CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories by J. Posthumus (read after txt) 📕

The End

About the Author

Grace Bridges is a geyser hunter, backyard chicken keeper, editor and translator, and Kiwi. The current president of writers' organisation SpecFicNZ, she is often found poking around geothermal sites or under a pile of rescued kittens. She is a multiple nominee and three-time winner of the Sir Julius Vogel Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand, an editor and mentor for Young NZ Writers, and has edited dozens of published books. Her own novels include Earthcore, Irish cyberpunk, and Classics in Space. Both her works in this collection are part of the Earthcore urban fantasy series based in New Zealand. More information and free stories at www.gracebridges.kiwi.

Things with Wings

Jane Lebak

Things with Wings Jane Lebak

Sekkiel, the angel, prayed while watching the chickens.

Raviniel made it beautiful here. Sekkiel’s friend had picked a cliffside grotto for his “heavenly mansion,” and it had become a bird sanctuary. Water tumbled from the cliff and through Sekkiel, who let the water and the prayers flow through him. Please bless his work while he’s still a guardian angel, and thank you for this chance to help him.

For the past thirty-five years, Sekkiel had spent three mornings a week with Raviniel’s swans, a heron standing long-legged at the shore, and his sparrows. Peacocks, so many peacocks. The trees bore a raiment of birds more colorful than any bouquet, and they’d parceled off the environment into “pocket zones” so each bird felt comfortable. Love and feathers abounded.

The chickens, though: those required tending, and the one thing a guardian angel didn’t have was time to tend them. Not a problem. Only an hour after Raviniel received his assignment, still dazzled by the nascent soul of his human charge (a baby!, a brand new baby, her soul brilliant and clean), Sekkiel had approached with a calendar and a list of volunteers. The bird sanctuary would thrive. The chickens would be fed.

“The day your human charge enters Heaven,” Sekkiel promised, “you’ll present her before the Father, and then she can visit your home.”

Eyes round, heart overfull, dreaming about two creations he loved meeting and adoring one another, Raviniel had gushed, “She’ll love that! Thank you.”

For thirty-five years, angels had tended Raviniel’s grotto, or sometimes tended Raviniel’s human charge so the exhausted guardian could pray and recharge here instead. Raviniel loved his charge, but she didn’t even love birds. His feathers dulled whenever he talked about that, because he’d wanted to go birding with her. Nowadays, his charge didn’t even listen to the birds chattering to the rising sun. She woke, joyless, and trudged off to her job, still joyless. Raviniel’s assignment wasn’t joyless, but it was a lot of drudgery.

Sekkiel’s vocation, by contrast, had intense periods of fighting followed by stretches of down-time. He worked in the angelic ministerial corps, otherwise known as “the assignment pool.” When a deployed angel needed help, Sekkiel was one of thousands who might answer. With his shift due to start, he detangled himself from his prayers, stepped out of the waterfall, and escorted Raviniel’s chickens back to their coop.

They didn’t need to be cooped. They had no predators, and they couldn’t wander out of Heaven. Still, it turned out that after thousands of years of domestication, chickens preferred things a certain way, so Raviniel had provided them a coop and a run.

A hen was broody and irritated, and Sekkiel discovered she’d laid one solitary egg. He picked it up, then gave her the oval stone they used as a stand-in. They always presented eggs before God.

Settling the broody hen took the full five minutes, and then Sekkiel felt a sharp call in his heart: danger and need. He was getting paged. He still had the egg.

An angel needed help right now, though, so he opened a pocket dimension. Into that little reality, a very tiny universe, he tucked the egg. Then he flashed across the divide to Earth to answer the call.

Sekkiel landed in the middle of a demonic firefight—spiritual fire, that is, over a human soul in the teeth of a struggle. He armored his heart with God’s strength and drew his sword from a different pocket dimension. With his blade incandescent and his heart burning, Sekkiel clashed with the demons trying to fill a human soul with discontentment. He fought them off, but he didn’t even have a chance to put his sword back into storage before another desperate call came to his heart: a human soul about to lose hope.

After answering nine different calls, tired but thrilled to be serving God by protecting his creatures, Sekkiel got a respite. He could take this chance to present the egg at God’s throne.

He reached into his pocket dimension, but the egg was gone.

Ruthann forced a bright smile for her kindergarteners. “Everyone, this is an exciting day! Do you know what arrived?”

The students wiggled in place, three kids shooting up their hands while two others blurted out, “The chicks!”

Ruthann fought a sigh. “No calling out during circle time. Anya, do you have an answer?”

“The eggs.” Anya sat tall with her hands folded in her lap. “The chicks will be inside the eggs.”

“That’s exactly right.” Ruthann made eye contact with all the students every day, her smile broad, her voice pitched up. It exhausted her to spend eight hours in high gear keeping a group of five-year-olds engaged. She was only thirty-five and lately starting to feel dread about teaching until retirement. The chick hatching experiment was usually a highlight, but this year, even the chicks felt uninspiring.

Growing up, Ruthann had always had a soft spot for “things with wings.” Flight seemed to be like freedom, and feathers were the magic that got you into the sky. A feathered dragon, a Pegasus, even an angel—but she’d given up on all the fantasies. If angels existed, they probably didn’t even have feathers, and why would they care about her?

She