Annabelle opened her eyes to the brightening day. The cows were laughing at some crude joke they had made. Her infant brother, Jimmy Joe Jr., was snoring quietly in the corner where only the night before he'd been whooping and hollering up a storm, and had killed ten oxen. They had restrained him after that and had given him some new-fangled drug to make him quiet, for Jimmy was a big baby. At two months of age he stood 7 feet tall and weighed well over a ton.
Annabelle stretched and picked up the dusty old shotgun that lay in the corner of the nursery. She aimed it at Jimmy and pulled the trigger. A loud roar and bang echoed off the walls.
"Wake up Jimmy!" Annabelle yelled.
Slowly Jimmy rose to his full height and shambled out of the room picking shot out of his back. Annabelle ambled outside into the bright Louisiana sun, which was strange to her because usually by this time large sexual clouds had gathered in the sky. She went over to the hen house and silently watched as one hen had trouble giving birth and a caesarean section had to be performed. The chicken screamed in agony and Annabelle shuddered as the vet quickly and expertly slit the hen from stem to stern and without pausing ripped the bloody and steaming entrails from her body with a sucking sound Annabelle would never forget. The hen's screaming and gasping wore down to a faint gasping and wheezing, and the vet packed up his instruments in his faded and cracked brown leather bag.
Annabelle looked up at him, silently pleading for some kind of explanation.
"Overpopulation," the vet said quietly as he fed Jimmy huge twenty pound slabs of raw beef, which he always carried for treats whenever he ventured out to the Henson Ranch. Jimmy gulped the bloody meat greedily and the vet set off in his ancient Ford; Annabelle stood staring out into space and then her hair began to smell.
© 1978 by Craig Snyder