Áine and the Chicken

Published in The Apiary, 2021.

It was her son’s birthday, and this year instead of gifts, he simply asked to know who his father was. This greatly displeased her, of course, but she realised that when she was his age, she too wished to know all the great secrets of the world. So, she led him into the garden, ordering him to cover his eyes, steered him towards the chicken coop which contained one lonely chicken and said, “This is your father.”

When he opened his eyes, he laughed, for there seemed no possible way that this could be his father. It was a chicken after all!

She looked at him reproachfully. “Do you think your mother would lie to you?”

He gazed at her, then at the chicken, then back at her again. “How could this be my father? He’s a chicken, mam.”

“Yes,” she replied simply. “He is a chicken. But he wasn’t always. He used to be a very important man, a bit like a King. He had land, and he had servants and he even had a crown which he would sometimes wear. I met him when I was only a little girl, much the same age as you. But he was much older, older than I am now. And he told me,” she ducked down, impersonating the deep voice of someone of authority. “Áine, you are glorious, you are as radiant as the sun, yet your eyes are as cold as night. What will it take for me to warm them so?”

The boy looked at his mother in giddy scepticism. The chicken stood very still, watching them both.

“But he was a bad man, my child. When I said I didn’t want to court with the likes of him, he took it upon himself to…” she trailed off, pondering on how to phrase her next words best. “Well, he just wasn’t very nice. So, one night when he was especially horrible, I put a spell on him to transform him into a chicken, so that he may never be horrible to another girl again.”

The boy erupted in laughter once more, turning on his heel to leave his mother alone with the chicken, shaking his head. “You’re very silly, mam.”

She rose to her feet, and the way the sun seemed to catch itself in her orbit made it look as though she were glowing. She watched her son nervously, for he carried with him an air that sat quite unnaturally with her. Too like his father, she thought.

With a smile, she turned to the chicken. It tilted its head at her, almost knowingly.

“I’ll make a banquet out of you one of these days,” she said, grinning. “It’ll be glorious.”

But the chicken only did in response as chickens usually do, and that’s not very much at all.