one wingless fairy and one rude chicken

The reason I don’t call Ben “uncle” is because he’s not my uncle. Well, at least he wasn’t my uncle until he married Aunt Kitty a couple years ago. By then, I was too used to calling him just “Ben.” Besides that, Ben doesn’t really seem uncle-y. He’s taller than the doorway and when he opens his mouth every animal in sight takes cover. Probably that’s why he keeps quiet most of the time.

If I’m going to tell the honest truth though (which on this one and only subject I’m not really supposed to do), Aunt Kitty is not exactly my aunt either. She says my mama was like a sister to her and that’s close enough and then she says for goodness sake if I must keep yapping go yap at the cows ’cause she has more important work to be about.

Once she told me I was an outcast fairy. When I asked her, “Well how come I’m normal sized then and not fairy sized?” she said that’s just what happens when you leave the fairy world. You get bigger. So I said, “Well then, how come I don’t have wings?”

“Bah,” she said. “That’s just a silly myth. Fairies don’t have wings.”

I said, “How do they fly if they haven’t got wings?” and she just laughed.

What I want to know is, what’s so special about being a fairy if you can’t fly? When I asked Ben that very question, he said probably fairies had other magic talents, like talking to animals.

I spent the whole day trying to talk to the chickens. First I tried their language. “BAAAAK!” Then I tried my own, but they just kept cluck-clucking away.

So I thought, well maybe it’s not that I can understand them, but they can understand me. So I fixed my eye on one particularly bright looking chicken and I said, “Come here, chicken.” She didn’t even look at me. So I said, “Fetch me that piece of string, chicken,” and she lifted her neck and cocked her head and I thought, “Aha!” but then she just went right back to pecking at the ground.

Either Ben’s wrong, or chickens are just plain rude.