Flint

The Great Chicken God

The baby chick is the only non-chocolate thing in Finn’s Easter basket, and it’s awful what we did, and we knew it, kind of, when we were doing it, but we did it anyway, even though we didn’t mean it to turn out the way it did.  

But The Great Chicken God saw. And like any God, The Great Chicken God is a terrible God. A good and terrible God.  

So it’s no surprise it put a pox on both our houses that left every child blistered and scratching, covered in Calamine lotion and scabs. Me and Finn, my sister, his little sister Quinn, and his older brother Bryan were all consigned to oatmeal baths and endless hours reading in bed. Not even new baby Roan was spared from the contagion, and he’d just been baptized into the Catholic Church two weeks ago.  

I never got a chance to ask Finn before his family moved away if he thinks it just explains the stuff that comes after, or does it explain the before, too? I mean, we knew better. We were old enough.  

You want to know what we did. I’ll confess.  

We took the chick to the side of the house and set it on the ground. I stole a Raggedy Ann doll, a change purse, a stuffed rabbit. I cursed in swear words anytime grownups weren’t around. I never paid the Bookmobile for the hardcover copy of The Exorcist my mother tore up when she found it in the closet, hidden under all my Noddy books.  

We wanted to see what the chick could do, but it couldn’t do much, really, except be small and yellow and fuzzy, so we tried to teach it some tricks, but it didn’t know how to learn them. I coveted Finn’s family, John’s family, Nancy’s and Brianna’s and Simone’s and Sharon’s families, my first cousins’ family.  

We decided to see how long the chick could hold its breath. I didn’t like putting my father’s penis in my mouth. So we took turns counting, and covering its nostrils. My sister fell off the swing and broke her arm. It could do five seconds, easy. Her fingers broke when she caught them in the garage door. Twelve seconds, fourteen, it could stand, and walk. My father left my mother.  

Three seconds more was three seconds too long.

Flint is a queer writer with a keen interest in hybridity, generative genre tampering and upsetting the applecart of heteronormative discourse about sex/uality. A 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction, Flint earned an MFA in Writing from CalArts, and her work appears or is forthcoming in Beyond Queer Words, The Offing, Arts & Letters (Unclassifiable Contest winner), Staging Social Justice, CutBank, and Erotic Review, among numerous other publications and anthologies.