fifth st. yard drama

While my father is at work building the Winter Palace, the lady hens are celebrating their womanhood with squawks and murmurs. Gladys, Bessie, and Doris have all laid their first eggs. One at a time they go up the ramp into their little house and nestle down in the hay while the others stand guard, yelling chicken yells. Edith, big and red and brassy, makes a point of being the loudest. She is the town crier and takes this job very seriously, but in her most private moments she worries, examining her body, wondering why no eggs have come yet. She will never let the others see this fear. She makes up for her egglessness with seeming big and important, she knows that volume and stature can work wonders. The others know they just have to put up with her. They follow her lead, clucking quietly behind her back that really they are the mature ones, that Edith does not understand the true and wonderful secrets of chicken adulthood. They pity her. Edith feels their pity and tries so hard to lay an egg she thinks her feathers may pop right out of her skin. She is tormented. If only they knew, she thinks, how shameful it is to have to question one's womanhood. If only they understood the pain I live with every long and eggless day! It is very hard to be a hen. Edith knows she knows more of the trials of life than Bessie or Gladys or Doris ever will. In the yard they regard each other with cordial bitterness. They peck at bugs in the dirt and comment on the weather, clenching their wings.