by Julia Kent
“Of course I understand that!”
“And when you, Joe and Trevor had Mavis with you, you weren’t, uh…actually having, uh…” she continued.
“What? No! That was all Trevor’s fault.”
“Trevor has sex with chickens?” The two gave each other a look that said maybe, just maybe, they’d misinterpreted me, Joe and Trevor.
“NO! NO ONE HAS ACTUAL SEX WITH GENETIC CHICKENS,” I screamed.
Why I cared about whether they thought we were into bestiality, I’ll never know, but I needed to cling to one tiny shred of respectability, and this was, apparently, my line in the sand. I could walk human chicken fetishists on leashes for money, but by god, don’t accuse me and my boyfriends of fucking real chickens.
Excuse me. “Genetic” chickens.
To my surprise, not a single person around us flinched. Then again, one was dressed as a ferret and the other was a puking homeless dude, so my behavior wasn’t up for much scrutiny.
“Bawk!” Mavis declared, changing the subject, bending down suddenly, jerking my arm a bit. Rooster kept his face forward but rolled his eyes toward me in some silent signal, poking his beak up over and over.
“What?” I asked, distracted, feeling like I was walking through pudding made with all the stupid choices I’d ever made in my life, sweetened with a heaping dose of cold remorse.
“Mavis is hungry,” he said, breaking character.
I found the small bag of feed I’d shoved in my pocket and opened the drawstring, pulling a few pieces of corn out. I held out my hand, like feeding a pony at a petting zoo.
“That’s not how you feed chickens!” Rooster insisted, his eyes filled with an angry shock. “Don’t you know better?”
I tossed the feed on the ground and watched, bile rising, as Mavis licked it off the ground, moaning and shuddering as she did it. Her cheeks flushed with the kind of arousal you never see in porn movies, the authenticity making me stare longer than was proper.
I was making horrible fun of these folks, but they were just being real. Mavis was happy. Aroused and fulfilled, doing what made her centered in the world, finding her place.
Who was I to judge?
“Oh, mercy, Ed. Look at that chicken!”
I whipped around, because that woman’s accent was beyond familiar. It was flat, with a slightly stretched out e. People from my part of Ohio sounded like that.
“Adorable costumes!” Ed boomed. His laughter would be infectious if my world hadn’t just ended on a roulette table. The woman was about my mama’s age but in better shape, eyes wide and round, without the hollowed puffiness my mama had carried on her face since I was little.
Ed wore white socks with black loafers and knee-length khaki shorts.
“What’s this? Peggy, do you have the camera?”
Peggy pulled out an actual camera. Like, just a camera. It had a little lens that poked out as she turned it on. For a moment, I wondered again if I was dreaming all this, because it’s 2017 and who uses a separate camera to take pictures?
“Excuse me!” Ed said to a guy walking by, making eye contact.
Eye contact with strangers on a city street in Vegas?
Oh. My. God.
“Are you from Ohio?” I asked.
“How did you know?” Peggy squealed.
I looked at Ed’s footwear situation, his gleaming white tube socks like Chiclets in the sun. “Parma?”
“As a matter of fact, I am from Parma! We live in Alliance now, though,” Peggy replied with a friendly grin.
Alliance was a few towns over from my hometown.
Ed waved at the complete stranger, who ignored him. “Excuse me, sir?”
The guy was about my age, with jeans slung low, the edge of his underwear peeking out. Mirror shades, one of those foreheads that was rapidly losing the battle to keep a hairline, and a uni-nostril. You know – where there’s so much hair you can’t see the midline break.
“What?” The stranger was brusque.
“Would you mind taking a picture of us?”
Ed got a bird as an answer, and I don’t mean one of the chickens.
“That was uncalled for!” Ed called out to the guy, turning to Peggy with a scowl. “I told you we shoulda gone to Branson!” he groused. “Bet they know how to be nice there! I just wanted a few moments of help to capture the moment.”
My people.
Oh, oh, oh… my people.
“You know what, Ed? Let me find someone to help.” I looked around, all along the sidewalk near the stairs that led up to the above-the-street walkways. The streets were half full, the night crowd still sleeping off last night’s drunken revelry. I spotted Wonder Woman, Deadpool, and a very scraggly elf in green tights.
I squinted.
Nope. Green Lantern. The fact that it was hard to tell the difference wasn’t my fault, though. He was rough.
Wonder Woman caught my eye and sized us all up, the two oblivious tourists, my cosplaying kinky pluckers, and… me.
“Want a picture? Twenty bucks,” she said, wiggling her fingers at me, beckoning.
“Twenty dollars to take a picture for tourists on vacation?” Ed huffed. “People told me Vegas would be expensive, but...”
“No, Ed,” I explained. “She means she wants twenty for a picture with her.” I looked Wonder Woman over and realized quickly that aside from a blue g-string, the rest of her costume was painted on, the strapless breastplate nothing but shades of body paint.
Ed wrapped one beefy arm around her shoulders, looked down at her, and turned heart-attack red.
“Where is your top?” he asked in a garbled voice, panic seeping in damn fast.
She just nuzzled up to him with a grin, a little paint smearing on Ed’s red and blue plaid shirt.
“Say cheese!” Peggy said, clicking with her actual, honest-to-goodness camera. As she moved her arm, a whiff of baby powder and Fels Naptha soap hit me. I was instantly homesick.
“Let’s, uh, get a picture of us all,” Ed said as he handed Wonder Woman a twenty.
“I can snap it,” I offered.
“No, no. Um, Ms. Wonder Woman, can you take our picture?”
“Sure!” Wonder Woman looked at the camera like it was an alien. “Don’t you have a phone? I’ll get a video of you, too.”
“Bawk!” Rooster said, pecking at Peggy’s hair. Peggy giggled and cuddled up to Ed, who was staring at Wonder Woman’s breasts like he was trying to read a hieroglyph.
I dropped the chicken leashes and took in everything, a slightly faint feeling taking over my body. It’s not so much that the world spun or anything. Not that dramatic. The weight of what I’d really, truly just done started to settle in my bones, pulling me down, making me feel closer to the earth.
I lost eight thousand dollars of my friends’ money. Technically, the band was my boss. We always joked that I was the boss, but that wasn’t really true. They employed me.
And what happens to employees who gamble with their company’s money?
They get fired.
“Ed? What is that chicken doing?” Peggy’s querulous voice made sensors inside my brain light up so fast, I pulled a tiny muscle in my neck, going down to my shoulder blade, from turning too fast.
Mavis was squatting.
“Is she going to the bathroom, Ed? Is she doing a...” Her voice dropped. “Number two?”
Wonder Woman watched, her gum cracking against her teeth as she chewed noisily, nipples hard as rocks through her painted costume. She held up Ed’s phone and started tapping her toe just as Mavis shat on the ground.
“Oh, my God, Ed! The chicken just laid an egg!”
“Cock-a-doodle-dooooooooo!” Rooster crowed.
Delirious from just too much – way, way too much – I looked on the ground, wondering how Mavis managed that feat. The brown egg sat in a crack in the sidewalk, among chewed-up gum and cigarette butts, Mavis slowly lowering herself over it.
“Good chicken!” I said, petting her red h
ead like we were in chicken obedience school and I’d trained her to do that.
Rooster started to shake, a tight, tense movement that was quickly followed by a stifled moan. Wonder Woman moved closer, holding the phone toward us.
He moved over to Mavis and whispered, “I just came.”
Ed heard that, grabbed his phone from Wonder Woman, and ushered Peggy out of there, muttering about perverts. Meanwhile, Mavis clucked and settled down over that fucking egg, her chicken diaper in the way. How had she managed to get the egg out from the folds?
Darth Vader and Jar Jar Binks walked by, looking at Mavis, saying nothing. I tugged on her and Rooster’s leashes, wanting to continue down the road, movement my only friend. If I just kept putting one foot in front of the other I could get my mind off the agony of the trapped sensation that plagued me. Distraction wasn’t just a form of relief.
It was how I would survive the next few hours until I had to face Joe and Trevor and ’fess up to what I’d done.
And then I turned around, leash in hand, my belt heavy with the bag of chicken feed weighing down –
– to find Joe staring at me.
CHAPTER NINE
DARLA
“Do you have something you want to tell me?” he asked in the baritone version of his mother. Good grief. For a moment I thought Joanne Ross herself had spectrally projected her soul into my Joe.
“I don’t… think so.” Sure, I had plenty I could tell him, but I didn’t exactly want to tell him anything right now. Where would I start?
“You’re walking a chicken on a leash, Darla.”
“Yes.”
“More than one chicken.”
“Yes.”
“A human dressed up as a chicken,” he clarified, as if I didn’t know that.
“Mmm hmm.” When you’re caught, don’t incriminate yourself. Stick to noncommittal consonants.
“On the Strip in Las Vegas.”
“Yes.”
“For… fun?”
“No.” The word came out all round and heavy in my mouth, protest in a single syllable. I looked at him like he was crazy. “I’m being paid.”
That didn’t seem to satisfy his inquiry. Joe’s frown deepened.
“And why, exactly, are you being paid to walk a human dressed as a chicken?”
Joe shouldn’t have dropped out of law school. His interrogation skills are exemplary.
Unfortunately.
“Because I’m exploring new career opportunities.”
His eyebrows shot up, eyes doing that half-closed thing where he’s trying to be patient. “I didn’t realize managing the band was just a way station in your life.”
“What? No. It’s not. Just, you know, picking up a side gig.”
“Bawk!” Mavis interjected, her neck pecking my ankle as she bent impossibly low. The woman must be a yoga teacher in real life. She was so bendy, knees bent down, ass feathers rubbing against the filthy sidewalk, that if she turned her head to the right she could have licked herself.
Now why would a woman who could perform autocunnilingus ignore that and walk around being sexually aroused by a chicken costume? Hell if I knew.
Autocunnilingus wasn’t paying me a thousand dollars an hour, so who cared?
And for the record, if it did I’d have been a fucking millionaire by age twenty.
“This is Mavis?” Joe pointed to her. “Then who is that?” He pointed to Rooster.
“Rooster.”
Joe pinched the bridge of his nose like he was in pain. “And they are?”
“My flock.” Rooster let out a small groan, the kind men make when they’re on the edge of orgasm.
Joe swallowed hard, his features tight and conflicted. “Your flock?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is that the Joe Ross?” Rooster asked in a shaky voice. Mavis began making little chicken noises like she was about to start running in panic and excitement.
Joe turned sharply toward him. “Who in the hell are you?”
“BAWK!” Mavis let out a single little bleating sound, then collapsed slowly into a fainted pile of chicken parts.
“Oh, geez.”
Rooster threw his wings around Joe, shamelessly crying happy tears, completely going out of animal character. “It’s such an honor to meet you!” he gasped.
Joe looked at me over Rooster’s wing feathers and mouthed, What the fuck?
I shrugged. Joe stayed still, arms extended with a rigid finality.
“I can’t believe we’re really meeting you!” Rooster let Joe go and then finally seemed to notice that his cluckbuddy had a bad case of the vapors. “Oh my God, Mavis!” he exclaimed, dropping down to hold her head.
Joe looked at me, shaking his head slowly. “I don’t want to know what’s going on, do I?”
“No.”
“But you’re going to tell me.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s get out of here so we can do it unmolested.”
“I’m still on the clock.”
“On what clock?”
“Their clock.” I pointed to the floor, where Rooster was reviving Mavis. She shot to her feet, flustered, eyes locking on Joe with awe.
“Who cares about their clock?” he demanded.
“I do. They’re paying me.”
“To walk them on a leash?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because –”
“The truth, Darla. The truth.”
“Can we get a selfie first?” Mavis asked, clearly recovering from her overwhelm.
“No.”
Joe grabbed my wrist and pulled me out of the growing throng of people into a small corner where a single glare from him emptied out two human puppies. In my peripheral vision I saw Rooster and Mavis in heated discussion as Joe forced me to look at him, brow deeply creased, dark eyes blazing with a warrior’s awareness of entering battle.
If I’d had a white flag, I’d have waved it.
“I lost eight thousand dollars of the band’s money,” I blurted out. “And all my retirement savings.”
“You what?”
“Don’t yell at me!”
“I AM NOT YELLING!”
I don’t cry very often. I’m not one of those women who use tears as currency or to manipulate. It just comes natural.
I cried.
“Shit,” Joe muttered, red faced and furious, his lips baring his teeth like a pissed off little yippie dog being told its owner was all out of Kraft Singles as doggie treats.
“All of it?” he choked out.
I could only nod.
“On slots?”
I shook my head.
“At a table?”
I nodded.
“Roulette.” His voice went supernaturally low, like he was channelling a demon. Then he groaned. “That video on YouTube? The English guy who bet his life savings on roulette and won? Darla!”
“I know! I know! I swear I didn’t mean to do it!”
“What do you mean, you didn’t mean to do it? You didn’t have a gun to your head.”
“I was so sure I’d win that it did feel like someone had a gun to my head, Joe!” I said, breathless and wet, my mouth full of salt and remorse. “You ever just know something is so right that you don’t feel like you have a choice? Like you’re just magnetically drawn to do something so contrary to everything you know, except it feels like fate is screaming out that it’s going to work no matter how irrational it seems?”
He gave me a tense look and stayed all strong and silent, red and pulsing, for just long enough to make my skin start to feel prickly.
Finally, he said, “Oh, yes. I certainly do.”
And then he sighed and pulled me into his arms.
“It’s all Trevor’s fault,” I said through a long line of snot and a mouthful of salty tears. “He told me I spent too much of my time settling for what life hands me. That I needed to learn to ask the universe for what I want.” I pounded Joe’s chest a few t
imes, then remembered his heart surgery scar.
Maybe I shouldn’t hit him in the breastbone.
I’d aim for his nuts instead.
“You, too,” I told him. “You said it, too.”
“I did?” He was so gentle and nice. So not the Joe I knew.
Aw, fuck.
That meant I really screwed up.
I bawled harder.
“It’ll be okay, Darla,” he whispered in my ear. I cried even harder, because if Joe was shining me on, the world was about to end. The man didn’t do bullshit. He didn’t say nice, kind words to calm people down because it was compassionate.
In fact, I thought he was incapable of it.
I sniffled, letting my choking gasps be absorbed by the cloth of his shirt, my personal horror as I cried making his shirt wet with tears of shock. How could I lose? I had a solid shot at winning. I’d studied roulette carefully. If anyone in the world was an expert on roulette, it was me.
Ok, drunk me thought that. Sober me knows I’m no expert.
But the game is a game, right? At least it sure seems like it. That meant a better-than-average chance. I had a booger weight advantage. It was a once-in-a-lifetime deal.
And yet… I’d lost.
Worst of all, I’d won all the risky bets and lost the play-it-safe one.
Abundance mentality was for people like Trevor. He was born with a golden roulette ball in his mouth, one I was sure would have gone in the right place if he’d been the one betting all that money. Me, I came into this life eating a shit sandwich and it looked like I’d spend the rest of my life in abundance, all right.
Abundantly full of nothing but shit.
“It’ll be okay,” Joe said again, his arms feeling warmer, stronger, tighter. “We all screw up.”
“Not like this.”
“No, not like this, but we all do screw up.”
“It’s not all my money, Joe. Only eight hundred of it. The rest is the band’s. They’re going to hate me. How can I ever look at Liam and Sam and Frown again? I can’t believe I did that!”
“Shhhh.”
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Because nothing I can say is worse than what you’re already saying to and about yourself.”
He had me at that.
“I think I need to be alone,” I said, surprising myself.
