The Last Laid Eggs of a Dead Chicken by Jordan Brown

I got home, haunted by my father’s story. “They’re like sharks, ya know.” He told me with eyes wide, his hands half raised. “One peck to draw blood and it’s over.” I thought of the pack of hens pecking at the throat of their fallen comrade. And her lying in the dirt and down and dust and chicken shit. Flapping meekly, wondering why? What had she done to deserve this fate? Some unknown, unseen and unforgiven breach of chicken etiquette? Some heresy to the code of hen manners in the roost? Or worse, some fated slight by the chicken gods that had marked the poor hen at birth. A black spot on her egg. She had pecked her way through it. Never knowing that she’d been chosen for the ritualistic self-destruction of kind carried out now by her sisters in feather. I stared at the dozen eggs my father had given me. ‘I wonder if any of these were hers.’