happened after—me shoving Tommy, Tommy clocking me back, me shouting, “How could you?”
Dad got between us and hollered at me to cool down. Then Tommy got to be the bigger man again and said he’d leave for now and explain everything later.
When it was quiet and I was alone and I could think it through, I realized I should have seen it coming. The company was in a death match with the price of chicken what it was, and they had to find any way they could to cut production costs. Just a few cents on the pound mattered, like a few drops of water matters to a man in the desert. The hatchery was always the most expensive part of the business—besides the farming, which they contracted out to chumps like us. With the Phoenix Crosses, Heartfields wouldn’t need to keep broody hens anymore.
Our farm was just the first test case. And Tommy had sold them the patent.
He never hated the company. He didn’t blame them for the piles of debt, or the uncertainty every eight weeks over what kind of flock we’d get. He didn’t care about the lagoons of chicken shit and dead stock, or Dad’s cough, or Mom dying. Well, why would he? He had a way out.
And I went along with it, kept it our little secret. Maybe I just wanted us to be a team, like brothers—for a little while, at least.
*
I had to get away, and Dad didn’t try to stop me.
I got a job driving trucks, hauling anything but chickens. I stopped talking to anyone at home. The only thing I couldn’t stop was the dreams. My bird—I think it was her, but in the dream it was me—living her endless lives. Hatching. Growing. Losing her beak. Laying her egg. Dying. Every life was a little bit different, but those parts were the same. It got so I started to know what was coming next, like one of the video games Tommy and me used to play over and over.
Some nights, not even sleeping pills helped.
I knew Dad and Tommy were doing well because Heartfields was doing well. There was a story on TV that talked about the chicken industry, how the Phoenix Crosses were basically a renewable resource—well, at least it meant you didn’t need broody hens and hatcheries. Just as soon as a flock went away to slaughter, growers could set the eggs in their barns and incubate the next batch—or hold off, if demand wasn’t high enough. The eggs would keep. Hatched, the birds didn’t get sick, and the meat tasted great.
Anybody trying to compete with ordinary birds—they were having a hell of a time. Heartfields had just bought up eight more slaughterhouses in eight more towns; they had the national market cornered. International, too, soon enough. And all the credit belonged to Dr. Thomas Jablonsky, Jr., the son of humble chicken farmers. My brother was a hero.
*
In my dreams, I was searching my mind for something, like trying to remember a song that I knew a long, long time ago. When I was awake, I wondered what it could be. Something in their phoenix genes? I stared at Tommy’s photo of the phoenix on my dashboard, until I was sure.
Tommy and Dad must think I did it, somehow, because it happened the day I came home. Really I was just coming home to warn them.
With the additions Tommy’d put on, the house was twice as big as the one I grew up in, and now Dad had a bedroom and his own bathroom on the ground floor so he didn’t have to climb stairs. Upstairs, they’d need the space, Tommy and his new wife. Dad’s first grandchild was on the way.
Over beers on the porch, I told Tommy you were learning. The company couldn’t keep raising and killing the same birds again and again without a problem. But he didn’t believe me, no matter how many times we went around.
“OK,” I said. “Just—just think about it.”
“Even if it were true, which it’s not,” he said, “they’re just birds, Joe. What are they going to do? They can’t even fly.”
“I think they have dreams, too,” I said. “That means they have minds.”
Tommy shook his head. “You’re anthropomorphizing.”
I shrugged and went back in to get another beer. He followed. When I opened the refrigerator, I saw a single egg, sitting inside a half-dozen carton, and I picked up the whole thing. “What’s this?”
Tommy shrugged. “It’s good to keep one behind, in case there’s a problem. Then I don’t have to start from scratch again in the lab.”
All at once I thought about my chick, slipping around the plastic hamper. I should have given her someplace better, someplace she could have explored, with a place to perch and somewhere to dig.
Tommy cleared his throat. “I was glad when you called, Joe.” He must’ve gotten used to making deals in our time apart because he didn’t sound like a scientist at all anymore. He sounded like a businessman.
“There’s so much to do now,” he said. “They made me a vice president, and I have to read reports, study other climates.” Finally he got to the point. “I thought maybe you’d like to come back, run the farm again.”
The egg in my hand suddenly got heavy as a softball, and I nearly dropped it. “I can’t work for the company anymore.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because soon there isn’t going to be a company.”
*
I meant to at least say good-bye to Dad, but sirens called me and Tommy back outside. From the porch, we could see flames up on the hill, where the Heartfields plant had stood all our lives. For a minute, both of us just stared. What Tommy saw, I can only guess—his future, maybe, going up in a ball of fire and a column of smoke.
I laughed. Finally, they’d remembered the song they wanted, the song to set themselves alight.
Tommy turned like he was going to punch me in the face. “What the hell!”
I ducked and ran. It wasn’t until I started the engine of my truck that I realized I still had the egg carton in my hand. Even if I’d had time to plan, though, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have left you behind.
I set the carton down on the seat beside me and took off down the driveway while Tommy hollered and banged on the side of the cab.
I lost him at the road and just drove. For miles and miles, ash coated my windshield as I passed grow-out sheds becoming rows of flame. Sirens on top of sirens blended together like some kind of wailing choir, but under it all, I imagined I could hear birds singing.
I looked to the egg at my right, turned up the heat, and drove on.
For you and me, next time is going to be better.
C.S. Malerich lives and works near the District of Columbia. Her speculative fiction has appeared previously in Ares Magazine, The Again, and in both volumes of Among Animals by Ashland Creek Press. She is a founding member of the collective DC Stampede, supporting grassroots organizing on behalf of animals, people, and the planet.
by C.S. Malerich
The only look I ever got at the full-blood phoenix was this photo Tommy sent from the lab. He said she’s twice the length of a Heartfields Cobb—mostly the tail; the tail is real long, like a pheasant’s—but half the body weight. Phoenix were never bred for meat, of course. They were never bred, period.
In person, she must be like a miracle come to life. Even in the photo, the feathers on top of the head are flaming orange, with red around the neck that gets darker and darker until the tail is black as coffee.
That wasn’t the first time I envied Tommy. He always got to do things I didn’t. College. Grad school. He even went skiing one Christmas.
*
I remember when Dad and Mom plowed over Gramps’s spent cornfield to build the first grow-out barn. The whole county was going into chicken then because Heartfields had bought up the hatchery and the plant and modernized everything. They could process 2,000 birds an hour, which meant they wanted a lot of birds.
Not just any birds, though. Patented Heartfields Cobbs, engineered so their legs were perfect drumsticks and their breasts were perfect TV dinners. Plus, with the company’s mix of supplements, they hardly ever got sick—Dad explained it all at dinner after the man from the company came around. Heartfields would supply everything, Dad said: the stock and the feed and the supplements. Eight weeks later, the company’s trucks and the company’s men would come get them. All we had to do in the meantime was make sure the automatic feeders were working. Gramps couldn’t understand why such little birds needed a building as big as a football field, ’til Dad explained there’d be 20,000 birds in there.
“This is modern farming,” Dad said. “Mechanized. State- of-the-art.”
We’d get paid by the ounce, and then everyone, even us kids, could see why he’d signed on.
I was what, six? The spring before, Mom was teaching me and Tommy to hit whiffle balls in that cornfield, but now I can’t remember what it looked like before the barn went up. I can’t remember a time when we couldn’t see the shining Heartfields plant from our porch, or when the company trucks weren’t most of the traffic on our road. And every eight weeks, give or take, they stopped at Gramps’s cornfield—what used to be Gramps’s cornfield—to pick up the birds we baby- sat for them.
It didn’t turn out the way Dad thought.
The stock wasn’t as healthy as the Heartfields man let on, and someone had to walk through the barn at least once a day, checking on the birds and clearing out the dead ones. In every flock, some died of sickness or wounds, or just because they couldn’t get to the feeding troughs and starved. Dad kept a tally next to the door of how many died that day. Sometimes flu hit, and we lost thousands.
Every dead bird counted against us once the company took and weighed them. After the trucks drove away, Dad and Mom would hose the shit and leftover carcasses into the lagoon at the end of the property. Then the barn would be empty for a couple days while we all held our breath.
Finally the Heartfields man would show up. He’d hand Dad the check that was always less than we hoped and a clicky pen to sign the contract for the next flock, already cheeping inside the trucks behind him. Dad hated to sign—I know he did, ’specially right after seeing that last check. But if he didn’t, how were we gonna keep the lights on another two months?
“The next one will be better,” he always said.
*
After Mom died, there wasn’t any discussion about which of us would go to college. Tommy’s grades were a hundred times better, and we didn’t have the money to send us both.
“Maybe in a few years,” Dad told me.
Well, in a few years, Tommy was in graduate school and Dad’s lungs were sounding as bad as Mom’s. So it was me who cleaned out the barn after the company trucks left. Me who picked up the leftover carcasses and hosed the chicken shit into the drains. Me who met the Heartfields man the next day with his check and his contract and his clicky pen. It was me who paid the bank and old hospital bills and Tommy’s student loans. It was me watching us slip further and further into debt, all after building a state-of-the-art farm on Heartfields promises.
When we got the third bad flock in a row, I called Tommy.
Before I could say anything, he was telling me about the phoenix—a real live phoenix. Now him and his Abnormal Biology team could study what made it resurrect. Something in the genes? Something in the environment? If they could break it down, step by step, that could change the future.
It all seemed very far away from the farm. I imagined him in a pristine lab, long white coat with shiny stainless- steel tools, learning how to make life re-make itself. It was like thinking about a different universe.
*
November was the first bad flock that year. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Dad how bad.
Some of the stock died right off the bat; the rest clumped together under the heat lamps, making fluffy pyramids out of themselves. The ones that were too slow or too weak—well, they ended up on the bottom and got crushed. I got in there to try to clear out the dead ones and space out the live ones. They were dying so fast I’d find the bodies already putrefying. I puked a few times—more than a few times—and I have a pretty strong stomach.
Heartfields sent a field vet out to take a look. “They’re cold,” he told me. “Raise the heat.”
*
“Every flock since Thanksgiving has been like that,” I told Tommy. They came to us sick, and I could barely keep half of them alive to fatten up. I called Heartfields over and over. Field vets came out, and I followed their instructions every time: I turned up the heat because they said the stock was cold. Then I increased the ventilation because they said the stock was hot. Then I installed a new water system because they said the stock was dehydrated. We took on more and more debt and kept sending back fewer and fewer broilers.
And we weren’t the only ones. Around here, people come off friendly until you ask something too personal, and then it’s like a brick wall. But word was getting around town about problems with the Heartfields Cobbs. Mrs. Zwacky down the road had already gone bankrupt. I went to the estate sale and watched her sell everything in her house—the beds and the coffee table and the kitchen appliances, even that lawn ornament that looks like a woman bending over. Me and Tommy stole it for a prank once in high school.
No one said why she went bankrupt. No one had to. Bad flocks.
“I think the company’s doing it on purpose,” I told Tommy.
“How come?”
“It’s the hens. Hens get older, their chicks get weaker. But they won’t replace them now because the price of chicken is down. So they’re stringing us along ’til the economy’s better.” If half the stock died, they didn’t care; that was less chicken on the market to drive the price down and less they owed the growers. And they knew they could do it to us, too, because we’re a Heartfields county. Hell, a Heartfields region. No other game in town.
I wanted to punch someone.
“They still have to feed the stock,” Tommy said.
“Fuck that. The only thing cheaper than chicken is chicken feed.”
Tommy whistled. “Quite a theory there, Joe. But you can’t criticize the company. They’ll cut you off.”
There was no point in running up the phone bill to hear things I already knew. “One more bad flock,” I told him, “and I’m gonna to have to choose—Dad’s medicine or your student loans.” Then I hung up.
He was the one to call back. You might’ve expected him to be angry or worried, but no.
“I have a solution for our problem.” His voice was smiling, that usual stone-cold-cool smile of his, but I could tell he was serious for once. Really dead serious. That’s when I started to hope.
“What?”
“It’s what I’ve been working on out here,” he said, getting close to the phone and speaking low. “Adding phoenix genes to the Heartfields Cobb.”
*
A week later I got the photo of the phoenix. Two weeks later Tommy himself showed up in a refrigerated semi.
“Where’d you get the truck?” I asked.
“Grant money,” he said, with that smile.
In the trailer were racks and racks of eggs. I was too wired to hold still, and I couldn’t help picking one up. It was light, like someone had sucked the yolk out, but looks-wise, it was your average chicken’s—brown as toast, with a few freckles. Just for a moment, I thought I felt movement inside, maybe responding to the warmth of my hand.
“Are you sure no one will be able to tell the difference?” I asked.
“They’ll look just like Heartfields Cobbs on the outside,” Tommy said. “Honest to goodness.”
“And you’re sure they won’t, you know, explode?” All the stories I heard, this phoenix thing was playing with fire. Like real fire.
“Nah, Joe, it’s been tested, over and over. The Crosses don’t immolate themselves. You can slaughter them like any other bird.”
Then he pulled out gloves and a mask from the truck’s cab and asked me where to start.
We’d agreed to keep it between us two for now, like somehow that’d lower the risk. It didn’t make me feel better, though, that we’d have to flush the Heartfields stock before we put the Cross eggs in the barn. Sick as they were, that stock was all that was standing between us and bankruptcy if Tommy’s plan didn’t work.
“You’d think I’d risk you and Dad and the farm if I wasn’t sure?” he asked.
And me, I believed him. So we got started.
The grates over the drains came off easy, and then with rakes and shovels, we made piles of stock and pushed them in. They were cheeping as soon as we started, getting louder and louder as we went. It was almost deafening.
The thing is, when a chick cheeps, it never sounds like pain to me. It’s some cutesy, cartoon noise. It definitely doesn’t sound like a death scream, though I knew they were drowning and dying in there.
I stopped for a second to push sweat out of my eyes. Tommy had the hose, ready to flush them down the drains to the lagoons.
“Hey,” he called to me. “They’d all be dead in eight weeks anyway.”
I nodded. Then he turned on the water.
We didn’t finish until dawn. Once the barn was clear, we put down the Cross eggs, turned up the heat lamps, and locked the doors.
Tommy parked the semi behind the barn, where no one would see it from the road, and headed back to the university.
One egg I took home with me. I planned to put it back later, but for a little while I just wanted to look at it. Touch it. Maybe even see the chick when it came out.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept dreaming I was trapped inside a small space, smaller than a closet, suffocating and trying to push my way out.
When finally I woke up Monday morning, the egg had hatched.
*
Chicks are always cute, I guess. I hadn’t paid too much attention to them since I was a kid and they’d become a chore and then a product. This one, though—since it wasn’t surrounded by thousands of others—this one I took some notice of. It was covered in yellow fluff, just the same as the chicks I was used to. It was restless, stretching its little legs and flapping its useless wings, slipping around the bottom of the plastic hamper where I’d put it. I laughed out loud a few times, just watching it.
Its beak made me nervous, though, when I looked hard. The chick had the usual scowling baby-bird face, but that beak was twice as long as normal. Was there something wrong with Tommy’s gene-splicing? Then it hit me: I’d never seen chicks with their full beaks before. Heartfields always cuts them down to keep them from pecking each other and scarring the meat. I started to relax. We’d have to rig up something to de-beak the Crosses ourselves, but how hard could it be? The knuckle-draggers at the hatchery did it all the time.
As I was getting dressed, a sound rang out. I spun around. Cheep! It was the clearest note I’d ever heard, like a bell. Cheep! Cheep! It went on singing, and the craziest part was, I could have sworn some of the notes didn’t come from the bird in my hamper.
Right away, I drove out to the barn. I didn’t even have to unlock it. As soon as I got within earshot, I could have told you all of our eggs had hatched—the singing was that loud. We had a flock of Phoenix Crosses.
Shit, I thought.
*
“They sound like a fucking angel choir,” I told Tommy on the phone.
“That’s your imagination.”
“They don’t sound like normal chickens.”
“Look, who’s going to hear them? And if anyone does ask, just tell them I’m experimenting with the breed. Tell them Heartfields approved it.” In the meantime, he said he’d talk to a friend in Ag Science about equipment for de-beaking.
No one asked. Dad never went down to the barn anymore on account of his lungs, and I think he was just happy to hear our new flock was healthy. It was the first day ever, in the history of the Jablonsky farm, that there wasn’t one dead bird on the premises. Unless you count the flock of Heartfields Cobbs we’d flushed to the lagoons.
Which I guess you would.
I decided to keep the hamper chick, at least for a while.
“This because we never got you a dog?” Dad wheezed, his idea of a joke, when he found me feeding her. The only way to keep her quiet was to keep her fed.
“Just trying to learn more about them,” I told him, the best I could come up with.
“Put it outside,” Dad said. “They aren’t housebroken.”
But I kept the chick in my room for a week, even though the third day she flapped her way out of the hamper and ruined the rug with her shit and scratching. Hell, I never liked that rug anyway. I put a screen over the top of the hamper to keep her in after that, and I checked on her five times a day to make sure she hadn’t figured a way out. The third night, she ate up all the Heartfields grain I’d brought from the farm, so instead of driving back out for more, I gave her table scraps. Bread crusts, apple cores, corncobs. That kind of thing. She pecked it up like it was a banquet.
*
Tommy brought the equipment for de-beaking, along with a couple of assistants. When it came to it, I didn’t much like the idea of doing it ourselves, but he showed me the technique for holding a chick’s head with your thumb so the nippers reach the beak. They were red-hot, cutting and cauterizing in the same stroke. At first I expected a bigger reaction from the chicks—and yes, they sang like a bunch of jingle bells right up to the moment they got their beaks sheared—but then they were quiet. I didn’t know if they couldn’t sing anymore, or if they just didn’t feel like it.
There were so many for us to do, I got into the rhythm of the work and forgot to notice anything else.
When I got back to the house late that night, there was my chick, hopping around the hamper, singing for food. I’d forgotten about her, and she still had her beak, but I was done for the day. She could keep it. If I kept her apart from the others, she wouldn’t get in any fights, and it wouldn’t matter.
That night, I dreamt I had half my face burned off and woke up screaming. Dad came running and wheezing to find out what was wrong. From the hamper, the chick was still singing to me.
*
“Do these things have powers?” I asked Tommy on the phone.
He laughed. “They have a wholly unique biology that lets them resurrect themselves. Is that a ‘power’?”
“Could they give me dreams?”
“You’re having bad dreams?” He sounded surprised.
“Nightmares,” I said. I was sweating. “I think it’s the birds.”
“Yeah, could be,” he said, without giving it too much thought. “You’re thinking about them a lot.”
“No, Tommy, I mean the birds are giving them to me. Like on purpose. Like—the evil eye or something.”
He laughed again. “Joe, they’re just birds. Try sleeping pills.”
*
By the end of the first week, my hamper bird sprouted white feathers like an ordinary Heartfields Cobb. I nearly took her down to the farm then, but instead I set up a coop outside the house with a screened-off run. There I could keep an eye on her, and maybe get a better night’s sleep.
She got round and plump, with just that bright red comb to tell you that you were looking at a chicken and not a snowball. She was also strong, scratching and digging with her blue scaly feet, until all our grass was gone around the coop. Dad and me saw her dust-bathe from the porch. She’d scratch herself a basin in the ground and then flap and roll and get filthy dirty.
“You know, your great-granddad used to keep chickens,” Dad told me.
“Yeah? Why didn’t Gramps keep it going?”
“Not to sell. He had ’em for the eggs, and they ate up the pests in the garden. I used to name them.”
“Name ’em? Like what were their names?”
“Oh, let me see ... there was Pepper, uh ... Spots. Um ... oh, Sparky. Sparky was my favorite.”
I laughed.
“What’s this one?” Dad asked me.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. She won’t tell me.” Dad snorted his laugh and went back to watching.
If she wasn’t digging, then she was flapping—launching herself from one corner to the other. Finally I did an experiment and let her out. She walked around the driveway, pecking and scratching and whistling—she never just clucked like a normal bird. She got into the garden and hopped in and out of Dad’s wheelbarrow, and I kept an eye on her the whole time, wondering what the hell I’d do if I couldn’t get her back into the coop. But at dinner she came back on her own.
I tried it a day at a time, and finally I just let her wander while the sun was up. I’d’ve worried about coyotes and raccoons, but I had a feeling she was a scrapper. She looked like a Heartfields Cobb, but she grew spurs on her feet, which I’d never seen on a hen, and she still had her beak, too. If there’d still been cockfights out at the Nablach barns, I think I might have taken her, just to see what kind of damage she’d do.
We were feeding the Crosses more than Heartfields rationed for their flock, so I knew we’d run out of feed before the eight-week cycle was up. Once the birds went hungry a couple days they’d lay their eggs. Tommy said that phoenix brood and prepare for their rebirth when food gets scarce or the climate gets harsh. The Phoenix Crosses would work the same way, he said.
Meantime, I saw my bird fatten up like the others. Every day, she moved less and less. I think she got too heavy for her own legs.
*
In my dream, I was restless. I wished I could scratch and dig, like my bird in the yard, and feel dirt under my nails. But the ground below me was too hard. I wanted to build, too—the urge was so strong it hurt my knuckles—but there was nothing to build with. I was standing in a crowd of others like me, and we had nowhere to go.
I felt full. Not the same as when you eat too much or you’re backed up, but something was pressing against my insides. It was like nothing I’ve ever felt awake. What the hell could it be? I could imagine it getting bigger and bigger, like an inflating balloon, until my whole body just burst open. The others’ eyes were on me, watching me start to panic, like they understood but they couldn’t do anything to help me. What the hell was it? This horrible burning, pressing thing?
It didn’t matter. I had to open myself and let it out, whatever it was. There was no room to maneuver, to split myself in two, but I had to try. I was terrified the thing would rip me apart as it left my body but more frightened of living with it inside me. More frightened that I wasn’t me anymore, that—I know this sounds crazy—that it was me, and I was going to die if I couldn’t get out.
Relief, finally. All of a sudden I felt the thing leave me and the pressure inside disappear. All my muscles went slack. I became hollow as an empty bottle.
The others were watching—impressed, maybe. Or just curious. After a moment, I turned to see what it was I’d birthed. It was brown, oblong, with freckles. An egg.
Crazy thoughts and feelings rushed in to fill all that empty space inside me. I’m a bird. No! I’m a man! No! I’m a mother. That’s me. I’m nuts. I was proud, I was ashamed, I didn’t know what I was.
In the middle of all that, there was this: That egg was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I woke up listening to Dad cough in the next room, and I cried, actually cried, into my pillow.
*
Soon as the sun came up, I went out to my bird.
“What the hell is happening?” I yelled at her. She didn’t even get up.
“What are you doing to me?” I opened the door of the pen, but she ignored me.
“Hey!” The dream hadn’t worn off yet, and now I was worried something was wrong with the bird. I whistled to her. I called her names and tried to lure her out with bread crusts, but she didn’t move a muscle.
It hit me: She’s brooding.
For a minute, with the dream fresh in my head, I couldn’t think what to do. Then I remembered—we’d agreed on a plan, Tommy and me. I phoned him to get him out here. We’d have to collect the eggs and hide them in the semi until Heartfields came and took the birds to slaughter. Then we could clean the barn and wait for the whole thing to start over. There’d be another flock of the Heartfields Cobbs to flush before we could set the eggs out, but I tried not to think about that yet.
While I waited for Tommy, I decided to take my hen’s egg. When I went to move her off it, she went wild. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not that. She twisted and flapped her way out of my grip, then she attacked me—I mean, really attacked me. She was scratching with her spurs and pecking with her beak. I had to kick her twice just to keep her from opening an artery. While she was dazed, I grabbed the egg and got the hell out of there. When I closed up the run behind me, she threw herself down with her wings spread out, screeching like Mom’s old opera records. I told her if she didn’t stop, I’d have to put her down in the barn like the others.
She didn’t stop. So I got my thickest gloves, caged her up, and took her to the barn with me. I couldn’t listen to that racket anymore; I just couldn’t.
*
Most of the time, the chickens just sat around the barn like blinking pillows, but the minute we tried to take their eggs, the Crosses turned into flapping, scratching demons. We had to work together: I’d grab the bird, and Tommy’d grab the egg.
It took three days to get them all, and we were really racing the clock by the end because the Heartfields trucks showed up just as Tommy was locking the trailer. We came back to the house exhausted and scratched and starving, but when I lay down, I smiled to myself, just thinking about the surprise on the Heartfields guys’ faces. We’d filled the trucks to busting—we hadn’t lost a bird from this flock, not one.
This check was going to be big, probably our biggest ever. That’d make all the nasty stuff worthwhile, all the work, the scratches, and the lost sleep. We could start paying down our debt again, and I wouldn’t have to choose which bills to pay. For the first time in a long time, I thought about the future and it didn’t make my stomach shrivel up.
*
In my dream that night, there was no egg. I was hanging upside down—me and the others, all in a line, something pulling us forward by the feet. I wanted to get away, but I couldn’t pull myself upright. The smell was disgusting. And, one by one, we passed a blade that sliced our throats open.
I woke up thinking I was choking on my own blood.
Half-awake and coughing, I stumbled past my hamper, down the stairs, and out the back door to the old coop. Taking the eggs and seeing the trucks drive away yesterday—I wanted that to be a dream, too. My bird was in that crowd. If it would have done any good, I would have driven to the plant right then, right to the shining Heartfields complex, to find her.
I found Tommy instead, awake even before me. It was at least an hour to sunrise, but there he was, heading down the driveway. The way I remember it, he had on his button-down shirt and his pressed-front pants, and he was whistling.
I flipped the porch light.
“Joe?” He turned. “What’s the matter?”
What did I say? I was furious and desperate, but I didn’t know why. I knew we’d sent 20,000 birds to their deaths, but so what? We’d done it before, dozens of times. Hundreds of times. Thousands of birds, millions of birds ...
Even without the dreams, I think I would have understood then how you’d hate us.
“Calm down,” Tommy said. “Let me get you a drink.”
Inside, I let him sit me down. “It was just a bad dream, Joe. You’ve been thinking about them too much.”
I got calmer. What he was saying made sense, and I wanted him to be right. I drank the beer he’d given me, whatever time it was.
“Where were you going?” I asked.
He smiled. “I wanted to be sure I don’t miss the check.”
Sure, that was why he’d stayed at the house last night. The Heartfields man had never shown up before breakfast, but I thought I understood him. This day we’d find out if all our work had paid off.
I told him to wait. We could all go to the barn together— Dad, too. His lungs would be all right if he took his oxygen and didn’t go inside.
Later, as I hosed away litter and loose feathers, I kept an eye out for any eggs we’d missed, but our work was good. From one end, I looked down the whole length of the barn. It was like a football field, yeah, but no turf, no field lights, no excitement. Just concrete under my feet, the food and water pipes, the dark propane lamps overhead. I thought about my hen, how she’d tried to fly around. The ones in here had it even worse. They couldn’t even see the sky. They didn’t have dirt to dig in, or room to go flapping their wings. I knew what that felt like, because I’d dreamt it.
There were tires on the driveway. Just four tires. Dad and Tommy met the Heartfields man as he stepped out of the pickup with the company logo, holding the two pieces of paper that would decide our future.
“Mr. Jablonsky?” he asked, looking past Dad and Tommy because I was the one he knew. I jogged over, even though I didn’t want to.
Something was wrong. The trucks should be here with him, carrying the next flock. Without them, that check in his hand was nothing—a stay of execution at best.
“This is your check.” The Heartfields man looked at me oddly as he handed it over. Dad and Tommy crowded around, impatient for me to open it. I did it without taking my eyes off the man’s face. He held my gaze, too, like he was the one waiting for some explanation—from me, of all people.
Tommy whooped when he saw the amount. Dad pulled it out of my hand and kissed it, then I felt his hands on my back, patting me, congratulating me. Who knows what Tommy was doing—turning cartwheels, probably. I just kept staring at the Heartfields man, waiting for him to accuse us of something.
After a minute, he broke his stare and smoothed the other piece of paper over the hood of his pickup. Then the clicky pen came out. “You need to sign this for the next flock.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The stock. You ain’t got them in your cab, do you?”
The Heartfields man gave me a nervous smile. “I was told you had them here already.”
By now Tommy’d come back from his touchdown dance and he jumped in. “That’s right,” he said. “They’re here already.” He took the pen out of the man’s hand. “I can sign.”
The Heartfields man breathed out, glad he hadn’t screwed up. In another minute the deal was done and he was back in his pickup, driving away. I hadn’t moved a muscle. The way Dad looked from me to Tommy, with his brow scrunched up, I knew he wasn’t in on it.
“Son?” Dad asked. “What’s going on?”
“I saved the farm,” said Tommy. He smiled and smiled.
*
There’s just flashes of what happened after—me shoving Tommy, Tommy clocking me back, me shouting, “How could you?”
Dad got between us and hollered at me to cool down. Then Tommy got to be the bigger man again and said he’d leave for now and explain everything later.
When it was quiet and I was alone and I could think it through, I realized I should have seen it coming. The company was in a death match with the price of chicken what it was, and they had to find any way they could to cut production costs. Just a few cents on the pound mattered, like a few drops of water matters to a man in the desert. The hatchery was always the most expensive part of the business—besides the farming, which they contracted out to chumps like us. With the Phoenix Crosses, Heartfields wouldn’t need to keep broody hens anymore.
Our farm was just the first test case. And Tommy had sold them the patent.
He never hated the company. He didn’t blame them for the piles of debt, or the uncertainty every eight weeks over what kind of flock we’d get. He didn’t care about the lagoons of chicken shit and dead stock, or Dad’s cough, or Mom dying. Well, why would he? He had a way out.
And I went along with it, kept it our little secret. Maybe I just wanted us to be a team, like brothers—for a little while, at least.
*
I had to get away, and Dad didn’t try to stop me.
I got a job driving trucks, hauling anything but chickens. I stopped talking to anyone at home. The only thing I couldn’t stop was the dreams. My bird—I think it was her, but in the dream it was me—living her endless lives. Hatching. Growing. Losing her beak. Laying her egg. Dying. Every life was a little bit different, but those parts were the same. It got so I started to know what was coming next, like one of the video games Tommy and me used to play over and over.
Some nights, not even sleeping pills helped.
I knew Dad and Tommy were doing well because Heartfields was doing well. There was a story on TV that talked about the chicken industry, how the Phoenix Crosses were basically a renewable resource—well, at least it meant you didn’t need broody hens and hatcheries. Just as soon as a flock went away to slaughter, growers could set the eggs in their barns and incubate the next batch—or hold off, if demand wasn’t high enough. The eggs would keep. Hatched, the birds didn’t get sick, and the meat tasted great.
Anybody trying to compete with ordinary birds—they were having a hell of a time. Heartfields had just bought up eight more slaughterhouses in eight more towns; they had the national market cornered. International, too, soon enough. And all the credit belonged to Dr. Thomas Jablonsky, Jr., the son of humble chicken farmers. My brother was a hero.
*
In my dreams, I was searching my mind for something, like trying to remember a song that I knew a long, long time ago. When I was awake, I wondered what it could be. Something in their phoenix genes? I stared at Tommy’s photo of the phoenix on my dashboard, until I was sure.
Tommy and Dad must think I did it, somehow, because it happened the day I came home. Really I was just coming home to warn them.
With the additions Tommy’d put on, the house was twice as big as the one I grew up in, and now Dad had a bedroom and his own bathroom on the ground floor so he didn’t have to climb stairs. Upstairs, they’d need the space, Tommy and his new wife. Dad’s first grandchild was on the way.
Over beers on the porch, I told Tommy you were learning. The company couldn’t keep raising and killing the same birds again and again without a problem. But he didn’t believe me, no matter how many times we went around.
“OK,” I said. “Just—just think about it.”
“Even if it were true, which it’s not,” he said, “they’re just birds, Joe. What are they going to do? They can’t even fly.”
“I think they have dreams, too,” I said. “That means they have minds.”
Tommy shook his head. “You’re anthropomorphizing.”
I shrugged and went back in to get another beer. He followed. When I opened the refrigerator, I saw a single egg, sitting inside a half-dozen carton, and I picked up the whole thing. “What’s this?”
Tommy shrugged. “It’s good to keep one behind, in case there’s a problem. Then I don’t have to start from scratch again in the lab.”
All at once I thought about my chick, slipping around the plastic hamper. I should have given her someplace better, someplace she could have explored, with a place to perch and somewhere to dig.
Tommy cleared his throat. “I was glad when you called, Joe.” He must’ve gotten used to making deals in our time apart because he didn’t sound like a scientist at all anymore. He sounded like a businessman.
“There’s so much to do now,” he said. “They made me a vice president, and I have to read reports, study other climates.” Finally he got to the point. “I thought maybe you’d like to come back, run the farm again.”
The egg in my hand suddenly got heavy as a softball, and I nearly dropped it. “I can’t work for the company anymore.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because soon there isn’t going to be a company.”
*
I meant to at least say good-bye to Dad, but sirens called me and Tommy back outside. From the porch, we could see flames up on the hill, where the Heartfields plant had stood all our lives. For a minute, both of us just stared. What Tommy saw, I can only guess—his future, maybe, going up in a ball of fire and a column of smoke.
I laughed. Finally, they’d remembered the song they wanted, the song to set themselves alight.
Tommy turned like he was going to punch me in the face. “What the hell!”
I ducked and ran. It wasn’t until I started the engine of my truck that I realized I still had the egg carton in my hand. Even if I’d had time to plan, though, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have left you behind.
I set the carton down on the seat beside me and took off down the driveway while Tommy hollered and banged on the side of the cab.
I lost him at the road and just drove. For miles and miles, ash coated my windshield as I passed grow-out sheds becoming rows of flame. Sirens on top of sirens blended together like some kind of wailing choir, but under it all, I imagined I could hear birds singing.
I looked to the egg at my right, turned up the heat, and drove on.
For you and me, next time is going to be better.
C.S. Malerich lives and works near the District of Columbia. Her speculative fiction has appeared previously in Ares Magazine, The Again, and in both volumes of Among Animals by Ashland Creek Press. She is a founding member of the collective DC Stampede, supporting grassroots organizing on behalf of animals, people, and the planet.