The Fat Hen

(Gilayaie)

She was a fat hen; there was no denying it. Not the plump, prosperous kind of fat that speaks of grain bins overflowing and a farmer’s soft heart. No, hers was a weary fat, a settled fat, the heavy-bodied resignation of a creature who had seen too many springs and hatched too few of them. Her feathers, once a russet bronze, had dulled to the colour of old mud, and her comb flopped over one eye like a stained, forgotten bonnet. She walked sideways, a slow, teetering crabwalk, as if the world were a tilting deck and she had long ago lost her sea legs.

The boy found her at the border of the woods, where the thin, frost-bitten grass gave way to the dark, breathing loam of the trees. He was not supposed to be there. He was supposed to be collecting kindling, but the afternoon had a hushed, amber quality that invited loitering, and the hen was a peculiar sight. Most creatures fled a small, noisy human. This one merely paused, swivelled a rheumy eye in his direction, and continued her sideways pilgrimage.

“Where will you go, O’ fat Hen?” he called out, the words emerging in a singsong he hadn’t intended. It was the shape of her, perhaps, that demanded a rhyme.

The hen stopped. A leaf, brown and skeletal, skittered over her foot. She did not look at him, but at the low, tangled line of the drystone wall that marked the boundary of Old Man Prendergast’s farm. “Going to the farm,” she clucked, her voice a dry rustle, like husks shaken in a sack.

The boy crept closer, drawn by the sound. He had heard hens cluck and squawk and shriek their egg-laying triumphs, but he had never heard one speak in that low, dusty monotone, a voice worn smooth as a river stone. “Why are you going to the farm, O’ fat Hen?”

For a long moment, she was silent. A crow shouted something rude from a birch branch and flew away. The hen shivered, a single, convulsive ripple that started at her beak and ended at the sad, limp fan of her tail. “To give warmth to the eggs,” she said at last. “So that they hatch.”

The boy felt a strange, hollow click in his chest. He thought of his own mother, who smelled of yeast and woodsmoke, who tucked the quilt under his chin on winter nights. Warmth. He understood warmth. “How many eggs have you, O’ fat Hen?”

She had resumed her sideways walk, a step, a pause, a step. Her feet were scaly and yellow, like tiny dragon’s claws. “Eleven or twelve,” she muttered, and the words seemed to cost her something. She said them not as a boast, but as a confession.

The boy trotted alongside her, matching her slow, awkward pace. The farm loomed closer, its barn a great, shadowed jaw, its hayricks like sleeping yellow beasts. A reckless, greedy thought bloomed in him, the kind that only children and kings can entertain without shame. He stepped directly into her path, forcing her to halt.

“Give one egg to me, O’ fat Hen.”

The effect was immediate and terrifying. The hen’s sideways gait ceased. She pulled herself up, and for a single, shocking moment, she was not fat or weary or old. She was a feathered column of fury. Her neck stretched out, thin and reptilian, and her eyes—those small, wet, black buttons—ignited with a fierce, dry fire.

“By god,” she rasped, and the words came out as a scalding whisper. “I have none.”

The boy stepped back, stung less by the refusal than by the violence of it. The air between them seemed to curdle. “But you said eleven or twelve,” he whispered, pointing a grubby finger. “What happened to the eggs, O’ fat Hen?”

The fire in her eyes did not die. It turned inward, a low, smoldering grief. She looked past him, toward the dark mouth of the barn, toward the places where foxes creep and rats scuttle and the cold indifference of the world seeps through the gaps in the walls. Her comb, that flopped-over bonnet, trembled.

“God’s curse!” she says.

And the boy, standing at the edge of the woods with the kindling forgotten at his feet, felt the afternoon grow suddenly, profoundly cold. He understood then that he had not been speaking to a hen at all, but to a small, feathered chronicle of loss. The eleven or twelve were ghosts. The warmth she carried was the memory of a warmth she had failed to keep. She walked sideways not by choice, but because the weight of her empty nest had pulled her off course, turning her toward the farm, toward the same dry straw, the same hopeless duty, the same god whose curse was simply this: to make a mother, and to give her nothing to mother but the cold shape of what she had already lost.

He stepped aside. The fat hen passed. And as she disappeared into the long shadow of the barn, she was already murmuring again, a soft, rhythmic clucking that might have been a lullaby, or might have been a prayer, or might have been the slow, aching count of all the eggs that never felt a thing. *Eleven or twelve. Eleven or twelve. *

Fat hen

Where will you go, you fat old hen, 

Walking sideways, past the glen? 

 

I go to the farm, the warm hay bed, 

To give my eggs the heat I've spread. 

How many eggs do you keep? 

Eleven or twelve in a nest so deep. 

Then give me one, dear hen, I plead. 

By God, I have none—not one small seed. 

 

What stole your eggs, what cruel design? 

She sighs, *God's curse! *—and that is mine.