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“The sun is rising,” he tells the chickens, and the chickens understand him perfectly. His mouth is a little lopsided, and his words get scrambled on their way out, and more often than not someone will say, Oh, honey, we’ve almost got it, can you say it again? or, Mikey, kid, could you try signing it?
But the chickens don’t even know signing, and besides, they get restless every time Michael sits them down for a lecture. So he talks, and talks, and talks, and never once have they misunderstood him. Sure, there are drawbacks – they don’t have big warm hands to hold him with, which is a bit of an issue – but the sun is rising, now, for the second time today, and the sun always makes his room feel like Boo, so he’s in a forgiving mood.
“Wow,” he says, and he holds a small hand up, lets it cast shadows against his face. “It sure is bright.” He knows other words for that, words he’d made a dead-eyed Bee explain to him late at night: “Luminous,” he says out loud, and to the chickens, it sounds perfect. There’s no such thing as mispronunciation here.
He swings a leg onto his bed and clambers up, then twists so he’s sitting dead in the middle of it. “We should have a meeting,” he says to the chickens, bundled warm and soft in a nest of his quilt. One of them clucks, a gentle, questioning sound, and Michael loses his train of thought because he’s too busy clucking back, but the sky rumbles and his brain lights up again. “The sun. Definitely it’s not meant to yell at us. Also I don’t know what time it is anymore.”
One chicken, with chocolate-milk feathers and downy fluff under her chin, bows her head, stays still as Michael pats it. Gentle, Bee warns him, a million times over. No poking. And Boo says, softly, Look, Michael. They trust you.
“We should go to the beach,” Michael suggests. “That’s what people do when it’s sunny.”
We’ll be eaten, the chicken clucks, which is absurd, because no one wants to eat a chicken, and she’s never seen a shark in her life. Michael knows it. She was a chick just a few months ago.
“You’re silly,” he chides, but his thoughts scatter when the window explodes.
The chickens launch themselves across the room, immediately in action. Michael can’t say the same; his brain is empty and white as he watches the glass embed itself in the opposite wall. The rumble is louder now that the seal is broken; it fries the air, makes the house shake and shiver. Two suns, he thinks, as the chickens scream, and it’s still cold.
His hands, as per his usual routine, speak for him: they drag him off the bed, steady him at the windowsill. There’s a better view, here - three or four suns dot the horizon (his fingers diligently hold up the number so he can keep track), clouds spiralling high above them like pillars. “You’re very pretty,” he tells the sunrises, “but you scare the chickens. And you hurt my eye.” To prove his point, he looks away; the image of them is burned bright into his retina, turning the rest of the room dark. He blinks it away, rubbing at his eye, until he can see the floor again.
He's standing in something dark red, though he can’t feel a thing; he traces the trickle of liquid back to a long line cutting across his calf. A shard of glass catches the light. “Oh,” he says. “I need a band-aid.”
Another sun ignites a fire over the ocean. To the tune of solar winds, the house crumbles.