A Girl Named Zippy Read Online Free Page B

and spent ten minutes licking their own wormy butts.
    Speckles and I loved each other. Dad never had to tell me to feed her—I couldn’t wait to see her every day. In the mornings she hopped out of her box when she heard me coming, and did something like a tail-feather wag as I opened the pen door. When I sat down she hopped onto my lap, and then let me lift her up onto my shoulder, where she would sometimes just stand very officiously. Other times she sat down, tucking her legs up underneath her and making little happy chicken sounds, the bird equivalent of a purring cat.
    And there it was every day, a perfect little egg, left like an offering. Fortunately I didn’t acquire Speckles as a food source, because when a banty egg is broken open in a frying pan, the whole affair is about the size of a silver dollar.
    I was so fond of Speckles that Dad decided we should get a rooster and raise some babies. He went alone to pick the rooster out, and chose the most brazenly attractive of the banty males. He was blue and excessively strutty. As far as I know, there are only two names for roosters in the history of the world, Red and Chanticleer, and we could hardly call him Red.
    So Chanticleer came to live with us, and life changed radically. I cannot in good taste report the relationship between Speckles and Chanty, except to say that he was relentless and she spent a great deal of time running from him. He must have been accustomed to servicing five or six hens at Tink’s, because he never stopped. I liked him not at all.
    After Chanticleer came to stay with us I could no longer get in Speckles’ pen with her. Like any abusive male, her husband first separated her from her family and friends. I had to just stand on the outside with my fingers hooked in the wire, looking at her longingly. I think Speckles would have looked at me with yearning as well, except she was generally wild-eyed, and had to keep glancing over her shoulder.
    One day at school I decided to just tell my dad how I felt about Chanticleer, how I wanted him to go back to the farm even though he was so extra good-looking. I thought about it all the way home. My resolve got me safely past scary old Edythe’s yard, where normally I would have become all skittery, afraid she would walk out of her terrifying house and wag her chin whiskers at me. I decided to just go straight to Speckles and explain the whole thing to her.
    Dad had built the cage behind our house, where it would be in the shade almost all day, and as I marched past Dad’s tilty tool shed all I noticed was the quiet. When I got to the cage I saw why: one whole side of the cage was ripped apart, and inside there was nothing but feathers.
    I stood frozen for just a moment, the way children do, my synapses firing and misfiring like crazy, trying to make sense of the senseless, and then I turned and ran into the house, dropping my books and my Honorary Mouseketeer corduroy jacket along the way, and threw myself onto the couch. I wailed and sobbed with such abandon that my mother must have feared some real calamity, and when I told her what had happened she just sat on the edge of the couch beside me, rubbing my back and telling me how sorry she was.
    Then my sister came in.
    “What’s wrong with her?” she asked, pointing to my hiccuping body.
    “Her chicken got killed.” My mom tried, I honestly believe, to say it with real sympathy, but she had not truly known Chicken Love, and there was just the slightest warble in her voice, if I may risk such a description. It was enough to send my sister over the edge.
    She tried to say, “oh, dear,” but it came out as just a big snort, and soon her legs had collapsed and she was laughing so hard she was making no sound and wiping tears off her face.
    My sister’s general gaiety was interrupted by my dad coming home from work, or wherever he went during the day. When I tried to tell him about Speckles I cried even harder. I was completely undone.
    It is