THE CHICKEN, THE GOOSE, AND THE GANDER
Licensed obtained through Adobe Stock. Edited.
The room was humid and smelled of lavender cleaner and mold. Ma tried to dress it up for me, but the place was still a dump. I placed my luggage on the squeaky bed. It’s okay, you won’t be here for long. The window unit sputtered whatever cold spit it had left. I peered out through the window, its pane speckled with sun-baked clay. I imagined the microscopic organisms that colonized the glass, their invisible-to-me world. It’s only temporary.
Outside, I saw the rusted chain-link enclosure that contained my mother’s chicken and gander. It was meant to protect the birds from her husband’s dog who longed to live with the wolves. There was once a goose. She stuck her neck out to see what was on the other side, but the she-wolf was waiting. The canine lunged and clamped down, suffocating the goose’s cries. Her headless body—call it muscle memory, or maybe her last thought, her last request to her body—sought cover beneath their nest bed the same way we seek safety beneath ours as children.
The goose’s partner, the gander, was grief-stricken—filled with images of the tragedy he witnessed as his love’s body flailed before finally resting in the dirt as if to say, “I can’t let you see me this way.” He settled beside the body—her body—head high, honking. My mother found her head beside the growling, blood-stained dog.
Eventually, my mother moved the chicken to the gander’s enclosure. That’s where I watched them from behind the earth-stained glass. The gander drank from a deep bucket, his long white neck dipping in like a ladle. He came back up with water in his cheeks, looked down at the chicken, and dripped water onto her feathers. He repeated this several times before I realized the chicken was drinking the drops of water that formed on top of the dirt.
She was too small to reach inside the bucket and dip her beak into the water without falling in, but the gander—the sweet gander did what he could to help. I cried in that drab backroom of my mother’s broken-down trailer. She did what she could.
I found and filled my mother’s best Talavera bowl with fresh water and went outside into their pen. The gander walked toward me like a patrol guard. “It’s okay.” I squatted with them in the dirt and placed the bowl before the chicken and her two yellow dinosaur feet. She trilled and looked up at me with her red comb tilted, then back down to the water and drank.
S. N. Rodriguez is a writer and photographer in Austin, Texas. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Writers' League of Texas, and her work has appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Hippocampus Magazine, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, The Pinch, River Teeth, and elsewhere.