Hank the Were Rooster #11: The Chickens Down the Block
Suburbia is a strange place, and the people who live there are ever weirder. Hank is normal in comparison to most, thank you very much. How else do you explain the neighbor at the end of the block who keeps chickens in her backyard?
It’s totally legal, she always tells people before they can even ask. So long as she only has a few, the city council has no laws against it. That’s not the same thing as legal, but given his own activities, Hank can’t argue with her.
The chicken coop dominates most of the backyard, even though only four chickens live there. They cluck and squawk a lot, but even though Hank’s tried to pass off his morning shouts as coming from the chickens, no one believes him. Probably because chickens haven’t mastered the English language.
Most of the time, Hank ignores the chickens. He rarely even goes past that house: it’s down the block from him, and when he leaves and come back home, he goes up the block.
One day, in a moment of health-madness, Hank decides he’s going to get in shape. He’s not horribly out of shape, but he’s getting close to middle-aged so it wouldn’t hurt to do some jogging. So twice week, after he gets home from work, he puts on sneakers and runs around the block. ‘Run’ is generous for the speed he achieves, but everyone starts out slow, and the important thing is that he’s trying.
The first few runs, he doesn’t think anything of it when he passes the chicken coop. He’s listening to music, so he doesn’t even hear the clucking. On his fifth run, there’s a squawk that’s loud enough that he can hear it over his music. He slows down, notes the coop in the backyard, mentally shrugs, and keeps going.
Hank keeps a detailed schedule on an app with multiple reminders of when he’s getting close to the full moon. The schedule now keeps track of his exercise too. When, three months into his healthy era, his twice-weekly jog falls on the same day as the full moon, he initially thinks nothing of it. His problem doesn’t appear until after dark, and he’ll finish his jog well before that.
The day of the full moon comes. He’s feeling twitchy, but that’s normal. He wonders whether that might help him jog faster. He puts on his sneakers and heads out.
He is feeling more energetic, he soon decides. That makes him smile. Maybe it’s because of the full moon, but he also hopes it’s because he’s getting into shape. The run isn’t as hard as it usually is.
He gets into the flow. His feet move, the neighborhood goes past, and the music keeps him going. He’s breathing hard, but it feels good.
Then he comes back to his block, down the far end. Though his legs still have plenty of energy in them, he slows down after just a few houses. Hank frowns. A glance around shows he’s at the house with the chickens, but so what? With a shake of his head, Hank makes himself go faster.
He finishes his run, takes a shower, and does the best he can to prepare for the full moon. As always, despite his best efforts, when the moon comes up, he’s soon out of the house and stalking across his yard, elbows flapping at his sides as he tries to use his arms to fly.
Every other full moon, he’s stayed in his back yard. That’s bad enough, since he’d prefer to stay inside his house. It’s better than running wild through the neighborhood. Until now, he hadn’t thought that might happen.
This night, he opens the gate and leaves his backyard, clucking softly as he goes. The human part of him is vaguely aware of where he’s going, enough to keep him out of the street so he doesn’t get run over by a car.
What route Hank took that night, he couldn’t say. Somehow, though, he ended up down the block, at the house with the chicken coop in the backyard.
He tries a few times to walk through the fence, with no success. If there’s a gate, his rooster-brain can’t find it. So he manages to do what no rooster has done before. He climbs over the fence.
It’s probably a good thing that Hank doesn’t remember everything that happens to him while he’s a rooster. Because he’s a heterosexual man who’s currently a rooster, and there are four female chickens nearby.
It’s also a good thing that he can’t get the door to the coop open. Humping the side of a chicken coop is bad enough, but at least he didn’t manage to do more.
The next morning, when Hank realizes what’s happened, he quadruple-locks his gate. (Well, first he cleans his clothes from the night before.) There’s no way he’s getting out of his backyard during the next full moon.
He then spends the rest of the day telling Stacy that he loves her and isn’t interested in anyone else and that he’s never touching a chicken again.
