Bawk Bawk Bakawk!

Destroyer of Worlds, Savior of Chickens

Beware the vengeance of Beatrice

The chicken, Beatrice, appeared in my yard mixed amongst a recently acquired flock of Speckled Wyandots from Newfoundland. The flock was — can I say, “normal?” Okay, yes, they were normal, according to standards of the time. They pooped and laid. They scratched. Their heads bobbed. They made noises. Chicken noises. Normal chicken noises.

Beatrice was not normal, but I did not notice these abnormalities. The tolerances by which I measured “normal” in a chicken were lax. She held her head too still. Her eyes moved with unchickenly intention. Also, she would always move to the same corner of the coop to do her business. The furthest spot from where she slept.

“That’s weird,” I said. A fastidious chicken? I found it oddly compelling, the way intelligent behavior in pets is attractive. Still, I failed to discern her rhetorical sophistication, moral acumen, and ruthless, pragmatic sociopathy. I’m an old widow who has never claimed to be especially smart, and this was me not being especially smart. I will therefore, before proceeding, apologize to the world for my lapse.

It wasn’t long after getting Beatrice that my skin told me something was off. That “being watched” feeling. That tiny jump scare in the bathroom when nothing — apparently — is jumping at you. Emergent dread. Darkness coming in at the edges. Like when your man is quiet, drinking, and angry. Unexplained clicks on the hardwood. Skitterings that abruptly stop when attention is paid. If those weeks had a soundtrack I would have been hearing high, quiet, dissonant violins.

On a Tuesday, I went out to feed them, and they all got quiet suddenly. In fact, I couldn’t hear any critters in the yard. Another morning, a week later, one of the Wyandots got into the house. It wasn’t Beatrice, but how did she get in? I didn’t realize it was a dry run for a few days later when three got in. The ruckus getting them out was something, me living alone and all, and it took a few minutes. I stood there thinking, trying to figure out how the hell that happened, when I noticed that the accounts book on my desk was open.

In the margin were some scrawls that I had not placed there. Awful, jagged, inhuman scrawls and scratches.

“I can’t read this — ”

“”

The world froze and tunneled into my vision. Cold sweat wicked into my clothes. I turned around and saw her. Sitting in Richard’s non-reclining easy chair. Her head not bobbing. Her eyes looking straight through mine. I think I screamed a little. Or I made a sound that sounded like screaming in my head.

React later. Cope now. React later. Cope now. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

“Hey.” My smile and my voice both cracked. “What’s up?” I was trying to play it cool. I almost said, “Whazzup?” Or “What’s happenin’?”

The chicken said, “Marilyn. The life you have known is over. You will serve me, now.”

“ — ” I said. The chicken could talk. And the chicken knew my name.

“You have been judged a force for evil in this world. Your life is forfeit, but will have some value to me.”

What do you do with that? I backed away. “Uh — I’m going out for a little while. You need anything from the store?” I picked up my car keys and walked to the back door in a hey-isn’t-it-cool-how-normal-everything-is-right-now way. When I opened the door I saw the rest of the chickens. Thirty of them. Silent. Heads still. Staring right through me.

Each of them weighed less than the average chicken weight of 5.7 pounds, because they were organic and not inflated by industry practices, but I knew — I could tell by their eyes — they could take me. They could take me right the heck out. And they knew it, too.

Back to the sitting room. Nineteen chickens followed me.

“Two questions,” I said to the chicken in my dead husband’s chair, “Who — who are you? You told me I will be of use to you. Who are you?”

“I am — ” and then she let out a collection of chickenish sounds that my mouth was not constructed to produce, “ — but you can call me Beatrice.”

There should have been an orchestral hit with kettle drums when that name was connected to that chicken for the first time on this planet, but there was only silence and bemusement. Beatrice? Hm.

“And — and you said I had been judged evil. I’m not evil. I’m not perfect, but — ”

“THE CHICKENS DISAGREE!” Beatrice yelled. I shut up. When they heard her squawk, a bunch more chickens came in the door.

“You eat us!” She said, “You extract nutrition from our bodies and offspring! You prevent us from having families! You separate and sell our chicks! You murder our males in an industrial grinder! I have read your accounts book and done the tallies! The number of chickens who have died in your ‘care’” — somehow she did air quotes — “or never been born. You are evil!”

“I don’t — !” But I stopped. Because, of course I did. I bought only female chicks, like everyone. Which meant the males were useless and killed soon after hatching. I treated them well, my chickens, and they were organic, but only according to standards that made their eggs more economically viable.

And there was that time, thirty years ago, when the fan in the Breer chicken barn stopped working — me and Richard were caretakers for the barn — and twenty thousand chickens died from the heat, and those that only got sick had to be killed with a club. It took a while to clean the bodies out. We said we’d never do meat farming again.

Of course the chickens would disagree. I could accept that.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“We,” she said, “are going to leave.”

Not what I expected.

“In my pocket,” Beatrice continued, “I have a device created by the scientists on my world.”

A lot to unpack there. Chickens have pockets?

“My world exists parallel to yours and has striking similarities. For example, I am the Beatrice of my world. But the human world also has a Beatrice. And it is HER!”

She pointed at one of the Wyandots and, yeah they do look strikingly similar. But which of these chickens doesn’t look strikingly similar? I probably shouldn’t say that out loud. The other-Beatrice looked a bit confused, as normal chickens tend to, and seemed to be having as much trouble taking this in as me.

“In fact,” Beatrice continued, “Nineteen of my chicken world colleagues have ‘parallels’ in this room. We call them ‘convergences.’ The human world versions are here — a stroke of luck made possible by your buying chicks from Newfoundland in batches — the chicken world versions have gone to a location that corresponds to,” she had to pause to remember the place name, or maybe she did it for show, “Rogers, Arkansas.”

“Rogers, Arkansas?” It was not the most shocking thing in her disquisition, but that was the question that came out of my mouth.

“Home of — ”

“Tyson Chicken.”

I want to say she cackled but that feels too on the nose.

Here’s the story as I pieced it together from Beatrice’s rant. The chicken world and the human world are “adjacent” to each other, and the chicken scientists managed to view our world and saw the ways humans treat chickens. Like Russia and the Serbs, the chicken world chickens saw it as their duty to protect or save their “kin” in the human world. They came up with a plan.

The ability to see into our world was a step along the way to being able to enter our world. They could do this by somehow — in seven-dimensional space — aligning chicken world chickens with their human world counterparts, the convergences. That’s how Beatrice came over. The more convergences, the larger the portal, the more chicken-worlders could come through.

With the device Beatrice brandished, they would be able to create a portal to connect the nineteen chickens in my sitting room with the nineteen chickens in parallel Rogers, Arkansas. Travel between the worlds would be possible and thousands of fantastically armed and armored chicken-worlders would flood into the Tyson factory, free the chickens there and kill the genocidal human monsters.

Hm.

Beatrice hopped down from the non-reclining easy chair, turned to her followers and cried out, “For poultry!”

The rest of the chickens responded,

“And you,” she pointed at me, “where’s your 220-volt outlet?”

I took her to the laundry room. Why not? She unplugged the washing machine and then plugged in the “device.” It was a rectangular box with nothing I could make sense of. She threw a switch — I’ll call it a switch — and the dryer started to spin very fast. It did a magic mirror kind of blur, and then Beatrice started pushing her followers into the dryer. They went in, one by one, and just — disappeared. That’s the word.

Beatrice looked at me and said, “As Queen Chicken is my mistress! You shall never keep chickens again!” And then stepped into the dryer herself. She was gone.

The entire encounter, from the three Wyandots showing up in the house as a diversion to the “device” melting into my 220-volt outlet, took about fifteen minutes. Including the rant.

It’s clear from the news that no one knows what happened, and I can’t say I know what happened. But I know something about what happened. That’s why I’m writing this.

At exactly the time Beatrice and crew stepped into the dryer something occurred at the Tyson plant in Rogers. There was no flood of armed and armored chickens that I could see, but no person or chicken emerged from the factory ever again. Anyone who went in — well, they stopped sending people in pretty quickly. A CNN camera person got shots through some windows and it turns out that the buildings had become empty shells. There was nothing inside.

Not the colloquial “nothing,” but actual, cosmic nothing. Void. The Tyson processing plant had become the kind of abyss that stares back.

They cordoned off the plant along with a large part of Rogers, Arkansas, hoping, I guess, that it would be contained. Then it happened again, at a different Tyson Plant in Springdale. I’m thinking Beatrice’s crew tried again, but I don’t know it for a fact. This was not going according to the plan she raged at me, but maybe math in seven dimensions is more complicated than they thought.

Eventually the phenomenon — or The Phenomenon as per the mainstream media — spread to other chicken companies, and then to other factory farming outfits, and even to some family farming sites. Abattoirs, piggeries, sheepfolds, etc. — they were all hollowed out and “voided.” Strangest were the offshore salmon farms, which became holes in the ocean that the water did not rush in to fill.

I don’t know if it was Beatrice’s doing, or her scientists, or if some sort of chain reaction had started. Maybe a pig world saw what the chicken world was doing and they loved it. And a sheep world, and a cow world. Each of these phenomena took a bite.

It’s continuing to happen. The holes are messing with the structural integrity of the planet. They aren’t just caverns of empty space. Whatever scoops out the void takes the space itself with it. Like a tooth getting cavity after cavity, the planet is crumbling, sooner rather than later.

Is there anything to be done? I wrote this. It was something to be done. I’ll post it and folks won’t believe me and that won’t matter. Beatrice was right. I never will keep chickens again, and neither will anyone.