Jo—

(Pops stood at the edge of the porch, listening hard. His hands rested on the railing, his ear cocked toward the stars; at the far end of the fields, the woods were wailing. All the trees cracked and groaned, all the chickens quivered and warbled in their coop, and Pops stood very still, listening. When he turned to come inside and saw her standing in the doorway he said:

“Jo—”)

Jo stood in the yard, staring down at a mound of bloody feathers.

How terrible, to be greeted by a dead chicken in the morning, to walk onto the porch in the coziness of one’s pajamas and see the mangled remains of barnyard fowl poking out of the yellow, unmown grass. Drinking coffee out of a tin mug, Jo stirred the feathers with the toe of her boot. Absolutely fucking terrible. Truly, the worst.

Those chickens had run free for too long, toddling fat and easy over the weedy yard, practically inviting predators to gobble them whole. She’d been meaning to fix the coop—restring the chicken-wire fence, wrench out the rotten boards, and patch the leaky holes in the roof—but there was so much to do, so many lawyers to call, so much legal jargon to sift through, and the will was still locked in the desk in Pops’ room, so in reality there hadn’t been time to waste on a trio of chickens, although now, due to Jo’s laziness, that trio had been reduced to a pair, a couple of waddlesome hens clucking about the lawn.

Crackling wheat fields closed in around the yard, leaning over the fence and casting shadows over the grisly spectacle. A truly terrible way to start the… Jo looked down at her watch. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. How could it already be five? She was still wearing her flannel pajamas and nursing her coffee, for fuck’s sake.

The coop would have to be fixed. There were extra two-by-fours and a bucket of nails in the garage. Jo would patch up the coop and then she would find the will—it was in Pops’ writing desk upstairs, she was sure of it—and then she wouldn’t have to worry about anything at all. But all that was going to be a lot of work, so first she needed more caffeine.

Inside, Jo brewed more coffee and deactivated Facebook again. She piled the mail and the lawyer’s papers into a tottering mountain at one end of the kitchen table, and then she dragged the rocking chair to the living room and sat beside the windows facing the yard. The chickens rootled for worms in the grass outside. Jo marveled at their flightless stupidity, their inability to understand the fragile boundaries separating their coop from the dark, predatory evening just beginning to creep over the fields and the dead autumn forests beyond them.

(When Pops croaked, dark shapes bundled him into a hole in the ground. It was November, and the naked trees loomed above the funeral party’s stooping shoulders. Evening fell and the fields winked out, and Jo stood beside the mound of earth for a long time, silent and obstinate in her oversized coat.

At home the lawyer poured himself a beer and suggested they get down to business. It was a sad business, nasty by all accounts, and no one would want to besmirch the late Mr. O’Halloran’s memory by grubbing after money and deeds and property, but there was a process to follow, a legal process that, despite its reputation as a mechanism for uncaring bureaucracy, was at its heart entirely well-meaning. No besmirching, the lawyer said as he unloaded his briefcase onto the kitchen table and motioned for Jo to sit beside him. No besmirching whatsoever.

Jo sat. Settling himself behind neatly stacked columns of papers, the lawyer tilted his beer and drank.

The will, of course, was the issue at hand. Mr. O’Halloran hadn’t kept one on record, and without a will there wasn’t much anyone could do. The very boundaries of the civilized world would crumble without a will, and this uncivilized crumbling was all the more probable due to the fact that Mr. O’Halloran hadn’t finished paying off his mortgage. Yes, it was true: hardworking, salt-of-the-earth Mr. O’Halloran had not quite managed to pay back the generous adjustable-rate loan he had acquired from the bank sometime in the late 1990s, and so now that same bank was wondering what would happen to the farm and the house and even those adorable chickens clucking around the yard. Unfortunately, if the bank were to reclaim the O’Halloran house and environs, such a transaction would necessitate a relocation of the home’s sole occupant, one Josephine O’Halloran, only daughter of Mr. Jack O’Halloran, lately on leave from university to “find herself,” or something like that. It wasn’t personal, this looming relocation/eviction, but there were rules to follow in these situations, legal procedures that would forestall the aforementioned social crumbling.

Jo watched the lawyer drink his beer. “There’s a will,” she said. “Pops gave me everything.”

Of course, the lawyer allowed, if there were a will lying around—something that said in plain English what Mr. O’Halloran had wanted and who was meant to occupy this ever-so-charming house—then that would be a different matter. If there were a legal document proclaiming the house to be the property of Miss Josephine O’Halloran, then a certain bank’s wish to reacquire the property would be null and void (provided, of course, that the same Miss O’Halloran mentioned in the will proved that she could continue to pay her inherited mortgage payments). But the will would have to be found and its authenticity established. A lot of legal hemming and hawing, so to speak.

Jo nodded. She stared at her hands heaped on the table in front of her.

Showing himself out to the dirt driveway, the lawyer thanked Jo for her time and suggested she look for the will. “It would be most pertinent for you to start searching immediately, Miss O’Halloran,” he said. “Certain impatient persons are not willing to wait much longer. Now where the hell are my car keys?”

He fumbled in jangling pockets, his awkward limbs flailing beneath a starless throat of sky.)

When she woke in the dark of the living room she sat very still, listening.

It was midnight and there was nothing at all. There was nothing hovering between the swift, whirring blades of the ceiling fan and nothing hidden behind the sour folds of her baggy coat hanging on the hook by the door. Nothing was out of the ordinary, so Jo sat in her rocking chair, listening. She made a cup of hot cocoa and walked onto the porch. The wheat trembled at the edge of the yard; the chickens chattered in their coop. Jo held her warm cup of cocoa, whispering to herself that nothing strange was happening, that everything would sort itself out. Then she heard it: a shriek rising above the fields, a full-throated wail echoing from the faraway woods. It continued for a full minute before stopping as abruptly as it had started, leaving in its wake a dull, humming silence.

Jo stood beside the railing, listening. Once again she thought of the gun beneath the bed.

(Pops was frying breakfast in a skillet. He cracked eggs over the sizzling iron, heaped their shells on the counter, and broiled bacon in the oven. At his elbow a percolator hissed, exhaling steam in frothy plumes that spiraled up toward the kitchen’s wooden rafters where a coiled bunch of lavender sprigs hung, tied together and suspended in space with knotted twine.

Jo, only seven and a half years old but already sitting in a grown-up chair at the kitchen table, felt very sophisticated. Very classy indeed, swinging her feet high above the ground. She watched Pops puff out his ruddy bagpipe cheeks to blow on a mug of coffee, then she looked out the window, imagining, as she watched the chickens bustle across the yard, that their house was a ship, a prairie schooner scudding across ebbing drifts of wheat stalks. She and Pops were headed for the place where the earth dropped into empty space, falling through clusters of stars in a tumbling rush of soil. The chickens burbled and pecked in the dirt outside, and Pops set out the breakfast plates, and Jo told him all about their future adventures, about how their porch was really the prow of a ship jutting toward celestial seas. They had a lot to do before embarking: the porch would have to be swept and the tomato garden watered, the foundations of the house uprooted and equipped with starship engines capable of interstellar travel. The chickens had to be fitted with tiny astronaut suits. It was important to eat a good breakfast to keep up their strength, just like the real astronauts she’d learned about in Mrs. Shaughnessy’s second-grade science class.

“Stop telling stupid stories,” Pops said. “Your breakfast is getting cold—quit playing around.”)

The next morning Jo stumped out to the yard to find one remaining chicken and another bloody lump of feathers. She stood with her balled-up fists in the pockets of her coat, exhaling clouds of mist into the frigid air. A cold front had blown down from the high plains overnight, frosting the brown skin of the wheat and freezing the packed dirt of the yard. The last chicken plumped up its feathers, seemingly oblivious to the cold.

Jo walked back to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

She should have fixed the coop when the first chicken died. Instead she’d dicked around for an afternoon and fallen asleep in a rocking chair, and as a result she’d lost another hen. It was easy enough to repair a chicken coop: nail up a couple of extra boards and you’re done. And yet she’d insisted on procrastinating. What the fuck was killing her chickens, and where the fuck was the will, and why the fuck couldn’t she do anything right?

Jo crept to the foot of the stairs and peered up toward the dark second-floor corridor. Since Pops died she’d taken to sleeping on the living-room couch to avoid the rooms upstairs, not because she was scared of the second story—Jo liked to think she was scared of nothing—but because if the will was anywhere it was upstairs in Pops’ old room, probably hidden in the drawers of his desk, and as long as she avoided looking for it Jo could pretend that a will existed, that some ambiguously evil bank wasn’t going to evict her from the only home she’d ever known. Jo clutched the staircase banister with both hands. How awful, to imagine greedy financiers gobbling up the family farm, to think of their hearty chuckles as they sold the land to commercial developers, who would in turn bulldoze the house and the chicken coop, paving the way for a golf course, or a shopping megaplex, or some gross aquatic theme park of teetering yellow waterslides. Even worse, what if they did nothing at all? What if the uncaring, fat-cat executives simply condemned the property and left it to rot? 

Jo could see it clearly: the front porch strangled by a tangle of weeds, the chimney crumbling beneath a tumor of bee hives, a hoard of feral chickens nesting in the living room. No one would know the O’Hallorans had ever existed, that a family—or, to be more precise, a father and a daughter—had lived in a house, woken up early, and brewed coffee in a kitchen smelling of dried lavender sprigs. Their lives would be nothing, brief anecdotes swallowed and digested by the vengeful Kansas prairie.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Jo pulled on her boots and went to the garage for nails, a hammer, and two-by-fours. Arriving at the chicken coop, she wrenched off the rotten boards and flung them away. Then she hammered with gusto, humming a tune as she boarded up the whistling holes in the walls. Why had it taken her so long to accomplish such a simple task? All she’d needed was a little inspiration, a little caffeine, and then the coop practically fixed itself. Jo hummed louder as she swung her hammer with renewed strength. This was easy! Nothing could be simpler!

In the house the phone began to ring. Jo straightened up from her work, listening to the muffled sound. One, two, three rings, and then:

“Please return our calls when you get the chance, Miss O’Halloran,” the lawyer’s voice said on the answering machine. “We know this is a trying time for all parties involved, but you must understand that our patience is growing thin.”

Snow began to fall over the flat earth. Shafts of pale light glanced over the woods and fields, and the unfinished coop cast alien shadows over the frozen, unkempt grass. The last remaining chicken poked her head out of the hole in her home to gape at the dead wheat. Jo, all elbows and angles, stuffed her hands in her pockets and stared at the hen.

What was the point of anything at all?

(Pops brewed coffee in the percolator and Jo sat with her hands folded on the kitchen table. The setting sun had burned up the fields, leaving behind the gray shadows of distant trees shaking their limbs in the wind.

Pops poured the coffee and came to the table with two steaming mugs. He said he’d move the rest of her things upstairs in the morning, that she could take her time unpacking to make sure he’d gotten everything out of her dorm. But also he reminded her not to take too much time. This was a temporary kind of deal, he said, and he didn’t plan on letting her be a charity case for the rest of her life.

“To be honest,” he said, frowning down at his coffee, “I thought you would have said no. I thought I raised you to be the kind of girl who said no.”

Jo stared at her hands. She wanted to explain, and she wanted him to listen, but already he was hardening himself against her, already he was saying that he didn’t know her, that he’d never raised her to drink with boys at parties, and she was trying to speak but he was drowning her out, he was shouting over her. Whatever happened, he asked, to that innocent girl who used to sit in the kitchen asking him questions about astronauts?

“Dad,” she said, “Dad, please—”)

After a dinner of grilled cheese, Jo reactivated Facebook. She reclined on the couch with her feet propped on an ottoman, drinking wine out of a mug and scrolling.

Everything was fine, according to her feed. Grace was getting married in the spring and Amber’s new capitalist husband had built her a yoga studio on the edge of their vacation property in the mountains. Rachel was studying abroad in Paris and going to a million countless galleries with sophisticated men. Alex had graduated a semester early, and she’d already landed a job with a premier marketing firm, and her parents had given her a new Mercedes to celebrate. Everything was fine, really the whole world was fine, according to the smiling pictures popping up on Jo’s home page, and anyone who didn’t recognize the inherent fine-ness of everything was either crazy or woefully deficient in the delicate art of being fine.

Then he popped up on her feed. He’d commented on a Jayhawks post, and for a moment it seemed as if the boundaries of the civilized world would crumble.

Jo drank her wine and deactivated Facebook. Everything was fine, just fine.

She stepped out for some fresh air at eleven o’clock. A dusting of snow covered the yard, and a cluster of stars flickered in the sky: small peepholes drilled into a dark ceiling. Standing on the porch, Jo felt as if she’d hidden herself in the belly of a submersible, as if she were floating deep in an ocean trench, staring up through fathoms at watery nothingness. And then the shrieking began, a shrill, animal yowl rising and falling in the cold air until the fields themselves seemed to be crying.

Jo slipped inside, locked the door, and sat on the couch. She held her head in her hands. Coward. What a coward, leaving the last chicken all alone in an unfinished coop! No use going back outside to rescue the hen’s frail body—no use trying to be a hero in the face of raw animal hunger. Jo searched for a small, solid, unchanging piece of herself to hold onto. Then the howls pierced the quiet once again, and Jo tripped her way up the stairs to the second floor.

At the end of the hallway was Pops’ old room, and inside the room was a twin bed and a writing desk with many drawers. Nothing but clean lines and a pale shining window looking down onto the yard. Jo reached under the bed for the rifle, but as she loaded it she thought of the will, and suddenly she could procrastinate no longer. Everyone’s patience was growing thin and finally Jo was fed up with waiting. She pulled open every drawer in the writing desk. Nothing. She looked under the bed, searching amongst the dust bunnies. Nothing. She tapped on the walls, looking for loose boards hiding a secret safe. Nothing. There was nothing. Jo stood alone in her dead father’s bedroom, and all the woods in the world were screaming, and there was nothing ever at all.

But here came the past again, here was a memory of Pops standing on the porch. He listened to coyotes screaming in the corn, and he thought he’d raised her to be a girl who said no. As if this was her fault. As if everything was her fault. Something primal woke in her then, some rage buried deep as the dead. Here was a person who’d never listened, who’d stranded her in this nothing place with a nothing life and promises of nothing in the future, who’d spent his life toiling with unceasing, dull stupidity in the shallow, rootless dust for decades. Here was a person who’d wasted his life and expected her to do the same.

She’d called him crying at one o’clock in the morning. “Please,” she said, “please I just need…” She didn’t know what she’d needed, but it had been more than what she got. More than an enraged shadow looming in a pick-up truck, more than a silent two-hour drive down the long, flat road from Lawrence, more than the useless, grunting nothingness that had lugged her suitcases up to her childhood room. Always she’d needed more, and always this person had told her to stop being stupid, to quit playing around, to grow up and shut up and shape up. “Why,” he had finally screamed, “why did you insist on fucking around?”

Something primal. Something animal.

When Pops turned from the big looming darkness and saw her standing in the doorway with the gun his eyes widened with surprise.

Because he probably hadn’t been expecting that.

Snow began to fall in the present, the plump flakes thickening and obscuring the stars. Jo unlatched the window and peered down into white, empty space.

There were eyes in the yard, yellow, starved coyote eyes floating in a cloud of snow. Jo edged her rifle out the window and pointed the barrel at the pupils. On the count of three she would squeeze a million countless explosions into the yelping dark. One. The eyes lunged for the chicken coop. Two. The whole world would disintegrate in a tumbling rush of falling soil. Three. Pops moved his slow shoulders through the dark of her memory, a stupid ghost of a man raising his hand in greeting or in terror:

“Jo—”

Ian David Clark teaches writing and English at Washington University in St. Louis. His short fiction has appeared in Bodega magazine, while his scholarship has appeared in New Hibernia Review and Eire-Ireland.