Chickens + sense of urgency

Here is as good a place as any :)

But you still need to bring an excerpt to the TGIO to be entered into the drawing.

Chickenify this thread!

Tim
Municipal Liaison for Illinois::Chicago
ml-tim at chiwrimo.org

Well then! Here's my exerpt.

Just to reiterate: this was the plot I had down on paper before I learned that the challenge involved either chickens or urgency. So these are organic chickens, as it were.

--

Elabon: a Visit During Fateful Minutes

Or the Travelling Journal of a Lady Smuggled out of Elabon at a Young Age Through her Parents’ Ingenious Devices who Returned to her Homeland for Three Days and What Came of It

Chapter 1: In which some Chickens are Unimpressed and many Vegetables are Dead

Maayan did not wake up at the crack of dawn.

This was not surprising or uncommon. Maayan had not woken up at the crack of anything resembling dawn since her old rooster gave up his scrawny rooster ghost that winter. Left these days entirely to its own devices, her organism remained in resolute inactivity until the Sun was over its vernally low midday hump in the sky.

When Maayan did wake up, she took in the low shadows and bright sunspots on the dirty runners on the floor under her stove, turned over on her left side to face the whitewashed wall, and nodded off once more.

The second time she woke up, she felt bored enough with sleeping to rise for the day. Swinging her legs off the “bride’s place” on the massive stove, Maayan jumped. Her still-not-entirely-awake body unhelpfully landed her awkwardly on her right ankle. Cussing and hobbling, Maayan made her way to the door and pushed it open.

It was one of those clear, high-ringing spring days that do not distinguish themselves at first sight from a dry clear winter’s day, except that with the right kind of ears, one can hear the fresh steppe grass eagerly clawing its way up through the earth through the dry and rotted remains of last year’s straw.

It was cold outside, but not much more than it was inside. At least outside it was not as stuffy. Maayan made a note to herself to pull down the winter shutters and scrounge in the attic for the summer midge nets today. Then she forgot all about it.

Realizing that she had automatically grabbed the blanket to drape around her shoulder when she rolled off the stove, she replaced the item where it belonged. Immediately, it got distinctly colder, and Maayan set scrounging about the furniture to collect a set of not quite dirty to the point of stinking clothes. The rickety wicker chair yielded a chemise; the visitor’s bench, her pants; and the trunk – miracle of miracles! – still had a pair of laundered underpants in it. Laundry Day, like the judgment of an angry god, has once again passed her by.

Shaking out the stray grass blades and tumbleweed seeds out of the stockings she has once again left in her shoes outside, Maayan made her way to the henhouse.

“Hello, ladies,” she said grimly, surprising herself with the hoarseness of her voice.

One of the white ‘ladies’ fluffed her feathers; another one coughed feebly. Maayan came in, picked up from the already-poopy straw the ‘chicken god’ – a sea-polished stone with a natural hole down the middle that has been failing to live up to its folk expectation of protecting poultry from diseases, predators and various evil eyes – hung it back on its nail, and checked the nests. There was nothing in them. At least nothing edible.

Maayan looked at the chickens with reproach.

“Kokko?” asked the brown scruffy hen, the bad girl of the roost and the ersatz-leader of the dwindled pack since the demise of the rooster. It sounded like a challenge.

“Yeah, well… Fuck you too,” said Maayan and walked out of the henhouse feeling like she has just lost a battle of wits. Nevertheless, she returned several minutes later to prop open the door, toss some cabbage scraps and a few handfuls of stale grain into the feeder and fill up the watering tube ‘organized’ by Mera during her last visit.

The brown hen observed her actions with a baleful, squinty eye.

“You’re first for the soup, vittu,” said Maayan unkindly and untruthfully to the brown hen as she left for the second time. The hen finished giving her the last of its available stink eye, then tucked her head back into its shoulders and went back to sleep.

What am I expecting from them, anyway? Thought Maayan. They are just like me. Scruffy, lazy, grumpy. So of course they do nothing, and they lay no eggs.

Her morning chores finished, Maayan sat on the bench by the door and began assessing the clouds on the horizon for rain threat. The skies were clear, with some threatening cumulus gathering off by the mountains and high cirrus in the East. And yet for some reason, it seemed to already be raining. The soundscape of rustling grasses and falling water suggested it.

Falling water?

Maayan turned her head to check if she perhaps overturned the chickens’ watering contraption by accident during her brief visit? But the contraption - Mera’s own not-yet patented and surprisingly serviceable design - was still upright and being used by the small white hen Maayan privately called “Auntie,” for her ungraspable resemblance to her late aunt. Something about her shining white thighs reminded one of virginally clean and crisp auntly petticoats. Not that Maayan ever saw aunt Filipa’s petticoats. But she conjectured that if she had, they would give a similar impression.

Meanwhile, the sound of falling water continued unabated.

The metal sink was half-full and not leaking. Maayan washed her hands and face, noting with vague displeasure that the water was already sun-warmed. All right, what else in this dump has spillable water in it? she wondered, making a circle around her hut.

The tool shed was locked, as usual.

The cattle shed was dry and empty.

The entirety of the vegetable garden was flooded. In fact, the entirety of the eastern hillside was flooded. Every carrot, cabbage and herb bed cut into the hillside was underwater.

Maayan’s first thought was that Saram had ridden to her place in the dead of night to be chivalrous and showcase his aptitude in agricultural matters by watering her garden on the sly. This was plausible. There had been precedents. However, this did not explain why the water *continued* to flow like a merry bubbling spring across the vegetable beds.
All the topsoil had been washed off the narrow terraces and down to the gully. Which, Maayan suddenly noticed, was also flooded. Bone-dry only yesterday, it now housed a creek about as deep as it was wide.

The sight of this unexpected reprisal of the Arrival of the Waters set off a full array of premonitions, suspicions and other alarms in Maayan’s stomach. There was no water in the Hermit Hills. It was why they were called “Hermit Hills” and not “Bounteous Orchard and Farm Hills.” It was why Maayan’s hut was the only inhabited dwelling in a long-dead village, if one discounted the field mice and the family of feral cats occupying a decrepit barn at the edge of what a very long time ago used to be pea fields. It was why everyone had left. And now...

Her stomach in a knot of suspicions and premonitions, Maayan walked to the northern slope of the hill and stared down for several long minutes at the raging river that flowed below. As though nothing had happened. As if the last fifty years had been simply undone.

Filled with disquiet and an uncomfortable sense of urgency, Maayan set off towards Mera’s farm at a brisker than usual pace.

Well, since this is my first year doing this, I wasn't exactly sure how I was supposed to incorporate this, but I slipped it in!

Chickens, urgent or not, do not fit neatly into my novel, but I must say I am pleased with what I've come up with:

The barracks, up close, were different than I had imagined. They each had four doors, two east and two west. You could imagine that they were apartments or connected houses. Here there were people. Lots of people. Busy people. Women and children dashed around, talking and playing. The roads between the barracks were dusty, with a few patches of mud, but no one seemed to mind. The dust and the activity reminded me of the chicken coop on the farm. The children were the chickens. Chickens with a sense of real urgency that only a group of four-year-olds can muster over a game of jacks.

Wish me luck!

This is the most fun I've had writing a scene EVER. And actually, I'm surprised at how much this makes perfect sense in my story.

Jamie took a step into the dense, dark forest. The trees twisted and swayed as she passed. Brown and red dry leaves crumbled and crunched beneath her feet. The sky was black above the cracked bows and the moon shone grey instead of silver, casting everything about them into deepest, dreary shadow.
Jamie noticed that there weren’t any animals making noise in the woods. No buzzing of insects or hooting of owls. But that didn’t mean the forest was devoid of life. There was breath all around her, and a heart beating so loudly she could feel it coursing through her like a bass drum.
“The forest is alive,” she whispered to Tom, half expecting him to argue with her or tell her that she was mistaken.
He didn’t. Thomas could feel it, too.
She felt him grab her hand and clasp it tight. Tom was just a half step behind her, clinging to her half out of worry and half out of need.
“Stop,” Calliope hissed, and the five of them froze where they stood. “Do you hear that?”
“I can hear the forest,” Jamie said. “It breathes, and thinks, and the trees speak to one another in words that I don’t understand. I don’t think they want us here.”
“No, not that,” said Calliope. “THAT. The flapping sound.”
They held their breath, but still all Jamie could hear was the whispering of the trees. It danced on her ears like an orchestra of tense, ghostly music, quivering with vibrato.
“No I… wait,” Mike said suddenly. “I do hear it. It’s like wings.”
“Hundreds of wings,” Calliope amended.
They looked around, but there was nothing but forest in every direction. They couldn’t see more than a few yards into the gnarled roots and impossibly warped trunks.
“I think we should keep moving,” said Thomas. “The forest doesn’t like it when we linger.”
Jamie looked hard at him. “You understand them, then? The words between the trees?”
He wouldn’t meet her eye, but nudged her gently forward. “Walk forward,” he insisted.
They crept onward, making more of an effort to be silent. Not that it mattered. Whatever was out there already knew where they were.
There was a fluttering of wings directly behind Marcy’s ankles. She shrieked and whirled around. Everyone gasped and turned. They searched the immediate area with just their eyes, not moving a single muscle, but there was nothing to be seen. Nothing was there.
“I don’t like this,” Calliope admitted. “Move faster.”
They picked up the pace to a brisk walk, foregoing any attempt at concealing themselves. Every so often, someone would hear something following them or catch a glimpse of movement in the corner of their eye. It became difficult to distinguish actual movement from tricks of the moonlight from tricks of an overactive mind, but soon they were all quite certain that something was flapping and fluttering just out of sight.
Jamie saw it first. The white cloud came hurtling out of the shadows just in front of her. Feathers rolled through the air like a dust storm, washing over them faster than they could get out of the way.
Flap! Flap! Flap! Flap! Flap!
“Chickens!” Jamie cried, covering her face.
The flightless fowl were everywhere and nowhere all at once, pecking an arm or a leg and melting back into the cloud of feathers, just one more wing in the great collective of killer poultry.
“Mike is down!” Yoosun screamed, pointing to a massive pile of flapping white feathers.
The pile thrashed as Mike tried to free himself, but for every chicken he threw off, seven took its place. He was fighting a losing battle.
Yoosun threw herself into the fray, kicking chickens with mighty vengeance and screaming in Korean. Marcy was at her side in seconds and the two of them dug into the pile of angry birds, scattering them as best they could to give Mike a chance to surface. By the time he found his feet, his face was a bloody mess of chicken pecks and his shirt was torn to shreds. There were scratches bleeding through what was left of the fabric.
“Where’s Jamie and Tom?” Mike managed to ask through swollen lips.
“Here!” Thomas shouted. “The chickens got Calliope!”
Mike, Marcy, and Yoosun fought their way through the throngs of pecking beaks and tearing talons to Thomas and Jamie. Tom had a bruised eye, but Jamie looked more or less alright. Her pants were shredded from the knees down and her hands were bloodied, but she seemed to have protected her face at least.
“They clamped their foul little beaks onto his dress and flapped that way,” Thomas said, pointing into the forest. “He shrieked like a little girl as they carried him off.”
Another wave of chickens was upon them and the five of them were once again swatting away fluttering birds for their lives. One of them clawed its way up to Yoosun’s camera and broke the strap. She caught the chicken by the neck, threw it down, and stomped on its head. It died with a cluck.
“Kill them!” she shouted, retrieving her camera from a pile of bloody feathers and quickly securing it in her backpack. “Kill them before they destroy us!”
“I don’t know how to kill a chicken!” Marcy said franticly.
Somehow, the chickens had gotten into the trees. They leaped off the branches, one after another, dive-bombing their prey with a vicious chorus of clucking.
“Figure it out!” Yoosun said in answer, breaking another chicken’s neck.
Jamie had a chicken caught in her hair, ripping out clumps of strands as it struggled against her and clawing up her scalp. Thomas punched the chicken in the face, inadvertently knocking Jamie to the ground in the process. The chicken stopped moving and he freed it from Jamie’s hair as he helped her to her feet.
Somewhere out in the distance, they heard a shrill, ear piercing scream that could only have been made by a terrified child--or a terribly efeminate cross dresser.
“Calliope!” they all cried at once.
They tried to run in the direction of the scream, but chickens impeded them every step of the way.
“Where are they all coming from?” Jamie shouted, but no one could answer her. They seemed to be materializing out of the very air. No one could see beyond the screen of feathers that encased them as thoroughly as the Mist.
“No matter how many of them we beat down, they just keep coming!” said Thomas, kicking one chicken out of his way as he tore another one off of Mike’s back.
“We’ve got to find shelter!” said Mike.
“There’s nothing out here! We’re in the middle of a forest!”
“Then these chickens are going to tear us to shreds!”
“Just keep killing them!”
“We can’t kill them fast enough!”
Thomas broke off a tree branch and swung it at the horde of chickens like a baseball bat. “Use what you can find to keep them at bay!” he instructed. “We’ve got to buy ourselves some time to think!”
Calliope’s desperate shrieks were getting further and further away. It was becoming an effort to distinguish them from the clucking of chickens.
“We’re going to lose him if we don’t hurry,” said Mike as he snatched a fluttering chicken from the air and threw it into an oncoming mass of feathery doom. “I’m going for it!”
He threw his bruised and torn arms up in front of his face and charged through a flock of chickens falling from the tops of trees like angry, bloodthirsty bricks.
Marcy watched him go in horror.
“We can’t let him go alone!” Jamie cried hysterically. “Stay together! Move!”
The other four did like Mike, shielding their faces as best they could and charging headlong into the frenzied birds. Loose feathers whipped at their exposed skin and caught in their hair. Chickens slammed into them like so many dodge balls. Still, they couldn’t see the end of this insanity. It looked like they were trapped in an endless sea of feathers and clucking birds.
“What did we do… to provoke… them?” Marcy gasped as she ran.
No one answered her.
Then, everything went to Hell in a hand basket. With one last, frantic yelp, Calliope’s screams faded into the night. Jamie, still in the lead, caught her ankle on a tree root and flew forward. She smashed hard into the ground, taking Thomas with her. They rolled a few feet in the leaves before the chickens set on them, tearing at their clothes and flesh with beak and claw. The others stopped short, and in their moment of hesitation, were overcome all at once.
Marcy was blinded by feathers, birds, and pain. She curled up into a ball, desperate to protect herself, screaming like a banshee as she felt pieces of her skin pecked and ripped off while she reeled helplessly beneath her attackers. She cried for help, knowing even as she did that none of her friends were in any sort of position to rescue her.
This isn’t how I imagined I would die, Marcy thought.
The clucking intensified to a fevered pitch, frantic and wild, Marcy’s own terror reflected in the cries of the birds. She squeezed her eyes tight, waiting for one last assault to claim her consciousness and probably her life.
It never came.
Silence claimed the forest. Even the wind stood still. Marcy could hear the blood pulsing through her head and her own ragged breathing. When she finally dared to lift her head from beneath her arms and open her eyes, nothing could have prepared her for the sight that waited.
It stood not twenty feet in front of her, back arched, tail straight up, ears flat against its head. Marcy was too stunned to trust her own vision. She had been rescued by the white cat from Chicago.

2009: Paper in the Water

This was a fun one, and it actually did fit into my story somewhat well considering some of the other animals in the story go a little mad later on in this chapter (my story is a horror/thriller one, so all sorts of odd things are happening)...