Playing Chicken

I first saw the black hen on my dreaded morning drive to the office three Mondays ago. Another long drive to another day of long hours and misery at the law firm I still wasn’t a partner at after ten years. As I crossed the bridge, from nowhere, an acute, dense fog swallowed my vehicle. The lower register of my high beams caught a sudden flash as something crossed them. I quickly switched to my lows in the fog and nearly spilled a latte down the front of my Austin Reed suit when the black hen darted into the road directly in front of my SUV. Her sharp claws clacked on the stone of the old bridge. When I was sixteen my father told me never to swerve for a small animal. “Just flatten the bastards”, he had said in his war voice, which differed little from his father voice. In that moment on the road, lesson tossed aside, I reacted on instincts and swerved, saving the hen’s life. I should have run her down.

On the Thursday morning of that same week, traffic slowed to 20 mph as I approached the bridge again on my way to the office. A dozen emergency lights flashed ahead, blinding me with blues and reds. There she was again, my little black hen, on the right-hand shoulder strutting along shards of broken glass, her neck bobbing as chickens’ necks do next to an overturned sedan. I stole a glance from the poor woman being loaded into the back of an ambulance on a stretcher. She tilted her neck up just enough to get one more look at the strutting hen and the mangled sedan, then lay back down exhausted. The black hen stopped her strut and stared right at me. Her cold, black eyes pierced mine as I watched her antics through the safety of my vehicle.

She took Friday off. By the time Monday of the following week came I had almost forgotten about the black hen. I had had only the most fleeting thought of her and her destruction as I got into my SUV. As I crossed the bridge on my morning commute the Honda in front of me slammed on its brakes. I was savvy enough to avoid this accident, and even saved my coffee as I swerved out of the way, a maneuver my father would approve of. I looked back in my rearview as I passed by the Honda, but I saw no black hen as I had expected, just an idiot driver looking confused as if I’d done something wrong. I almost felt the day might pass without her.

By the time I was in sight of the office my hopes of peace from the black hen were dashed. In my normally empty parking spot in front of my office was a fire truck with a company of men spraying a large hose directly into my office window. Huge orange flames roared out of my office keeping the firefighters at bay. I sped up and peeled into the parking lot to get a closer view. I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew that black hen was behind this disaster. The one I had almost forgotten about. That fucking chicken had destroyed my office and set fire to it. As I pulled up next to the fire truck I saw the faint outline of a car inside my office through the flames. I snuck my way up around the firefighters closer to the destruction that was my office, desperate to know what had happened. Within twenty feet of the building a window suddenly blew out in the office next to mine and sent me flying backward. I landed hard on my side, my elbow smashing into my ribcage. This got the attention of the firefighters who rushed over and carried me back into the parking lot. They asked if I was okay over and over again, and ignored my questions about my office and the “accident”. Feeling helpless, I sat on the back of my car and lit a cigarette while watching my office burn to the ground, the fire hose doing little to suppress the gigantic flames. That’s when I saw her. From underneath the fire truck the black hen came strutting out, pecking at the ground. She barely cared to look at me this time, just gave me a quick glance and what looked like a little grin, and kept on going. For some reason I couldn’t get up, didn’t care to get up. I just sat there. Maybe she just wanted my attention, wanted me to stay still and listen. I turned back and watched my office burn to the ground until naught but some twisted steel and ashes were left, along with some random papers blowing around in the parking lot. I never tried to rebuild afterwards, and I never saw that black hen ever again.