Decorative Chicken

DEDICATION

FOR ORION,
the real-life inspiration behind this story: a tattooed menace made almost entirely of bravado, whose natural predator is apparently what happens when you make a turkey louder, more territorial, capable of flight, equip it with spurs, and dress it for the Met Gala.

After careful consideration, I removed your proposed retaliation from the story.
Ninety-nine dead peacocks hanging in my house was a bit much, even for fiction

Tess had slept in my bed four nights that week, which was an impressive commitment for someone who kept insisting we were broken up. Her boots were still beside my front door. Her black boxer briefs were tangled in yesterday’s jeans on my bedroom floor. That morning, she’d kissed the back of my neck while I made tea and told me she loved me.

At two that afternoon, I found out she had a girlfriend.
Not technically a girlfriend, according to Tess.
This distinction became important.

“We broke up.”
She paced across my kitchen, sleeves shoved to her elbows, gesturing like she could physically rearrange the facts if she moved her hands fast enough.

“You’ve slept here four nights this week.”
“And?”

I stared at her.
She stared back.
The audacity was almost beautiful.

“You told me you loved me yesterday.”
“I do.”
“You called me at midnight Tuesday because you couldn’t sleep without me.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You said when things settled down, we could look at places with a yard.”
“I said we could.”
“You’re dating someone else.”
“Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

There it was. I tapped one painted nail against my wineglass and watched the faint crescent of my lipstick tremble against the rim.

“Does she know that?”
Tess stopped pacing.
Interesting.

“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Do that thing where you turn everything into a fucking deposition.”
“I asked one question.”
“You know exactly what you’re doing.”

I did. That was generally the problem. Three hours earlier, a mutual friend had asked whether I was okay with Tess seeing someone. Apparently everyone had received the memo except me. I’d spent those three hours rereading months of messages.

T: I just need some time.

T: When things settle down.

T: Of course I still love you.

T: You know you’re my person.

Not one promise. Not quite. Tess had built an entire relationship out of emergency exits.

“You knew what I thought this was,” I said.
Her jaw tightened.
“Mal.”
“You knew.”
“I told you we weren’t back together.”
“And then you climbed into my bed.”
“You let me.”

I laughed once. Wrong response.
Tess’s shoulders squared.
“I’m serious. Don’t act like I manipulated you because you decided this meant something it didn’t.”

That one landed. I slipped my rings off one at a time and set them beside the glass. Tess mistook my silence for surrender. She always did. Tess fought like fire: hot, immediate, convinced anything still standing when the smoke cleared belonged to her. I preferred architecture.

“You said you were coming home.”
“I said I wanted to.”
“You said you loved me.”
“I do.”
“While dating her.”
“We. Broke. Up.”

Each word arrived with its own hand gesture. I looked at her boots by my door. Her sweatshirt hung over the back of my chair, enormous enough that its sleeves covered my hands when I wore it. Her shampoo was still in my shower.

“You really don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.”
“I think you heard what you wanted to hear.”

There it was.
Something inside me went very still.

“So if every individual word is technically true,” I said, “it doesn’t matter what you make someone believe?”

Tess rolled her eyes.
“I never lied to you.”

She grabbed her boots.

By the time the door slammed, Tess thought she’d won. I stayed at the kitchen table, tapping one pink nail against the stem of my glass.

I never lied to you.

Interesting. And then, for absolutely no reason at all, I remembered the only living creature Tess was afraid of.

Tess was afraid of exactly one animal. Not snakes. Not spiders. Not the enormous dog that once broke its leash and charged us outside a gas station. Tess had stepped between me and that thing without thinking, one arm across my chest, and shouted until it reconsidered several generations of its ancestry. Peacocks, though? Peacocks were different.

“They’re Satan’s birds,” she told me the first time I learned this.

We were six months into dating, lying in bed at two in the morning, trading childhood humiliations. Tess had made the mistake of mentioning her fourth birthday. There had been a party. A petting zoo. A peacock. And somewhere in her mother’s possession, video evidence.

“You got chased by a peacock?”
“I was four.”
“You ran from a peacock.”
“It was trying to kill me.”
“You’re almost six feet of tattoos and unresolved anger.”
“Correct.”
“And your natural predator is a decorative chicken.”

Tess rolled onto her side and pointed at me.
“It’s a demon with curtains.”

I laughed until I couldn’t breathe.
“Laugh all you want. They’re fucking mean.”
“Satan’s birds?”
“Satan’s birds.”
She lasted eleven minutes before laughing too.

I loved that memory once. Three days after Tess explained that she’d never lied to me, I remembered it differently. Tess would have done something immediate. She would have thrown my clothes onto the lawn or keyed something expensive, then defended herself at a volume that made rebuttal structurally impossible.

I opened my laptop. Anger, I discovered, was extremely productive when properly indexed. I researched peacocks. Then peafowl, because apparently revenge had taxonomy. I learned about temperament, size, transport, noise, and several facts that made Tess’s childhood assessment of their allegiance to Satan considerably less ridiculous.

I opened seventeen tabs. By tab nine, I had stopped being angry. By tab fourteen, I was having fun. There are people who can acquire peacocks in quantities that raise questions, and the people who ask those questions are apparently not the people who sell peacocks. The logistics took longer than the idea. I was patient. That was another difference between Tess and me. She believed anger should happen while it was hot. I thought some things improved after marinating.

Two weeks later, I bought a hundred peacocks.

Tess called at 7:14 on a Saturday morning. I let it ring twice.
“Mornin’.”

For a moment, there was only screaming. Not Tess. Something high and human tore through the phone, the kind of sound that should have belonged to a woman discovering a body. Then came frantic wingbeats, a crash, and Tess.

“MALLORY.”
I smiled into my coffee.
“Hi.”
“What the FUCK did you do?”
“You’ll have to narrow it down.”
“WHY IS THERE A PEACOCK IN MY BATHROOM?”

Another scream.
Closer this time.

“Sounds like there may be more than one.”
“There are fucking PEACOCKS EVERYWHERE.”

Something slammed repeatedly against a door.

“Are you barricaded in your bedroom?”
“No.”
“Tess.”
“I am handling it.”

A tremendous flutter exploded through the speaker.
Tess yelled.
The bird yelled louder.

“I’m in the bedroom.”
“Thought so.”
“I’m not scared of them.”

A peacock screamed again.
Tess screamed back.
I covered my mouth.

“Are you arguing with it?”
“GET SATAN’S FUCKING BIRDS OUT OF MY HOUSE.”
“How many have you counted?”
“COUNTED?”
“Yes.”
“Mal, I am not going out there to take fucking attendance.”
“How many do you think there are?”
“I DON’T KNOW. THEY KEEP OPENING.”

I paused.

“Opening?”
“Their fucking feathers!”
“Ah. Displaying.”
“I hate you.”

“How many?”
Silence.
“A hundred.”
Even the birds seemed to respect that.

“You put a hundred fucking peacocks in my house?”
“There’s no going back now.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“See, that’s an actual threat. Much less ambiguous.”

She hung up.

By the time I arrived, two animal-control vehicles were outside. Tess stood barefoot on the lawn, one boot dangling from her hand. There was a shallow red scratch down her forearm and something white streaked across the shoulder of her black T-shirt. I decided not to identify it. Her other boot was apparently still inside. She refused to discuss it.

A man emerged carrying a crate.
The peacock inside turned its head toward Tess.
Tess stepped backward.
I said nothing.

“Not one fucking word, Mal.”

The smell hit me at the doorway. Warm animal. Droppings. Dust. Something sour underneath it all. The living room looked alive. Feathers covered the floor in slick streaks of blue and green. Droppings spotted the rug, the couch, the coffee table. A lamp lay shattered beneath the window. One curtain had been ripped halfway from the wall.

Then something moved above me.

I looked up. Three peacocks were perched along the curtain rod. One opened its tail. In the cramped room, it was enormous. Dozens of black-centered eyes unfolded across the wall. For one strange second, it looked less like a bird than something the house had grown.

Tess appeared behind me.
“See?”
“Demon with curtains,” I whispered.
“Fuck. You.”

The removal took hours. The birds were everywhere. Behind furniture. Under tables. On cabinets. One exploded from a darkened bedroom when a responder opened the door, wings beating hard enough to scatter photographs from the dresser. Another had wedged itself behind a bookcase. One stood silently in Tess’s bathtub.

“Is that the bathroom one?” I asked.
“They all look like the bathroom one.”

By noon, the house had become a humid churn of feathers and noise. Every few minutes another scream ripped through it, close enough to make the muscles between my shoulders jump. Eventually someone announced the house was clear.

Tess immediately asked, “How many?”
A clipboard appeared. Numbers were checked.
“Ninety-seven.”

Tess turned toward me. I lifted my hands. Nobody went home. They searched again. Number ninety-eight was discovered in the guest room, perfectly silent behind a mound of clothes Tess had apparently intended to fold sometime during the current geological era.

“See?” Tess said.
She pointed at it as they carried it past us.
“They fucking hide.”

Another sweep. Nothing. Someone suggested the remaining birds might have escaped while the doors were open.

“They didn’t,” Tess said.
“Tess.”
“I know my house.”

Then a scream came from upstairs.
Everyone froze.
Tess slowly raised one finger toward the ceiling.
“Thank you!”

Ninety-nine was found on the top shelf of the linen closet. Nobody could explain how it had gotten there. After that, they searched until closets stood open, furniture had been shifted, and there was nowhere sensible left for a bird to be.

“One probably got outside during the commotion,” someone finally told Tess.
“No.”
“It happens.”
“No.”

She looked at me.
“You said a hundred.”
“A hundred.”

The last crate went outside. The door closed. And after hours of screaming, beating wings, scraping claws, breaking glass and people shouting over one another, the silence was enormous. A single blue-green feather drifted down from the curtain rod. Tess watched it land. Then she looked upstairs. I watched her listening. And for the first time that day, I stopped laughing.

Tess lasted until 11:43 that night.

T: There’s still one here.

I was in bed wearing her old hoodie, the sleeves pulled over my hands.

M: Thought you weren’t scared of them.

Three dots appeared immediately.

T: I’m not.

Then:

T: I heard it upstairs.

I smiled.

M: Then go get it.

She called instead.

“It’s in the fucking house.”
“You’ve narrowed it down.”
“I’m serious, Mal.”
“So am I. Go vanquish Satan’s bird.”
“I checked every room.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
“Congratulations.”
“Stop being an asshole.”

I could hear her moving as she talked. Doors opening. Lights clicking on. Tess conducted fear like an electrical current. It entered her as panic and came out as aggression.

“Maybe it left.”
“It didn’t.”
“You’ve said.”
“I know what I heard.”

The next morning, animal control came back. They found nothing. Two days later, Tess heard claws on the hardwood outside her bedroom. Nothing. Then something knocked over a bottle in the bathroom. Nothing.

By Thursday, she had developed a theory involving the attic. I enjoyed this more than I should have. Not because Tess was afraid. Because Tess was certain. Every empty room became further evidence that Number One Hundred was exceptionally good at hiding.

I could have told her.
Instead, I waited until Sunday.

Tess had gone out. I still had a key, another technicality neither of us had bothered resolving. The house smelled faintly of disinfectant beneath something stubbornly animal. Most of the feathers were gone. Most. I brought one with me. A long blue-green feather, glossy enough to catch the light, placed carefully beneath the radiator in her bedroom. Not hidden. Just difficult enough to find. Then I left.

Tess called forty-three minutes later.
“I fucking told you!”

I held the phone away from my ear.
“Told me what?”
“I found a feather.”
“In the house where a hundred peacocks spent several hours?”
“I cleaned this room.”
“Apparently not very well.”
“Mal.”

I looked down at my nails.
“What?”
“It was under my radiator.”
“That does sound like a place cleaning might have helped.”
“Fuck you. It’s still here.”

There was triumph in her voice now. That was the interesting part. The fear hadn’t disappeared. It had found something it liked better. A fight.

“I’m going to find the little fucker.”
“I’m sure you are.”

After we hung up, I deleted the feather from my mental inventory. That was the last thing I ever put in Tess’s house. Everything that came after belonged to her.

Tess did not unravel. Unraveling implied passivity. Tess mobilized. By the second week, Number One Hundred had become less a peacock than an enemy combatant.

T: Little fucker waits until I’m asleep, she texted me at 2:16 one morning.

M: Maybe it respects your schedule.

T: I’m going to kill it.

M: You’re losing a war to a decorative chicken.

She called immediately.
“It is not a chicken.”
“Sorry. Demon with curtains.”
“Laugh now.”
“I am.”
“I’m going to find it.”

That part, I believed. Tess approached the problem with the confidence of someone who had never considered the possibility that persistence and correctness might be separate things.

She bought a flashlight bright enough to interrogate aircraft. She inspected closets, cabinets, the attic, every space beneath every piece of furniture. She dragged her bed away from the wall after hearing scratching behind the headboard. Nothing. Pest control came. Nothing.

“They didn’t even look properly,” Tess told me.
“They were there for two hours.”
“Exactly.”
I wasn’t sure what amount of time would have constituted competence.

Then the bird developed habits. According to Tess, it preferred the second floor. It moved mostly after midnight. It knew when she turned the television off. Once, she heard three deliberate taps against the bedroom door.

Another night:

T: I saw it.

I sat up.

M: Saw what?

T: Blue. Hallway. It went around the corner.

For the first time, I didn’t answer immediately.
I hadn’t been inside her house since the feather.

M: Did you find anything?

T: No. It’s fucking with me.

I stared at that for a while. Tess was furious now, which seemed to comfort her. Fear could embarrass her. Anger never did. She stopped talking about getting the bird out. She started talking about winning. When a friend suggested maybe there wasn’t another peacock, Tess threw her out. When pest control refused a third visit without evidence, Tess called another company. When they found nothing, she bought tools. A vent cover came off first. Then another.

She sent me a photograph of a rectangular hole she’d cut beneath the upstairs return.

T: Found feathers in here.

I zoomed in. Dust. Insulation.
Something that might have been a feather if you desperately needed it to be.

I typed Tess, stop.
Deleted it.
Typed That proves absolutely nothing.
Deleted that too.

Finally:

M: You’re cutting holes in your house.

Her reply came instantly.

T: Because it’s in my fucking walls.

That was around the time I stopped finding it funny. Not because I felt guilty exactly. Guilt would have required me to regret the original idea, and I wasn’t there yet. But I had expected Tess to figure it out. At some point, surely, arithmetic would defeat pride. Instead, the less she found, the more elaborate Number One Hundred became. It knew when she was looking. It could stay silent for days. It had learned the house.

I stopped teasing her. Then I stopped answering. It didn’t matter. The bird no longer needed me. I had given Tess one feather and a number. She supplied everything else.

Tess went quiet for nine days. I noticed on the third. By the sixth, I had started checking my phone more often than I was willing to admit.

On the ninth, at 1:08 in the morning, it lit up on my nightstand.

T: I know where it is.

I stared at the message. I should have gone back to sleep.

Instead:

M: Where?

T: Come over.

Curiosity has always been one of my less survivable qualities. Forty minutes later, Tess opened the door. For a second, I thought I had the wrong house. The place wasn’t destroyed. Destroyed would have been easier to understand. It had been excavated. The entryway looked normal until I noticed the missing baseboards. The living room furniture had been pulled toward the center, leaving pale rectangles against the walls. Vent covers were stacked neatly beside a toolbox. Beyond them, drywall had been cut away in clean sections. Not punched. Measured. Removed. Pink insulation bulged between exposed studs.

“Tess.”
“I know.”
“You know what?”
“How it looks.”

I turned toward her. She looked exhausted. Gray T-shirt, work pants, unlaced boots. There was drywall dust in her dark hair and a fresh scrape across one knuckle.

“I don’t think you do.”

She ignored that.
“Come upstairs.”

Of course she did.
And of course I followed.

The hallway was worse. Part of the floor outside her bedroom had been lifted. Pencil marks covered the wall. Small arrows. Measurements. Tess crouched beside an open section of drywall.

“It comes through here.”

I looked into the darkness between the studs.
Nothing.

“I hear it on this side around midnight. Then it moves behind the bedroom wall.”
“Tess.”
“I tested it.”
“You tested the peacock.”

She shot me a look.
“I left food out.”

I pressed my lips together.

“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.”

I absolutely was.

She pointed toward the opening.
“Last night I heard it in there. I know I did.”

Something cold slipped beneath my amusement. I had given Tess an imaginary bird. She had spent weeks teaching it how to live.

“You need to stop,” I said.

Her expression hardened.
“Excuse me?”

“Put the wall back.”
“It’s in there.”
“No, Tess.”

Her whole body changed. Shoulders squared. Chin lifted. Exhaustion burned instantly into anger.

“Don’t fucking start.”
“I’m not starting anything.”
“Everybody keeps telling me what I didn’t hear in my own goddamn house.”

I looked at the holes. The tools. The exposed insulation.

“Tess.”
“I know what I heard.”

Then she stopped. Her eyes narrowed. For the first time since I’d arrived, she really looked at me. Not at my face. At my posture. My clean hands. The fact that I hadn’t glanced once toward the open wall when she’d said it was inside. Something moved behind her expression.

“You’re not looking for it.”
I said nothing.

“You’ve never looked for it.”
“Tess.”

Her voice dropped.
All the fire disappeared from it.
“You know where it is.”
She stepped toward me.
“Tell me where you put the last bird.”
“I didn’t put it anywhere.”

Tess stared at me.

“The last one.”
“There isn’t a last one.”

Her face tightened.

“They took ninety-nine birds out of this house.”
“I know.”
“You said there were a hundred.”
“I know.”

Silence. I watched her eyes move past me. The open wall. The exposed studs. The vent covers stacked downstairs. The flooring she’d pulled up. Weeks of sleep surrendered to scratching that stopped whenever she went looking for it.

Her face changed.
Not confusion.
Not yet.
Just the beginning of arithmetic.

“No.”
I said nothing.

“No, because I heard it.”
“I know.”
“I saw it.”
“I know.”

Her voice cracked around the edges.
“You put that feather under the radiator.”
I could have lied.
“Yes.”

Tess looked toward the wall again. All that empty space she’d opened trying to prove she was right. Then back at me.

“You let me do this.”

There were a hundred answers I could have given her.

You told me you heard it.

You said you saw it.

You were so sure.

Instead, I thought about Tess standing in my kitchen, explaining that what she’d made me believe was somehow different from what she’d actually said.

Her mouth opened.
Closed.

Then, very quietly:
“You lied to me.”

There it was.
For weeks, I’d wondered how long it would take her to hear herself.
I almost smiled.
Almost.

Tess looked around at what remained of her house.
Then at me.
“How many?”

I let her wait.
“Ninety-nine.”