by Julia Kent
“Guh,” I replied.
“And you’re Darla. Darla Jennings, from the band Random Acts of Crazy, aren’t you?”
Guh.
You spend enough time working as band manager in the music business, talking to other managers and staff, chatting with the performers, and you hear stalking stories. Plenty of them. So confirming my identity wasn’t high on my list of ways to fuck up.
Then again, I’d already fucked up. Maybe I should just get all my fuckups out of the way in one big burst on a single day. You know, like those diet days when you start out with a chocolate PopTart and figure you already blew it, so go ahead and buy an entire cheesecake and make it lunch, dinner, and your midnight “I hate myself” snack?
“I am,” I answered, because why not let go of every single boundary I had?
They bawked.
Bodies covered in chicken costumes complete with more feathers than three hundred burlesque dancers packed into a Greyhound bus, they’d left their heads bare, adding feathers and beaks, making me read their emotions in their eyes.
They were ecstatic.
It was exciting to them to find me here.
Mavis shoved her phone in front of me, the video already playing. I knew it at a glance, poor Joe’s bare ass hanging out that window in our old apartment, Trevor’s brother’s gerbil clinging for dear life to Joe’s ass, claws embedded so close to his puckered sphincter he might as well have been a conjoined twin.
“Do you have any idea how popular you are on CluckBuddies?”
“Cluck what?”
“CluckBuddies. Our slogan is: Where people go to find a good lay.”
I looked around the room. This was a joke, right? Maybe I was just dreaming. We got off the plane, I won twenty dollars at slots at the airport, we checked into the hotel, and maybe I was actually asleep right now. Maybe I hadn’t really lost twenty grand at roulette, and maybe –
“Darla,” Mavis gushed. “May I call you Darla?”
Shit.
“It’s my name,” I started, ready to bolt.
“Darla, you’re a cult goddess in our world. You, Trevor, and Joe. When we heard Random Acts of Crazy was performing here at the same time as the AnFet convention –”
“The what?” These people had more jargon than that PhD student at the Harvard Extension School who was the teaching assistant for my intersectional feminism course last fall.
“AnFet. Animal fetish.”
“Got it.”
“It felt like fate. We’re chickens, you see.”
“I kinda got the hint.”
“And we really get off on Mavis.”
“You... Okay. Mavis.”
“Do you have any idea how hot that video of you all having sex with Mavis is?”
“Sex with Mavis?” I echoed. I was pretty sure I’d rather lose a hundred grand of Joanne Ross’ money than have this particular conversation.
“To see fellow chickies so bold, so fresh, online and unashamed of the true nature of their love, is like – it’s a –” She dissolved into hyperventilating tears.
I was about ten seconds away from joining her, but not for the same reason.
“You changed our worlds,” Rooster chimed in, his big bushy eyebrows tightening over eyes that were shining with tears of happiness.
“I changed your world all because my Sybian malfunctioned and threw Joe out the window?”
They peered at me, confused, and let me tell you, them beady-eyed little chicken pretenders look almost alien when they squint, and more judgmental than they had any right to be.
“No. Because you paved the way for animal love to be more acceptable.”
“I what?”
“You, Trevor, and Joe,” the other one explained. “That video is the AnFet version of a women’s suffrage or civil rights march.”
“Don’t try comparing an electrical malfunction of an oversized sex toy because I couldn’t hold on with my overlubed hands to that,” I argued back, furious at the ridiculous statement. “You get off on chickens. Own it. You’re kinky little fuckers.”
“Pluckers,” one of them corrected me.
“Excuse me?”
“We’re kinky little pluckers.”
“You get off on plucking each other?”
“Grooming.” Rooster jutted his neck out. “You can call us pluckers or cluckers, but not fuckers.”
“You have standards,” I replied.
“Just because we’re sexually wired differently from other people doesn’t mean we don’t have rights,” Mavis declared.
My irritation level was sky high, throat tight and the skin at my chest stretched like a piece of cold taffy. “I can’t do this, folks. I need to –”
“Where is your booth?” Rooster asked, clearly trying to get me to stay.
“Booth?”
“You’re signing autographs and doing fan photos, yes?” Mavis inquired, like I was Stephen King at ComiCon.
“Huh?”
“Oh, please! Can we do a selfie? How much do you charge?” She and Rooster nodded eagerly, beaks bouncing.
“Charge?”
“Most of the celebrities here charge a fifty-dollar minimum for a selfie and an autograph,” Rooster explained.
My ringing ears came to a halt.
“People charge fifty dollars for that?”
“But for you, our cluckbuddies would pay far more,” Mavis said in a reassuring voice, as if pre-emptively trying to prevent me from being offended.
Pay.
“Did you say ‘pay’?” I asked, intrigued.
“Are you available?” she asked.
“For what?” I clarified.
“Chicken play.”
“Chicken play?”
“It’s like puppy play, only more fowl.” They snickered, clearly wearing an old joke nice and thin.
“What’s puppy play?” I asked, confounded.
“Haha,” Rooster. “Anyone as avant garde as you in the bedroom probably views us as amateurs. I can only imagine the kind of AnFet role-play you and Trevor and Joe engage in.”
A few hairs on the back of my neck started to rise. These people knew a lot about me and Trevor and Joe. Maybe I should disengage.
“Would a thousand an hour for both of us be enough?” the woman asked, all fast and quick with a cough at the end, as if that mitigated the weirdness of it all.
“A thousand what an hour?”
“Dollars.”
As surreal as every other part of the last hour had been, this stood out. Was I really negotiating my chicken fetish consultant rate? I was a celebrity in this narrow kink niche? How did I not know this, and if it wasn’t some hallucinogen-based delusion, how had I reached the point in life where one accident during sex had made me a focal point for these people?
“You want to pay me a thousand dollars an hour to do what, exactly?”
“To, well...”
“Cough it up,” I demanded. “I have one nerve left, and you’re tap dancing on it. Give me the truth. Lay out what you want.”
“Be bold,” Mavis whispered to Rooster.
“Would you walk us? On a leash while we wear a chicken harness and a diaper?”
See? Surreal.
“You want me to put a chicken diaper on you?”
“No! No! We’re not perverts!”
Right.
“We can put the diapers on by ourselves.”
Huge distinction, right?
“Just the leash. And feed us.”
“Feed you?”
A sack of chicken feed made its way into my hand as if by magic.
And then so did the money.
“Please,” she whispered.
“I don’t have a leash, Mavis,” I protested.
Within seconds, three passersby offered me theirs, while she fumbled in her bag for one.
I had myself in a bona fide moral dilemma, didn’t I?
Walk the chicken perverts and make a thousand dollars or –
Wai
t.
What dilemma?
“How’s this go on you?” I asked Mavis, shoving the money in my front pocket then running the leash through my cupped palm to get to the metal hook. She was already wearing a collar.
Every single person at the convention was, except for the people manning the booths.
“Like a dog,” she said, her voice cracking at the end with something a little too close to orgasmic pleasure. I brushed my fingertips against her neck feathers and she shivered, the leash clicking easily.
“And me?” asked Rooster.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
If chickens have eyebrows, his went up. “Rooster. I told you before. Remember?”
“Right. Of course.” He handed me a leash and I repeated the act, finding myself about six feet behind two fully upright adults dressed as chickens, wearing diapers.
And off we went.
“Where do you want me to walk you?” I asked.
Mavis paused, then turned to look at me with confused eyes. “BAWK!” she answered, widening those beady little orbs in a way that made it clear she was communicating something.
“Bawk?”
“BAWK!”
Ah. Somehow, our Chickenish made sense. We were on the clock. Mavis wasn’t a person with language skills.
She was a clucker.
I was in charge.
You ever done something so embarrassing that the only way to get through it is to pretend other people can’t see you? I’m not talking about when you’re five and pee yourself in public and no matter how many times your mama tries to get you to change, you refuse because if you just pretend it didn’t happen, it didn’t.
I’m talking about adult embarrassment. Not shame – that’s different. Shame comes from someone else deliberately trying to disconnect you – like that elitist bitch at the slots and roulette table.
Embarrassment is when you disconnect yourself from society all by yourself. It hurts less than shame, but it’s one hundred percent on you.
Right about now, I had that shield up nice and firm as we began to promenade around the room. If I just pretended there was a forcefield around us that made us invisible, then I could last fifty-nine and a half more minutes, right?
A bright red banner with lipstick and handcuffs caught my eye. It shouldn’t have, because that particular combination seemed popular, but Charlotte was standing up at the table, holding a butt plug with a clit attachment, demonstrating the object to a potential customer.
I steered my, uh, herd to the left.
“BAWK!” Rooster said. Approving looks, most filled with a wistful envy, greeted us. I felt a bit like royalty walking along, an increasing number of chicken people looking our way.
I wished life had a pause button.
I needed to breathe.
But that was a luxury for other people. People who don’t get stupid and spend their friends’ money. People who don’t take a chance for the one time in their life, who decide to go for it and take a risk and lose. I’m a loser. Might as well tattoo a big old L on my forehead while I’m here in Vegas, the city where regret goes to party, the city littered with losers who once had a few minutes of glory.
All of it fake.
As I led Rooster and Mavis out to the back hallway, through a throng of people dressed as animals, I searched for sunlight. A wide bank of patio doors, some open, beckoned to the right. We walked outside into the crazy dry heat, sunlight burning my skin like I was raw, as if I had no actual protective layer, like the sun was cooking me, sealing in my failure under a burn.
What had I done?
My legs were numb but they moved of their own accord, pulled forward by the chickens, who moved quietly, clucking here and there. I spotted a walkway that surely led to the front of the enormous resort.
Please don’t make me walk through the casino, I thought, my insides tearing apart as though being dissected, each organ weighed and evaluated.
My heart felt like hamburger, all senses nothing but atoms rubbing together, forming a hum. I was a vibrating meat bucket. Nothing more.
Just then, a group of human puppies led by a man in a black leather biker jacket exited from a doorway that looked safer, less crowded, than the rest. Following them, I prayed to the only God left in my world, the one who performed lesser miracles like leaving enough toilet paper on the roll or giving you all green lights when you’re massively late for an appointment.
That’s right.
I wasted my prayer on an exit where I’d be the least embarrassed.
When you lose a high-stakes bet, everything else is low stakes in comparison, but there’s still something at stake.
The Strip stretched out before us, the Eiffel Tower to our left, the roller coaster way down the street, so far in the distance it almost looked like part of an alien planet in another solar system.
“Bawk!” Rooster uttered, then let out a cock-a-doodle-doo to the delight of the puppies ahead of us. To my right, a beggar held a sign about being a homeless vet. One of Mavis’ white feathers broke off and floated down, landing perfectly in his cup.
“Fucking cheap beer,” he muttered before turning to the side and barfing.
Mavis heard it and jolted, Rooster imitating her until they looked like foolish chickens jabbering in the sun, useless and annoying. I pulled the leash hard and took us down toward the coaster, remembering our entrance into Vegas last night, when I was light and carefree and joked about drunkcoastering.
Before.
Before I ruined everything.
“You ever actually fuck a chicken?” I asked Rooster as we stopped at a crosswalk to wait out the light. People cluttered the corner as time went on, all of them eyes ahead, avoiding contact. A few looked at the chickens, but with blank expressions.
Chickens on leashes? That was the Vegas definition of ‘vanilla.’
“Of course.” He pointed to Mavis.
“No, no, no. You know. A chicken.”
“BAWK!” Mavis was offended.
“A genetic chicken?” Rooster asked, clearly horrified.
“What is a genetic chicken?”
“One born a chicken.”
“What other kind is there?” I asked, stumped.
Mavis piped up. “There’s so much debate in the AnFet community over this.”
“Hold up.” I put a hand on Rooster’s chest, the feathers surprisingly soft. Silky and smooth, they made me want to cuddle him. I shook the sensation away, aghast at myself, and blurted out, “You didn’t answer the question. Have you actually fucked a real chicken?”
“Please don’t use the word ‘real.’ It’s so discriminatory!”
“You’re tone policing me about chicken fucking?”
“It’s offensive! If we don’t call people out on micro aggressions, we’ll never feel free.”
“Let me get this straight. Calling a real chicken a ‘real’ chicken is a micro aggression against people who are sexually aroused by pretending to be a chicken.”
“Of course!”
I scratched my head and ran my hands through my hair, digging my fingers into my scalp to buy time and also get the blood flowing back to my brain. Conversations like this were turning my bloodstream into mud.
“Rooster.” I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Have you ever actually fucked a chicken? A ‘genetic’ chicken?”
“God, no. What kind of person do you think I am!”
“Well…”
“I would never, ever commit avisodomy.”
“Avi — who?”
“Avisodomy. The term for a human attempting to have sex with a genetic chicken,” Mavis explained.
“That’s an actual term?” What do you know? I was wrong earlier. My 11th grade English teacher was right. There really is a word for everything.
“Everyone knows that sodomizing a chicken is the epitome of evil!”
“I didn’t say nothin’ about sodomizing one. Just— ”
Mavis cut me off, her eyes fille
d with anger, beak bouncing as fury took over. Or, at least, I thought it did. Hard to tell in that big costume. “It’s a crime to have sexual relations with a chicken, and that includes anal sex.”
“Did — did someone actually need to spell out the difference at some point in time? Was there ever a question that anal sex with a chicken is unacceptable?” I asked, agog.
“Yes.” She looked ready to cry.
“This is exactly why they have to print ‘do not eat’ on those damn silica packets in food, isn’t it?”
“It’s even military law,” Rooster elaborated.
“MILITARY? Some soldier took it upon themselves to have anal sex with a chicken?”
“United States v. Sanchez,” Rooster explained, jaw tight, nostrils flared. Up until this point, I figured Rooster was misnamed, because he totally acted like the bottom in this relationship, but suddenly he was all protective, ready to fight to preserve the assholes of chickens everywhere. “Sodomy with a chicken is clearly cause for courtmartial.”
“You’re fucking with me. That’s not real.”
“It absolutely is. I can pull out my phone and show you,” Rooster said defensively. “Except I don’t want to break out of my chicken self right now.”
“Was this a recent case?”
“No. 1960s, I think,” Mavis replied.
I would have to ask Joe and Trevor about this point of law. Two law school dropouts would surely be interested in learning that we narrowly escaped being tried for having sex with a chicken after our Sybian accident was caught on tape.
Rooster’s beady eyes narrowed. “You do know that having actual sex with a genetic chicken is a gross violation of human rights.”
“But. Chickens. Aren’t. Human,” I explained slowly.
“They’re closer than you think!” Mavis protested. “They’re sentient beings with emotions and thoughts and — ”
I tuned her out, a question forming in my mind that I couldn’t repress. “How does someone have anal sex with a chicken? Like, operationally?” I grimaced and shivered.
Rooster gave me a bald look and said dryly, “Very, very carefully.”
I left myself wide open on that one, huh?
Mavis hit Rooster in the chest. “This is not funny! Darla, do you really not understand that you don’t have actual sex with genetic chickens?”
