The Rooster

My mom bought five chicks from the local feed store when she moved into the house by the pond. My brother built her a chicken coop and painted it the same color as the house—driftwood gray with white trim. She fed the chicks compost every morning: coffee grounds, eggshells, apple cores, orange rinds. One of the chickens grew bigger than the others, its tail feathers longer. Soon, it started crowing in the morning. A rooster, my mom realized. Still, she kept him around even as he started pecking the hens with his beak, leaving bright splotches of blood on their white feathers.

The rooster turned on my mom one day as she walked towards the coop with their feed. He charged her, rose up squawking. His talons clawed her face and broke her glasses, a bruise blooming below her eye before she even got back to the house. She lived alone, my brother and I already far away in our messy adult lives. My dad got wind of the attack: the black eye, the broken glasses. He and my mom had been divorced over two decades by then, nothing left to say between the two of them, but he still drove to her house with a .22 in the front seat of his pickup. He shot the rooster in the chest—one, two, three times before driving away. When my mom got home from work, she found the body in the driveway. My brother and I praised our dad for this, called him a vigilante and a hero. My mom just smiled, looking down at her clasped hands in her lap.

Ten years later, this is what I picture when I think of love: the rooster’s violence, gunshots cracking through the late fall afternoon, my dad driving home with Beach Boys on the radio, my mom at her dinner table that evening, a glass of merlot in her hand and an ice pack over one eye.