just one of the girls

When ten year-old Patrick first entered the henhouse it was the smell that overtook him. He thought it sweet, not sentimentally so, but as in the way the smell of baking might overtake a house. His closest brush with nature, up until this point, had been to carry six eggs home from the grocery around the corner, which sat between a Bar & Grill and a Dry Cleaners, where the smell was of beer, cigarettes and toluene. In the henhouse he had a feeling of familiarity, but in no way could he have described it. When the warm freshly laid egg was put in his hand, when he saw his first night sky dusted so thick with stars, when he heard the absolute silence of midnight, he felt rooted, as if his legs were growing out of the dirt. On the seventh day, when he and the other boys piled into the back seat of the huge Buick to go back to the city, he cried. His tears came as much as a surprise to him as they did to everyone else in the car. As he sobbed, the salty rivulets ran across his face like swollen streams in a downpour.