Laura opened the front door, kicked off her shoes, slid across the tiles of the foyer, passed the startled shih-tzu, Max, and through the dining room, into the kitchen.
“Laura,” her mother, Pam, said. “Would you shut the front door at least.” Pam sat in the dining room with a home decorations catalogue propped open on the table. The room smelled of nail polish remover from an open bottle and discarded balls of cotton lay strewn across the table. Max seized his opportunity and sauntered out the front door and into the Spring sunshine.
At five, Laura had the capacity to use tools—climbing on chairs, snipping open bags of chips and couch cushions with scissors. Pam would admit her child in after-school daycare, but then she herself would have no good excuse to not have a job.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator door hung open. Kneeled on the dirty tiles, Laura’s head poked into the fridge like a foraging rodent.
“Laura, what are you doing?” A brown head of lettuce rolled to the floor. The front door was still open. And Max, damn him, where was he? The nine year old shih-tzu harbored the wanderlust and some of the vigor from his puppy days. “Jesus, Max,” she said. “Max,” she shouted into the living room. He wasn’t at the usual spot at the foot of the stairs. “Max,” she said again, and she listened for the sound of his nails scuffing against the wooden floors. “Laura, get your head out of the fridge and go wash up.” She didn’t wait for the girl to listen, and headed out the front door to find the dog.
When she returned, Max tucked under her left arm and seemingly pleased with himself, she found Laura sitting on the kitchen floor, with her back to the wall. She cupped something in her hands and softly cooed. The girl’s hair needed to be combed.
“Laura,” she said. “What do you have there?”
“A baby chick. Harry—I need to warm him.” The chick was dead but had almost finished forming. Blue alien eyes, bulbous and closed stuck out from its tiny head, and yellow, blood-stained spikes, the future feathers, ran down its back.
“Oh my god,” her mother said. She ran to the cupboard and grabbed a plastic bag. “Throw that in here,” she said. “Throw it out.”
“But it’s my chick. Chick. Chick.” She presented the dead chick to the air, as if the motion might allow the bird to fly. Her mother grabbed the fetus and threw it in the bag. “My chick. What did you do?” Laura said, violently, as if Pam had stolen the small girl’s very own child.
“Go to your room, Laura.”
How could she not know? The bird had felt like chicken meat from a grocer. “Wash your hands, and go to your room,” she said. “Go to your room.”
When Pam went up to Laura’s room fifteen minutes later, she found the girl sprawled out on the floor coloring a picture of the dead baby chick. With red crayon she had swiped a smile on the fetus’ lips. Pam lifted the spiral notebook that Laura had been drawing in. In all, Laura had drawn thirty-four pictures of “Harry.”