Counting Down the Days

May 25/26: A Cycle

(A/N: didn't post yesterday so here's an extra long one to make up for it. Fair warning, this is a VERY weird story)

The man purchases the chicks as newborns. They are fluffy, and if you bend near enough you can just hear them peeping. He brings them home in a plastic bin and keeps them in the cellar. The bin is covered by a steel wrack, and a strong bulb is positioned above it all. The floor of the bin itself is a soft layer of wood shavings. The chicks huddle together under the warmth of the bulb. Their tiny, shaking bodies are unequipped for anything else.
One dies on the first night. The light burns out, and the creeping midnight chill of August sets in. The chick doesn't freeze by human standards. It just... stops living.
The autumn is long this year. The sun rises every day with a weak smile, but it lingers all the same. The chicks grow fast, and soon they are strong enough for life outside of the bin.
Most of the chickens —because they are chickens now— are strictly egg layers. Seven are destined to be stuffed with vegetables and then roasted. Their poor little bodies are so fat that they can hardly walk. They waddle in a way that natural selection would surely have stamped out centuries ago had man given it the chance.
Even so, they live good lives. They roam free across the fields, and feed happily on bugs, compost, and apples. And when the man and his daughter load them up into cages and put them in the back of the car, they are none the wiser.
The winter passes. Several, excellent roast chicken dinners are eaten. The hen-house is warmed with an electric heater, and all is well.
Then, springtime comes. The snow melts slowly, and a green blush comes over the lawns of grass and squelching mud. The chickens are doing well. Too well, in fact. There are so many eggs that the family doesn't know what to do with them. They make quiches and frittatas, omelettes and pumpkin pies. Even so they struggle to keep up with the daily onslaught of eggs.
Having too many eggs is disturbing to the man. Long ago, the man's parents were dirt-poor and starving, so the man was taught as a child to live conservatively and waste nothing. The man was raised with memories that were not his own, memories of shortage and hardship, so plenty and excess fill the man with panic.
One day, he goes to the hen house and grabs a chicken by the neck. He studies it as it twists and struggles in hand. He thinks about the panic he feels, and the memories that do not belong to him. He thinks about times of plenty and times of hunger. He wants to kill the chicken and eat it to calm his nerves but in the end he releases it and returns to his work. The chicken lives.
The days pass by, then months, then years. A few more chickens join the ranks of the original fifteen. The single, huddled chick that died all that time ago is forgotten. Instead, three chickens wander away into the woods never to be seen again. At least two are snatched and carried away by a hawk. One is chased by a hawk until its heart gives out and it dies of fright. A few drop dead in their old age. The three remaining are now so old that they hardly lay eggs at all.
The man must supplement his egg supply with ones from the store. These eggs are sterile white and ice cold. He looks back on the time when there were so many eggs he was overcome with panic. He wonders idly about the nature of surplus and deficit: the tides that come and go at random and casually devastate mens' lives. There is now a great plague sweeping across the land and the economy is collapsing in a way that it hasn't in nearly a century. There are already reports of food shortages in some areas.
Nearly a century ago, a boy and a girl once grew up dirt-poor and hungry. When they got older and things got better, they still never turned their heat on, even in winter, and all the money they eventually earned was crammed into a safe or preserved in government bonds. Even though neither of them live to see the cycle restart itself, their son carries their memories with him, memories that are not his own. But the good thing about memories that are not your own is that, even though they're a part of you, they are not all of you. Even though the man carries his parents with him, he does not become them.
He purchases more chickens.