11
Angela woke up to the feeble sound of a chicken attempting to cock-a-doodle-doo. She looked out the window: the world was colored beautifully by the morning sun. She smiled; then she remembered her finger. She pulled her hand out from under her pillow and inspected it.
“Jesus!” she said, flinching at the sight.
The entire lower segment of her right index finger was red and swollen. She touched it gingerly and recoiled at the stinging feeling.
She got out of bed and walked to the kitchen, cradling her finger in her left hand. She sat down at the table as the crooning chicken continued its morning song. She picked up the bottle of pills that Elijah had given her and emptied it out into her hand.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight” she said, touching each pill as she counted. She picked up number eight and threw it into her mouth, swallowing it dry.
It was her third day taking penicillin, and her finger hadn’t gotten any better. She was beginning to worry that it was actually getting worse.
She thought of Ron as she felt the pill falling slowly down her throat. “You took something,” he had said. She wondered how long it would take for his daughter to realize he wasn’t lying. Everyone would find out that she’d been stealing from her workplace, and she would be taken away from her chickens for trying to take care of them.
As she sat at the kitchen table, she looked down at the floor and saw two of her chickens strutting around by her feet, seeming to look up at her expectantly.
“I know,” she said. “You need to eat.”
They weren’t very affectionate, but their simple presence—their repetitive, machinelike movements—their clucks—soothed her. They offered the only relief from the constant anxiety the pimple had brought.
Maybe she should’ve never gone to the doctor in the first place. The medication she got wasn’t even working. She should’ve just handled it on her own. Nothing good ever came from leaving her trailer.
Maybe she shouldn’t have started stealing the feed in the first place. But it made the chickens so happy! She had to do what was best for her chickens, even if it meant breaking the rules. Shouldn’t rules be disobeyed in situations like this?
She suddenly felt angry. Had Elijah given her the wrong medication? Was he underestimating the problem? She felt embarrassed by the fact that she’d trusted someone so inexperienced to make a decision like this.
She remembered that he had told her to come back if it didn’t get better. Without a second thought, Angela left her trailer, got in her car, and drove away.
She remembered that she hadn’t fed the chickens.
“Shit.”
She turned around, rushed back inside, threw some feed in the usual spot on the kitchen floor, got back into her car, and drove away.
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