I tell John I’m tired of writing what I know, of writing about grief and loss. I want to write a story about something I know nothing about, I tell him. He brings me coffee in bed every morning, and as he sets it down now, I ask him what he thinks I know the least about.
“God or chickens,” he suggests.
“Fair,” I reply, though I did propose a rooftop chicken coop during the pandemic. I have never proposed we attend church.
I stayed on a farm that had chickens once. I was ten and we were visiting my dad’s family. We weren’t allowed near the birds because mom thought they carried disease. She made me wash my hands all the time and after two days took me to a hotel in Louisville, where she locked herself in the bathroom for over 24 hours and I had to figure out how to get us food. When dad showed up, I begged him to take me with him, but instead, he told me to wait in the hall, and when he came out of the room he said it would be better this way, and that I had to be a big girl now because mom was going to need me.
I google chickens and the first story I see is that 800,000 chickens in Indiana were just euthanized because of a bird flu outbreak. Maybe my mother was right. I try to imagine 800,000 chickens but it’s too many, a number I can’t visualize, which makes me start to panic. I break the large number of chickens into separate barns in my head. I’m terrified of things I can’t see, can’t quantify, can’t conceptualize, and I either avoid them completely or fixate on them until I can see them clearly.
The bedroom door opens and John peeks in.
“More coffee?”
“Want to know how they euthanize mass amounts of chickens?” I ask him.
“Is this one of those things you wish you could un-know?” he asks.
“Yes.” I have a list of these things that includes 18th century menopause treatments, the average number of spiders per acre, the projected timeline for the sixth extinction, how marshmallows are made, and multiple ways to induce vomiting when a parent swallows too many pills.
“Hit me,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed. He knows I can’t keep it in my head, that if I don’t “say the thing,” as my therapist prompts, I won’t be able to move on.
So I tell him the top five ways they kill mass amounts of chickens and each way is more horrible than the last, and by the time I’m done, I am sobbing and John has his hand on my foot, which is sticking out from the comforter because I always want my feet to be cold and my body to be warm, which is the opposite of John, who wears only socks to bed, and then I’m all cried out, which is how it works, and John squeezes my foot, and he goes to get me another cup of coffee.
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Emily Rinkema lives in northern Vermont. Her writing has recently appeared in Ghost Parachute, Okay Donkey, JAKE, and Frazzled Lit, and she won the 2024 Cambridge and Lascaux Prizes. You can follow her on X, BS, or IG @emilyrinkema.