Jeff Landon
Harmony and Eggs
At night the insomniac
chickens wander about in loose gangs. They are
fat and careless and roam
amid the sleepy people on a commune called
Harmony and Eggs. The
chickens pick at grain between dry grass blades
and gather in a line to
parade the farm. People are sleeping. The
blind girl in her yellow
dress barks her terrible cough. She coughs
without stopping and her
mother sits beside her with a damp washcloth
for her daughter's head,
but it's just a cough, nothing serious. The
chickens leave her
be. They're not doctors.
In the shared kitchen, a
man talks on the house phone and eats from a
carton of ice cream. His
hands tremble. He used to drink but now he
eats ice cream. This is
the man who always remembers to feed the
chickens, and they gather
beneath his window to wish him strength.
The moon makes the
farmland look like ice, and the chickens loop
under the tractor that
the hippies don’t know to operate. They keep
moving, past the pickup
truck with a shot clutch, and the outdoor
bathtub. The chickens
move in a steady line like a snake made out of
chickens. A young man and
woman lay naked in the cornfield on a
blanket with their arms
wrapped lazily about each other. The chickens
respect their love and
privacy and move on to the swimming pool,
which is filled
with rusty tools. The terrible bluegrass
band plays their terrible
songs in the pool for the acoustics. The
mandolin player, a
disconsolate type, stops picking mid-chorus and
says, "Hello, you
chickens."
The Chickens move to the
front gate to welcome everyone back home. A
pair of headlights peeks
down from the top of the long driveway, and
the chickens wait and
pick bugs off themselves to look their best. A
girl named Raina gets out
of the car and sits on the edge of the
outdoor tub. The chickens
form a circle around her. She combs her
hair. She pulls something
out of the pocket of her jeans, a letter
she was going to send but
never will. She crumples up the paper and
jams it back into her
jeans. Raina never feeds the chickens, but
once, when it was
raining, she opened the door to the silo and the
chickens rushed in to get
dry. They remember. Raina lights the stub
of a joint, and blows a
trail of smoke to the chickens. They lean in
closer. She looks like
she wants to tell them something. They wait,
these chickens have
nothing but time. They never sleep and there’s
nowhere else to go.
Jeff Landon lives with his family in Richmond, Virginia,
and teaches at John Tyler Community College. His stories, online and
print, have appeared in Blip Magazine Archive, Crazyhorse,
Another Chicago Magazine, Other Voices, New
Virginia Review, Pindeldyboz, Hobart, FRiGG,
Smokelong Quarterly, Night Train, Quick Fiction,
Phoebe, and other places.