When the chickens came to live at our house, I think I knew my roommate Addie was pregnant, but I wasn’t saying anything, and neither was she. She’d been spending too much time in the bathroom or her own room with the door closed and no one else around her. I didn’t knock to tell her there were chickens in the kitchen. She didn’t come out to look.
The chickens had appeared hours earlier under the oak trees at the housing co-op down the street, shitting and pecking near the basil and marijuana as if they’d sprung out of the soil. The guys who lived there said they found them two seconds from death; that their cats were crouched down low, rear ends hunched and ready to attack. The men from the co-op didn’t even question whether or not we’d take the chickens in. It was nighttime, and where else did they have to go?
