Chicken Little Goes Shopping
Sam DeLeo
©
Copyright 2021 by Sam DeLeo
|
Photo by Arib Neko on Unsplash |
“What’s
that, Pop-Pop?” Albee said, pointing upward.
“Where?”
said Pop-Pop.
At
71, Pop-Pop, or Earl Sykes, wore thick glasses and his straggly gray
hair rimmed a large bald spot, effecting a bit of the demented
professor look.
“There,”
said his grandson Albee, “in the sky.”
“Hell
if I know, I got enough activity happening here on the ground to
worry about the sky.”
The
activity Earl referenced involved moving a sprinkler and rubber hose
to a different section of the backyard. He stepped methodically
through the yard holding the old metal sprinkler, as if divining
water instead of weakly spraying it over brown fescue. Albee,
recently graduated from college, regulated the hose behind him with
one hand while pushing his shoulder-length black hair behind his ears
with the other.
Earl
saw that Albee was still looking at the sky and followed the
direction of his grandson’s gaze until he located an orange and
yellowish dot fluttering hundreds of feet in the air.
“You
see it?” said Albee.
“Yep.
It’s probably one of those chickens pushing a shopping cart.”
“What?
Did you take too many of your meds again, Pop-Pop? It’s not
moving like a plane at all, or even a helicopter. Should we call the
police or somebody?”
“Dunno.
They might think we’re crazy. Let’s see how wet the grass
is over there.”
Next
to the feet of plastic chairs back on the cement patio, their beer
bottles caught flecks of the late afternoon sun. A bayonet, M60
cartridge belt, and small photo album sat on a faux-glass table. He
dug them out to pacify his grandson’s harping to look at them
again, though most of the previous requests occurred when Albee was
much younger. If war remnants could help convince his jobless
grandson to avoid enlisting in the armed services, he thought, he
ought to be able to accommodate a little rummaging.
The
hood of Earl’s beige sedan in the alley parking spot no longer
appeared to wrinkle in the heat. On the other side of the alley, old
two- and three-story houses tilted from their roots like crooked
teeth. In a yard two doors down, kids played with a seriousness that
made them look like tiny adults. Their grandmother, who had dyed her
hair green again, sat on the back stoop and did not return his wave.
Her expression gave him doubts she recognized the gesture.
Earl
had waited to water the lawn until the burn of mid-day passed. A
stillness settled in as the heat faded. The calm air likely convinced
Albee even more about the unusualness of the herky-jerky path of the
object above them.
“What
flies like that?” he said. “It’s like it’s
bouncing in the sky.”
“Hell,”
Earl said, looking around the yard, “all of it needs water.”
Earl
sat the sprinkler down where he stood and they walked back to turn on
the faucet and finish their drinks on the patio.
“Come
on, Pop-Pop. Back me up here, I’m not crazy. That is not an
aircraft.”
“No.
No, you’re right, Albee.”
“I
caught a short video of it on my phone. This could be something
historical here.”
The
orange and yellow dot continued to move erratically, but sank lower
in the sky. Albee convinced his grandfather to stand up again to get
a better look at it. Much of the blue had drained from the sky,
leaving a white veil, which set off the colors of the object in
higher contrast.
The
object drifted in front of them and seemed to rotate. Now, capped
black letters could be seen against the orange background. They read
“POLLO TO GO!” and beneath them was the yellow image of a
chicken pushing a shopping cart.
“What?”
Albee said. “It’s a chicken! You were right. A giant
balloon with a chicken on it.”
“It’s
that local Mexican restaurant chain,” Earl said. “They
used to send up gliders with banners, too. Pretty decent food.”
“Why
didn’t you just tell me that?”
“I
told you it was a chicken pushing a shopping cart,” he said, “I
can’t help it if you believe it or not.”
“But
you,” Albee started to speak and stopped, raising his hands and
dropping them to the side. He sat back down and shook his head.
Maybe
the temperature shift had caused a downdraft, because the balloon
kept falling, then suddenly picked up speed and quickly crossed out
of their view.
Earl
looked at his grandson and decided he would go get them a couple more
beers. He remembered with envy when he was younger like him, the need
to believe. Not so much in supra-human forces that could set things
right, that wouldn’t allow that rat captain to shoot the woman
and her young daughter running for their lives as they fled their
burning hut in Quang Ngai; wouldn’t allow the same captain to
receive an honorable discharge, become a state senator and now a
chief of police. Or even the need to believe in a force that rewarded
those who stopped the rat captains of the world. It was a belief in
something other than that, an unknown he’d lost a relationship
with, and so forgotten. Or maybe it was just belief itself he was
remembering, he thought, the freedom to let a mystery remain a
mystery.
Earl
looked up again. He could see thunderheads building on the horizon as
he made his way inside. When he returned with the beers, the clouds
had disappeared as if he’d never seen them, vanished back into
the white of the sky.
Sam
DeLeo’s writing has appeared in Glass Mountain, Hobart, Paste
Magazine, Culture Matters, and the London-based fiction magazine
Talking Soup, among others. He currently lives in Denver.
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