Backyard Chickens
Story by Mr. Manicotti
Images by Spooky Salad
My wife always wanted to raise chickens. I said we didnt have the space, but I must admit she found a way to make it work. Then she wanted to buy more. No problem, we had some space to expand the coops and the free, farm fresh eggs were admittedly nice.
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Then she came home with a rooster.
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"His name is Ebenezer," she said. "Now we can breed our own chickens!"
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This was a bit odd to me, but I went along with it since my wife had made it work in the past. And hey, baby chicks sell pretty good.
She started hatching our own chicks. Some we sold, but most my wife insisted on keeping to "get the right genetics." We repurposed our shed for her nursery and she began spending more and more time out there.
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Late at night I'd wake up to the sound of hundreds of clucks screaming in terror. One day I made the mistake of walking into the shed and saw some of what shed been up to. Dozens of dissected chicken corpses hung from the walls and lined the work bench. Vials of translucent liquid were scattered about and the entire place was littered with notebook pages. I assumed these were notes from her genetic tests, but when I picked up a page I found it just read "chicken soup is good for the soul" over and over again. As did every other page.
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I thought about bringing it up to her, but then again my wife knows more about chickens than I do. I put the incident out of my mind and for the next few weeks everything seemed more or less normal. Aside from the screaming.
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The screams of chickens drilled into my brain every night as my wife worked worked tirelessly to get the perfect breed. One day she appeared in the kitchen doorway grinning and covered in blood and feathers.
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"I did a thing," she said, and gestured towards the back yard. I saw that she'd expanded the shed to nearly double it's size. When I day expanded, she'd really just haphazardly nailed some wood and steel roofing together.
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"Looks great, honey!" I said. By now I was scared out of my wits and didn't dare oppose anything she was cooking up out there.
One thing that concerned me was that the screaming of the chickens seemed to be changing. What started out as high-pitched chick noises gradually morphed into gutteral growls and, eventually, thunderous roars. She was so dedicated to her breeding program.
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By now she had covered the entire back yard with scrap wood and roofing to create a bizarre, hulking shantytown of a she-shed.
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Sometimes I missed looking out the window and seeing the green grass and the dog playing in the back yard. Come to think of it I hadn't seen the dog for a few weeks.
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All was well and good until one morning my mother asked what my wife was up to. I told her about the chicken project and my phone dinged with the message that sent chills down my spine.
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"Send me a picture."
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Not one to let my family down, I took a deep breath and walked out the back door into the quagmire of wood and steel. The stench of manure and blood slithered into my nose as soon as I ducked into the makeshift door.
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They were all there, grinning at me. Hundreds of ten-foot tall feathered abominations with gnarled teeth and sinister red eyes. My wife sat among them smiling and wearing nothing but a necklace made of chicken heads.
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"I did it," she said. "I got the breed I was looking for."
