Mean Rooster By Nico Newman   My closest friends growing up were chickens. I was five when my Momma decided we were going to have a flock, and that first batch of chicks she ordered via phone from Cackle Hatchery were mean as sin. She ordered a barnyard mix of 20– 18 lived to adulthood, and 11 of them were roosters. Within the first year six of the roosters had gotten themselves eaten by the fox or met an unfortunate and bloody end when a neighbor’s dog got loose, and the five that remained approached life with the bloodthirstiness of something cornered and feral. I was something of a feral child myself, sun-bleached hair, a gap-toothed smile, and always covered in dirt– the perfect opponent for an angry-at-the-world rooster. The survivors and I played ‘tag’ when I would go out to do chores in the evening while my Momma was cooking dinner and my Dad was still at work. It was still September, weeks until the first nasty frost was scheduled to hit, and the grass in the front yard was higher than I was tall but I sprinted through it anyway with whichever rooster had spotted me leaving the house in hot pursuit. They only caught me once, they could only catch me once; I wailed and ran with my tail between my legs back to the house and begged my Dad to put the poor devil who’d got me in the freezer. The death of the first rooster was enough to put the fear of God (or my father with his headlamp and ax in the middle of the night) into the remaining four until one of them got cocky and went after my toddler brother, pecking him right in the middle of his little forehead. All of them died after that– they were wiry and my Momma made them into soup when winter came.
  My games of chase with the roosters didn’t put me off chickens though. I became fascinated with the way the rest of our flock went about their lives. My entire life became focused on the chickens; their mannerisms, the way they preened and smoothed their feathers and carried conversations and chased after grasshoppers and mice in the perpetually brown Montana grass. When I was nine, my Momma put me in 4-H because I had been kicked off the soccer team and she desperately wanted me to have some sort of hobby. I became a poultry kid then, spending all my free time with what rapidly became MY flock; cleaning the coop, checking for parasites, saving table scraps, and meticulously categorizing anything and everything about chickens into my adolescent brain. I spent more time with the chickens than I did my classmates, taking my place at the top of the pecking order in my own little corner of the world. I was hopeless (still am) with social cues and conversation, but none of that mattered when I knew the right way to pitch my voice to carry a chicken conversation.
  I was forced to grow out of 4-H when my parents split, but the mannerisms that shaped my youth persisted. My perpetually cocked head stayed present in every photo of me that my Momma has, my crooked smile and lopsided bangs tucked away in cardboard boxes in the loft. The hours of careful silence I spent gaining my birds’ trust have morphed into contented quiet around the people I value in my life, small talk uncomfortable and unnaturally loud. I dodge gaps and strut and sun-bathe like a chicken– muscle memory and nostalgia whisked with a spoon into the fibre of my being. My fight-or-flight and the way I blink are remnants of the way my chickens socialized me, mirroring bird behavior with far more easy accuracy than I could ever dream of mirroring a person. Even my speaking pattern, bursts of uncertain and overly-loud speech, is a leftover of my childhood friends.
  Mostly though, I’m a mean rooster. I puff myself up real big and act tough to compensate for the inherent fragility of my being. I chase people away and sharpen my spurs on rocks until they’re sharp enough to tear into anyone stupid-brave enough to try to get too close. I pace the fence and throw myself toward any possibility of freedom. Even if my freedom comes, an open gate or a snow-melt gap at the bottom of the chicken wire, I will live free a mean rooster and I will die a mean rooster, wiry and no good for the roasting pan.

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