FROSTBITE

The snow muffles the sound of Dawn’s tires. In other seasons, this last part of her drive is the noisiest—sparsely spread gravel crunches, sticks snap, leaves fall onto the windshield and scuttle down the hood. By February she will resent this, the strain of driving right after a storm. Vermont winters are one long chore, like canning tomatoes or steaming gowns at her store before prom season—the only way to get through it is to lower your head and settle in. But tonight Dawn feels giddy over the first snowfall, the way it coats and soundproofs the brittleness of winter.

She chews on the inside of her lip. “No one’s plowed yet. Might not’ve gotten the chance to even attach plows.”

Dawn slows as little as possible for turns, maintaining momentum. She wills the car to keep uphill motion, wills there to be no black ice, nothing to veer her into the ditch where she would lie battered and unconscious until someone came along in the morning. 

When she makes her final left, she pats the dashboard, twice. “Snow chains—who needs them?”     

As the headlights sweep across her driveway, Dawn spots a mound of red perched on top of the mailbox. The red seems to be moving, rippling against the white.

“Would you look at that,” she says, straining her neck to see behind her. “I believe there’s a chicken on the mailbox.” She puts the car in park, pulls the key out of the ignition. “Has to be frozen to death. I’ll have to chisel the thing off. Or maybe I’ll leave it, and Nick won’t be able to deliver my mail until spring.” If she is at home when Nick comes, she hurries out to meet him, and their exchange follows a usual course:  

“Nothing but bills again, I’m afraid.”

“You know, Nick, you should feel free to skip my house. Really! I won’t mind!”

“Wait, here’s a catalog. Land’s End.”

“I never should’ve ordered that blouse from … wherever it was. They must’ve sold my name to every other catalog peddling old lady clothes.”

“You’re not old, Ms. Wheeler.”

“No, I guess not.” She uses her bills and catalogs to wave goodbye.

When Nick first started on her route it was summer, and he wore shorts. Even though he was sitting in his delivery truck, his quads and calves bulged as though he were flexing. And she had the thought, fleetingly, that maybe this boy would be up for a Mrs. Robinson kind of fling. Then she remembered her own thighs, starting to hang slack below the hem of her gardening shorts—the only shorts she wore anymore—and she had to bend over she laughed so hard. But it was nice to have chats with someone, a person who wasn’t a customer, who wasn’t Charlotte.

Dawn climbs out of the car, cautiously planting her duck boots, then trudges down the drive, sinking shin-deep in the snow on every step. She keeps her eyes trained on the mailbox, squinting until it comes into focus.

“I’ll be damned. There is a chicken on the mailbox.” She steps closer to the chicken and pulls off a glove so she could run a finger along its feathers. It is warm, but doesn’t move. 

“Old girl, are you still alive or not?”

As though it hears her, the chicken squawks. 

Dawn reaches for the chicken and tucks it under her arm, explaining how she doesn’t usually invite chickens she’s just met into the house, but she’ll make an exception this once, because of the sub-zero wind chill.

Not wanting to slog through fresh snow again, she stretches out her leg to step inside the tracks she already made on her way to the mailbox. But with an “Oh!” she goes still, balancing on one leg, boot in mid-air. 

A brown chicken sits inside her footprint. The snow comes past its head, but it extends its neck to look at Dawn, blinking away the snow crusted around its eyes. 

Setting the red hen on her hip, Dawn picks up the brown one. It is livelier; it tries to peck her hand, but she worms her palm underneath its body. It settles once she has it in her arms; it nuzzles its head into a fold of her coat.

Dawn steps into the chicken’s vacated spot, starts to lift her back foot. She yelps then, and stumbles, snow coming in through the top of her boot. 

A yellow chicken sits in the next footprint, staring right at her, head cocked to the side. 

Dawn straightens her back and looks out across the yard.

Four more chickens sit along the driveway, one in every footprint, their feathers glittering with a thin dusting of snow.

Dawn gets a few moving boxes from the garage and sets them up in the laundry room, layering old bath towels in the corners of the boxes. There are two brown chickens, four light yellow, and the red. They look festive sitting against the brown of the box, like decorations for Thanksgiving. 

“Where did you ladies come from, hmm?” Dawn bends over to stroke one of the brown chicken’s heads. 

She figures she already knows: they got dumped. “Don’t take it personally,” she tells them. “People are always leaving animals by the side of the road around here. The nearest shelter is in Pittsford, 30 miles away. And it’s not like the shelter would take you. You’re chickens!”

Still, she wonders who would do this, abandon chickens right after a storm, after the sun has gone and left the mountain ice dark, after icicles have sprouted from roofs and cars and electrical lines like permanent teeth coming in. 

Maybe they had stopped laying eggs. Maybe they were holding a fight club at night, causing a ruckus in the coop that kept the owner’s kids awake. Maybe the owner had gotten a dog, and the dog had eaten one of the chickens, ravaged it to shreds, left slobbery wet feathers and bloody stringy bits strewn across the yard, and the owner figured, well, the chickens would be better off taking their chances in the snow. 

Maybe they had been dumped simply because the owner felt like he had a right to do so, because the chickens were simply too much, because the owner was simply a piece of shit.

One of the chickens squawks, and Dawn startles. She forces a laugh up her throat. The way her mind runs off.

These things did happen up here. Eaten livestock, dumped pets. These things are facts of life. But Dawn reminds herself: she does not have to let these facts clog her up inside.

Maybe the owner had wanted the chickens to experience life as free birds!

Maybe the chickens had decided to take a field trip! 

Maybe they had looked out the window of their coop at the falling snow and thought, it’s a beautiful night for a stroll! 

“I’ll call Charlotte,” Dawn says to the chickens. “What do you think? Maybe she’d want you.”

Charlotte doesn’t answer until the sixth ring, and when she does, she says, “Mom?” as in, “Mom, why are you calling after eight? Is everything okay?” 

Dawn smiles at her concern. “Everything’s fine. I’m calling because I found a whole coop’s worth of chickens outside.”

“What?”

“Chickens! I was at the store late. Pulling more scarves and mittens out from storage because of the weather, you know, and Merle can’t handle this kind of snow, and so I had to wait to leave until it finally knocked off, and when I pulled in to the house, there were all these chickens sitting in the yard. It was like whack-a-mole out there. Every time I turned around, there was another one.”

“Who is Merle?”

“My station wagon. You know that.”

There was a pause. Dawn can hear noise in the background on Charlotte’s end of the line. She is washing dishes, maybe, or filling a sippy cup for her toddler, Thomas. Charlotte is a good girl. She is the best kind of daughter. 

“And you’re calling me about the chickens because … ?”

“Well do you want them?”

“Mom, I don’t have room for chickens.”

“They won’t fit in your coop?”

“We don’t have that coop anymore. We knocked it down and put in a second greenhouse.”

“When did you do that?”

“Not that long ago. Before the first frost.”

“That was weeks ago.”

“Look, I appreciate you thinking of me, but I’ve got to go.”

“You could sell them.”

“To who?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Anybody. Lots of people around here want chickens.”

“I can’t take your chickens. I’m sorry.” Dawn hears Thomas start to cry. “I have to go, Mom.”

“Okay. Let me know if you change your mind.”

But Charlotte has already hung up.

Dawn pinches the phone between her chest and her chin as she rifles through the fridge. Stems of asparagus that sag in the middle. Two oranges with white pox of mold on the rinds. A loaf of whole wheat bread, moisture drops clinging to the inside of the plastic bag. Dawn grocery shops with good intentions but makes dinner choices with spontaneous abandon, as she considers cooking for one. But—she smiles and almost loses her chin’s grip on her phone—isn’t that lucky for the chickens? 

Dawn texts Charlotte to make sure feeding chickens past-the-expiration-date food is okay, then sets out her cutting board with gashes crisscrossing the wood, and slices the food into beak-sized portions. She sets her phone next to the cutting board, screen side up, but the screen stays dark.

When Charlotte moved to the house on the east side of their mountain two years ago, Dawn took over two paper grocery bags full of convenient meals, the kind of meals that sit uneaten in her own fridge: a rotisserie chicken, green beans that could be steamed right in the bag, potato salad, bagels and a quart of vegetable cream cheese. It was an old farmhouse, the kind the Vermont Department of Tourism liked to photograph, with a red barn and steel silo. Charlotte hadn’t wanted Dawn to help them move—they could do it themselves, she said, they didn’t have that much. When Dawn pulled in to drop off the food, Charlotte was bending over to lift a box, and her belly stretched her t-shirt taut. She was nearly four months along. They hadn’t wanted to tell people too soon. Dawn could understand that. Things could still go wrong in the second trimester. 

And Dawn understood when it turned out that living only nine miles apart did not result in daily visits with her daughter. Charlotte was busy being a vegetable farmer’s wife and Thomas’s mother, after all. They did have lunch on Sunday afternoons once a month, and celebrated the holidays they didn’t spend with Connor’s family in Connecticut. Which was only Easter, and that was because Connor’s family was not religious. But still Dawn understood—Connor’s family did not get monthly Sunday lunches.

Dawn uses her forearm to sweep the clusters of food from the cutting board into a metal mixing bowl, the biggest one she has. She slips the phone into her back pocket, so she can feel if it buzzes. 

The chickens peck intently at the food. “When was the last time you ate, my babies?” She fills saucers of water and as she sets them in the boxes, she sees that one has a patch of grey on that thing on top of chicken’s heads, the thing that looks like a doll-sized red glove. When she pokes at the patch, the chicken shrieks and shies away.

Dawn sits on the washing machine and types “Can chickens get frostbite” in a text to Charlotte and then, into the Safari search bar. They could—on their toes sometimes, but on their combs and wattles definitely. She texts “nevermind” to Charlotte and searches “chicken combs” and “chicken wattles” next. Combs are the red fleshy growth on top of chicken’s heads; wattles dangle from their beaks. 

A few show symptoms: combs and wattles lightening from bright red to grayish blue, swelling, tissue that is rough to the touch. Although Dawn wonders what chickens’ combs and wattles normally feel like—they look as though they always feel bumpy and rough. Charlotte doesn’t answer that text either, so Dawn assumes that means yes, these are frostbite symptoms. She jogs through the house assembling items for treatment: her aloe vera plant and washcloths soaked in lukewarm water—the paisley Pottery Barn washcloths, the ones that were too faded to sell at the store. Dawn holds a washcloth to every chicken’s comb and wattle for four minutes each, running the washcloths under hot water at the kitchen sink again and again.

Dawn understood, too, that Charlotte didn’t want to take over the thrift shop. Dawn had questioned if that rendered the name, “Charlotte’s Closet,” irrelevant, but decided it didn’t matter. Charlotte’s Closet had been the name for eleven years. Charlotte’s Closet had a Yelp page with an average 4 ½ star rating. Charlotte’s Closet gave her another place to display the photos of Charlotte in her high school dance costumes. It would be confusing to change it now.

The hens are surprisingly still as she works. One even shuts its eyes and leans into the washcloth, like it’s relaxing. “Can chixs relax????” she texts Charlotte. According to a YouTube video, “Help Chickens Relax!” they could. Dawn hypnotizes each of them just like the woman in the video, laying them on the grey-tiled laundry room floor, stretching out their necks, and then running her fingers along the floor away from the chickens until her hand is out of their line of sight. They watch her hand move away then seem to fall asleep with their eyes open. 

She snaps a stalk of her aloe vera plant in half, scoops the gel oozing from the stalk with her fingers, and dabs it on the chickens’ flesh. Wattles are especially susceptible to frostbite according to The Chicken Chick, so she globs extra onto their wattles.

She sits back on her heels, the drained aloe vera stalk in hand, and surveys the chickens sprawled across the floor. She takes a picture with her phone and sends it to Charlotte. “You can hypnotize chickens! 😂”

Dawn didn’t understand when she and Charlotte went for a pre-wedding massage (“to relax” Charlotte had claimed) and, after, Charlotte announced she wanted to walk herself down the aisle. Dawn was the only parent Charlotte had ever known. Theirs was a matriarchal family, a duo of strong women. It made sense for Dawn to give her daughter away. But Charlotte had insisted. Dawn hadn’t understood, either, when Charlotte said it would be easier if Dawn could come to them for Sunday lunches, that it was too much trouble to pack up Thomas’s things and get him in his car seat. Dawn had packed up Charlotte’s baby things by herself all the time. It wasn’t so hard. Dawn had also not understood when Charlotte requested she call less—she said they had a new phone plan with less data, but they could still text. Dawn had understood that, but then she offered to chip in for more data, and Charlotte said no. Dawn hadn’t understood that at all. But Charlotte does text back. She always texts back. 

Dawn looks at her phone again. Almost always, Charlotte texts back. 

“How to Treat Frostbite in Chickens For Dummies” instructs not to put a heat lamp on the frostbite, but to Dawn, a heat lamp seems logical. The chickens had been cold and now they needed to get warm. Simple. She rummages through the hall closet until she finds the heat lamp, puts the still-prostrate chickens back in their boxes, and positions the lamp directly over them.

As she bends the flexible arm of the lamp, Dawn sees the tip of one of the chicken’s combs has started to turn from grey to black. Actually, several of the chickens have darkening flesh. One of the sites mentioned something about this—that the black flesh should be trimmed away—or was it that the flesh should be left alone? Trimming it makes the most sense to Dawn. If it was black, didn’t that mean it was infected? Shouldn’t the infection be cut out? She texts Charlotte, she thinks maybe she should double-check online, but maybe the infection is setting in. Maybe the faster she cuts it away, the less it will spread.

She snatches the garden clippers hanging on a hook in the wall, holds the red chicken firmly by the neck, and shears the triangle of black flesh cleanly through. The sound the clippers make is thick, wet, like carving raw meat. The chicken writhes and squawks, but she makes it quick. She cuts and cuts until each chicken has only healthy red flesh left.

“There, there,” she tells them. “It’s all over now.” 

She checks her phone, one more time, but the screen only shows that it is 10:26. 

That evening, when Dawn was sorting the winter accessories, Tracy Simpson, Charlotte’s old dance teacher, came in to the store right before closing to browse the coat section. She had held up the green Hilfiger trench with black toggles and said, “Oh, Charlotte would love this! You should put it aside for her.” 

Dawn had reached for it with a smile, with a “You are absolutely right—how sweet of you to notice.” But when she took it to the back, she held it up by the hook of its hanger and chewed on the inside of her cheek until she bled. Charlotte had not come in to the store to wheedle freebies out of Dawn for … well. She set the coat in the re-sort bin, and then the trash, snipping off the toggles first to put in her mason jar of loose buttons.

Dawn has read in Dear Abby that many people her age have adult children incapable of making a life of their own, of making sensible decisions. So it is fine, really. Dawn feels proud to have raised an independent daughter. 

Then she realizes: it is 10:26. She tells the chickens, “Of course! Charlotte is asleep by 10:26.” They are huddled together in the corners, lying on the towels, panting, like cows grouped together under shade trees on summer afternoons. She takes one more picture on her phone, types “All chickadees in bed,” and sends it to Charlotte. The heat lamp glows orange against the dark as she pulls the door shut.

In bed, as Dawn waits for the Ambien to pull her under, she makes her list. This is what she does nightly: comes up with three things to be grateful for. She used to write them in a gratitude journal, but she felt guilty if she missed a day. Guilt is an emotion that clogs her, so now she simply thinks them to herself. 

She is thankful that Merle didn’t run over any of the chickens. It could’ve happened. She was so focused on the red chicken, the one on the mailbox, that she drove down the driveway looking backward. The chickens could have been flattened, obliterated into strips of still-warm road kill melting centimeter by centimeter through the snow, steam coming off their chunks. She would’ve had to shovel up the pieces, throw them in the garbage, their bodies sliding slick off the shovel and into the dumpster. At least they wouldn’t have decomposed. If it were summer, they would rot and smell and the mountain breeze would waft the smell of their rot through the lace curtains on her open windows.

But it’s not summer, she reminds herself, and you didn’t hit them. 

Dawn falls asleep before she can think of Thing Number 2. Normally, her mind goes black when she takes an Ambien, but that night, she dreams. She is the red chicken. She spots a praying mantis climbing on the rose bush. She pecks at it. The mantis screeches, rubs its arms together in its praying way, frantic. She wants to stop, to eat feed pellets instead, but she keeps pecking. She does not stop, cannot stop, until the mantis splits in half. 

In the morning, when Dawn is still in bed, her mind fogged, the doorbell rings—several times in a row. When Dawn opens the front door, she thinks, is it Sunday already? But then she remembers: Charlotte doesn’t come here anymore.

“Where are they?” Charlotte pushes past Dawn and into the house.

“Oh yes, come in. Sorry. Do you want the—coffee?”

“What did you do to those chickens?”

“What?”

“They’re in the laundry room, right? They looked like they were in the laundry room.” Charlotte strides down the hallway, her boots squeaking against the hardwood, and Dawn follows. 

“So do you want the chickens after all?” 

Charlotte opens the laundry room door and takes a jerking step backward. 

The chickens’ squawks are shrill pitched and drawn out. The skin that borders the sections Dawn cut away is inflamed, swollen much larger than the original frostbitten flesh. Past the angry red, their combs and wattles have turned black. The chickens flap in bursts, lurching into each other. The boxes slide an inch in opposing directions as they run into the sides.  

They stretch their necks to look at the women, their eyes bigger and blacker than they seemed last night in the snow. 

Dawn stands over the boxes, rubbing at the upraised hair on her arms. “What’s wrong with them, Char?”

Charlotte is still standing in the doorway, one hand gripping the metal knob, but the other is over her eyes, the bridge of her nose. “You,” she says quietly. “You are what’s wrong.” 

Dawn’s head rears back, and she can feel her chins double against her throat. “Honey. Honey, what?” 

Charlotte drops her hands to her sides, lifts her head, pulls back her shoulders. Quickly, she moves every chicken into one box, shuts up the lid, and squats to pick it up. She exhales, loudly, weaving under the weight of the box. 

Dawn stands, still, watching Charlotte go. Then she shakes her head. She hurries to catch up. 

“So you’re taking them? Do you want the other boxes? I mean, where are you going to keep them, if you don’t have your coop?”

“Get the door.”

Dawn makes sure to swing the front door all the way open. “Don’t bump them!”

A layer of ice has frozen over the snow during the night. Charlotte slides her feet forward one at a time, as if cross-country skiing across the porch, and Dawn keeps slipping until she starts mimicking Charlotte’s moves, following Charlotte’s path.

The ice blazes in the sunlight, blue-tinted orange glowing across the yard. Dawn’s footprints from the night before look chiseled into the snow, jagged ovals of shadow in the glinting bright. 

Charlotte nearly falls as she steps off the porch, and Dawn reaches out for her but she has already righted herself, moving again as though on skis, her shins shoving the snow forward, out of her way.

Charlotte slides the chickens into the bed of her pickup truck and slams the tailgate. The chickens’ squawks are soft, distant, and Dawn’s abdomen muscles unclench.

Charlotte will know what to do. She will care for them then grow attached and keep them. She will re-build the coop. She will give Dawn their extra fresh eggs. 

But then, Charlotte climbs into the cab. She shuts the door. She starts the truck. She doesn’t say a word, not even “Goodbye.”

The truck begins inching down the driveway, and Dawn waves, widely so that her daughter will be able to see in the rearview mirror. Charlotte doesn’t wave back.

Dawn steps off the porch. She is only wearing slippers, she can already feel the needles in her toes and the backs of her heels, but she wants Charlotte to see her waving.

When the truck gets to the end of the driveway, the taillights go red, and Dawn stops walking and focuses on waving with both arms, big windshield wiper waves.  

As the truck pulls out, Dawn sees Charlotte turn toward her and raise her hand to the window, just for a second. 

Dawn stands in the driveway, arms wrapped around herself, watching as the truck fishtails all the way down the hill—the road still hasn’t been plowed—until she can no longer see the gleam of the taillights. She will call Charlotte later, she thinks, to check in on the chickens. 

As she turns to walk back, she notices a patch of snow by the mailbox that looks different, textured. She takes a few steps forward and squints until it comes into focus.

A white chicken sits at the foot of the mailbox, its feathers coated in ice. The ice magnifies its black eyes, and Dawn’s first thought is that it is watching her through binoculars.