by Becca Borawski Jenkins

Sofia is the youngest hen and she comes running whenever we cook hamburgers on the grill. Today she took flight in pursuit of a dragonfly. It was quite a large dragonfly, I’ll give her that. It would have been worth the effort.

I remember the first time I threw a carcass to the flock. I’d made broth from a rabbit’s bones. I’d thought the hens would like the carrots and celery, but later I’d find the vegetables all exactly where I’d tossed them. It was a week before I found even some of the bones—smooth and clean like an archaeological find.

A week after that, I roasted a store-bought chicken. I thought we’d eaten every feasible morsel, I just wanted to see what they’d do. Oh, what they did—I could barely watch. When I did glance, they were looking at me, with their heads slightly sideways, that one-eyed stare.

We had to stop letting them out in the yard—they cause too much destruction and when I bend forward to tend the remains of the flowers they peck at my hands—so now I go into the coop twice a day to feed them. I told my husband, “God forbid I have a heart attack in there.”

Becca Borawski Jenkins is a writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Cinema-Television Production from USC. She lives with her husband in an RV they built by hand, on an off-grid homestead somewhere in the Idaho Panhandle.