Alien boyfriend - Part 1 - Please stop taking my chickens
[As requested by a reader]
The appeal of the cabin had been twofold: nature was meant to be good for the soul, and with any luck the complete lack of any non-chickens-and-trees stimulus could bore a novel out of your thus far uncooperative brain. The parents had seemed happy enough to subsidise your stay in order to have you stop wandering their house in the wee hours of the morning - they’d been very supportive of your creative endeavours, fruitless though they had been so far. You were lucky enough to be staying for free (thanks, dad) and had even been sent along with enough tinned and pickled produce to last for weeks: you had no excuse to leave, but you were starting to sorely regret not bringing a book. There was a kind of nervous tension about you that you couldn’t seem to shake, and it was making it nigh impossible to focus on an idea. You had a creeping suspicion it might have something to do with the dark trees leering in at you at all hours of the day.
It had come to your attention that you weren’t really a Nature Person.
In desperation for anything resembling entertainment as your well of inspiration still ran dry, you’d taken to sitting in the rocking chair on the covered deck, watching Dipper. Satay and Curry peck happily around their makeshift outside enclosure late into the evenings. You were smoking more than usual, and before long the garish misshapen ashtray you distinctly remembered making for your dad in year 9 pottery had a heaping pile of butts in its centre. The girls were from home; you’d been surprisingly hard pressed to find a long term chicken-sitter and your parents hadn’t managed to keep a plant alive for more than 10 days in the last 30 years, so the chickens had made the trip with you in the back of the truck, not entirely happily. After a few days of new dirt to peck at, they were settling in.
You’d spent the daylight hours playing at forestcraft, chopping up bits of wood and piling the pieces haphazardly against the side of the cabin. Evening found you with your boot-clad feet up on the railing which surrounded the cabin’s deck, reclining in the rocking chair, smoking and looking out over the lake. With the harsh line of dense trees surrounding the cabin and the lake, and the complete lack of artificial lighting, nights drew in quickly and unusually solemnly here. You were starting to find it less unnerving, especially when you were conscious to take the time to watch the sky mottle from blue to orange to purple-with-faint-white-blobs to black with pinpricks of white. It was then, on the fourth day of your stay when the sun was melting below the horizon and the cooing bok boks of the dinners (uh, chickens) stretched out to become fewer and further between, you finally started to feel relaxation dawn on you. The constant background smell of damp leaves and woodsmoke was starting to lose its pungency, the evening was pleasantly warm, you were full of hotdogs and free of any immediate obligations: life was going okay. You felt your shoulders lower slightly from your ears and got up to put the kettle on.
Curry had long since led the troupe into the shed for the night when you noticed the star. Your eyes were drawn to it unbidden, its brightness and unusually vigorous twinkling drawing your gaze. You watched it for a little while, wrapping a blanket around your shoulders in defence against the slightly chilled night air. You sipped your tea. It must be an aeroplane, you decided - stars don’t flicker that much, and most of the others weren’t as bright. But… it didn’t seem to be moving. Maybe it was just high up so moving really slowly. You bored even yourself with this train of thought, and in a compromise with your own brain resolved to note its location and check in on it in a couple of hours. You sighed and closed your eyes, consciously trying to lose yourself in the silence and placidity of the surroundings but finding only meagre comfort there. Maybe it was time for bed, and you could take another crack at the plot outline in the morning. You took a long, final drag from your cigarette and stubbed it out, making your way back inside.
As you methodically cocooned yourself in four layers of blankets, you flinched but weren’t certain why. Was that a flash of light? No couldn’t be, what would it be from?
The next morning was colder and drizzly. You woke at what felt like first light and sat in bed with a cup of coffee, inspecting the half-mist-half-raindrops permeating the air and a heavy fog stretching out over the lake through the small bedroom window. Regrettably, your Princess chickens probably weren’t going to fancy scratching around in this grizzly weather, so you should probably take them out some nutritious dust. You sipped solemnly. You’d feed the chickens, then you’d start on the plot outline and you were going to sit at the desk until it was done, come hell or high water.
A plan.
With your hair still contained by the loose ponytail you’d slept in, you pulled a jumper on over your cloud pyjamas and topped it off with your thick woolen coat.
“High fashion at the cabin today.” You muttered to yourself as you zipped up your boots. Before long you were trudging over to the hen shed with wet mist sticking to your face and hair, slightly regretting your reluctance to change out of your pyjamas into your jeans. You let yourself into the mesh cobbled-together outdoor enclosure and closed the door behind you. Then, you crossed the quiet few paces to the garden-shed-turned-henhouse and lifted the latch to let yourself into there too. The room smelled of fresh hay (for now, you hadn’t brought much in the way of fresh bedding) and the alarmed boks of your charges filled the small space easily. You furrowed your eyebrows immediately. Curry: golden brown with white spots - check. Dipper - dark brown all over - check. Satay: absent. You peered around for a few moments but once you’d looked behind the lawnmower and under the big terracotta planting pot you’d quickly exhausted the possible Satay Hiding Spots. You absentmindedly shook out some pellets into the hay between the nest boxes and then let yourself back outside into the outer enclosure. You patrolled the perimeter carefully looking for signs of incursion, but found no gaps or tunnels or anything which looked like a fox entrance point. Plus, there was no blood. Confusion and tension settled in your belly. Weird. Weird weird weird.
You spent the day in a state of discombobulation. You regretted that Satay was gone, but the confusing state of the scene was what was really getting to you. After several hours staring alternatively at your notebook and the window, your plot notes for the day consisted of:
Horror?
Chicken thief / murderer.
It wasn’t the most comforting mental tangent.
It was with a churning belly that you trudged through the mud to visit the chickens the next morning, and you weren’t surprised to find it was now just… chicken, singular.
“Hey, Curry.”
“Bok.”
“What happened to your sisters?” You questioned lightly, shaking out some pellets for her.
“Bok, bok bok.” She unfurled from her nest box and started to engage with her breakfast.
“Ah right. Very enlightening, thank you.”
Still no blood, still no signs of entrance. You were really starting to convince yourself that there was some sicko living in the woods toying with you, and a deep dread was settling across your shoulders. Nothing else for it: time to see if you remembered how to load a shotgun.
It wasn’t like your dad to retire to a secluded area at the mercy of both passing strangers and the kind of nature which had teeth and claws without some kind of protection, and you were grateful for his paranoia as you retrieved the gun and box of ammo from underneath the loose sitting room floorboard. Standing in the middle of the room, you text your mom with a levity you didn’t feel:
“Hey ma! Chickens going missing :/ might be a fox, might be a murderer. Gonna shoot it either way later, good plot ammo. Ammo, lol. Anyway if I don’t check in tomoz AM come retrieve my body xoxoxoxoxoxox”
Her reply was almost instant:
“Are you sure you don’t want us to come out to give you a hand, bab?”
“Nah you’re ok for the 5 hour chicken investigation drive, I’ll txt in the morning.”
“Alright sweetness, let me know if you murder a fella.”
“Don’t tell da.”
You hummed monotonously to yourself as you considered your next steps, drumming your fingers in a frantic pattern against your leg in an attempt to dispel some of your nervous energy. Maybe you should leave a note? On the off chance the chicken thief was human somewhere between socially inept and murderer. You slipped into the desk chair and picked up a pen, but were immediately at a loss for what to say. Should you tell them you were armed? That might be good for intimidation but you’d lose the element of surprise if they decided to try to get into the cabin.. Plus it was definitely escalation. Hm. After a few scribbled out false starts, you settled on:
“Hey, spooky chicken thief! Please stop taking my chickens.”
You re read it and it seemed pretty wet, but it was the best you could come up with so you pressed it in between tape to keep the water off and ventured out to attach it to the outside door of the coop.
You spent most of the day working yourself up into an anxious frenzy, which turned out to be both deeply unpleasant and surprisingly draining. Between picturing some dark malevolent spectre stealing into your coop and imagining quick draws with deranged chicken murderers, you managed to smoke most of your remaining cigarettes. You were sitting in the rocking chair on the deck as dusk rose over the lake, the shotgun resting across your lap and a mug of tea in your hands. You looked up to the sky and noticed with vague interest that the weird-star probably-not-a-completely-stationary-aeroplane was still there. Maybe you could find its name, if you looked it up. Or, better yet, posted a picture to /r/whatstaristhis and had someone do the work for you.
You watched the coop intently for several hours, but a long day of anxious energy coupled with the complete darkness of the night doomed your endeavour to stay up As Long As It Took. After many hours of nothing at all happening, your head slowly lolled forward against your chest and your eyes slipped shut.
You woke up to warm morning light and angry bokking. You lifted your hands to rub your eyes but felt an unexpected resistance, causing your eyes to snap open with surprise and fear. You noticed with confusion that you had a piece of string tied around your right wrist. In a sleepy haze, you followed the tether with your eyes. .. It was tied to a chicken’s leg. A.. different chicken. Not one of yours. You blanched and stood up quickly, causing your gun to loudly clatter to the floor, looking around frantically for any clue as to who had done this. You could hear your pulse hammering in your ears and your breath came in short gasps, cold terror twisting in your chest.
Only after you were forced to admit to yourself that you couldn’t see any hint of who did this, did your eyes wander to the chicken coop. And it was then you noticed there was a second note fastened to the door.
