Hens and Chickens by Jennifer Wixson Read Free Book Online Page B

the jumbled mass of thoughts and feelings in Lila’s breast, however – feelings of anger, confusion, and frustration – perhaps she might have continued the conversation.  
    There were times – such as this evening – when it infuriated Lila that she was born a woman, not a man. She regularly threw on oversized clothes or tried to hide her sexuality beneath a man’s shirt, desperately wanting to be treated as a person first and foremost, not as a desirable woman. Unfortunately, no matter what she did, Lila couldn’t disguise her vulnerable feminine allure from any man aged 12 to 112. Sometimes she longed to go and live someplace where she could just be known for herself – Lila Woodsum – not as a potential “piece of ass.”  But unless I move to a place without any men at all, she thought, that isn’t likely to happen.
    “Isn’t this beautiful countryside?” Rebecca gushed. “I love the fields; the farm land. It’s so romantic, isn’t it, Lila?”
    “Uh, totally. Just what I pictured . . . oops,” Lila said as they drove by the intersection for Route 7, the Moosehead Trail. “I think we’ve gone too far.” Lila regarded her phone. “We should have taken a right turn a couple of miles back onto Russell Hill Road, sorry—I spaced it.”
    Rebecca turned around at the next driveway and within five minutes they were lumbering slowly up the Russell Hill Road, a secondary back road that was lined with snow-covered stone walls and ancient maple trees. The sun had set, and Rebecca proceeded cautiously as the light quickly evaporated from the evening sky. “I didn’t realize how dark it is in the country without street lights,” she said, laughing nervously.
    Lila spotted the shoulder of a full moon pushing its way up the eastern horizon. “Don’t worry, there’s a full moon on the way up,” she said. As Lila gazed at the ethereal moon, all her negative thoughts evaporated. Instead, she felt a germinating sense of wonder and belonging.
    “How do you know the moon is rising, Ms. Nature?” Rebecca teased.
    Lila tittered, like a jubilant chickadee. “ ‘Cause I can see it through trees!” She pointed to the crest of the moon now clearly visible through a stand of pine trees halfway up the hill. The waxen moon was rising fast, and looked like a roving spotlight as it glided up the hill. Lila’s heart skipped a beat. “Stop a sec, will you?”
    Rebecca obliged, and Lila rolled down her window and breathed in a lung-full of sharp, fresh winter air. “Ahhhh!” she exclaimed. “Now THAT is the smell of liberty!”
    “It’s certainly a far cry from Boston,” agreed Rebecca. “Or even Roxbury, for that matter.”
    While the two friends sat companionably in the parked car, the fat moon slipped up beyond the outstretched fingers of the treetops and floated majestically in the night sky. Lila spied a pair of white tail deer cavorting under a gnarled crabapple tree in the sparkling snow-covered field to her right. She pointed the deer out to Rebecca, exclaiming; “I haven’t seen a deer since I was a kid!” The two deer, hearing Lila’s high-pitched voice through the open car window, scampered off to the safety of the thick woods that lined the far edge of the field.
    “Omigod, look at that tree, Becca!”
    A hundred yards up, on the left hand side of the road, an ancient maple tree was split dramatically in half and stood like a sentinel, with one thickset arm raised to the sky and the other bent graciously to the ground. Into the devastated grounded limb, some imp had carved steps into the wood, creating a set of stairs that led up into the leaf-less canopy of the tree. 
    “The tree is welcoming us!” cried Lila.
    “It is very unusual,” said Rebecca, putting the car in gear and proceeding cautiously up the hill toward the split maple tree.
    “Hey, there’s a big old house in back there,” Lila continued eagerly, leaning forward in her seat. “I don’t see any lights, though. Maybe