Flight

Cheep, cheep.  Cheep, cheep, cheep.  I listened to the to the trills of the other chicks as they cried out to be picked up or ran from the large, squishy objects that reached into the pen to pick up (and occasionally put down) a chick.   One of the black-and-white chicks-I still had trouble telling them apart-raced past me, kicking some stray feed onto my wings.  I cheeped at him in indignation, but otherwise made no move as I continued to sit in the corner of my pen (the rest of the chicks were just visitors, right?) staring up at the ceiling.  

 It was dirty, I could tell, even from far away.  It was cracked and grayed, the paint peeling off in the corner.

 And yet it was the place I most wanted to go.  More specifically, I wanted to fly.  I had heard rumors of flying, of the exhilarating rush of air supporting your body, but I had never experienced it.  My wings were small, and the soft feather didn’t help much to fly.  Furthermore, every time I had tried to take flight from the roost, the largest human picked me up in their fleshy hands and set me down, away from the roost.   

 For maybe the hundredth time that hour, I went through the underside of my wing with my beak.  The feathers were light brown and soft, still not enough to streamline my flight. My beak easily went through them to poke my skin-ow.  Despite this, though, I wondered if I could try again tonight, when no one would pull me away.  The white mesh cover would be on top of the pen, preventing me from taking off, but a few inches of flight was better than nothing.  I started fluffing up the down feather, grooming them back down, and repeating the process.  How many times would I have to do this before I could fly?

 All of the sudden, I was picked up by one of the humans.  They lifted me high into the air, well above the top of my pen.  First I started to cheep loudly to be let down, when I realized excitedly that maybe, just maybe, I could jump off the human and fly down.  For the first time, I didn’t hear them cooing over my pretty wings, which I normally loved, but instead concentrated on preparing for flight: I spread my feet and began to flap my wings.  Then I started to race across the human’s hand.  But before I got any further than a couple of centimeters, I felt something press me down from above, squishing me against the human’s hand and forcing my breath out.  I couldn’t see this force, but I was pretty sure it was another human.  I quelled my annoyance and tried again, with no success.   

Okay, this time, I’ll do it when they’re distracted.  That shouldn’t take long.  Sure enough, within what seemed like seconds, the human that was holding me was chatting away contentedly with another one.  Taking a deep breath, I stretched my wings as wide as I could and once more started to run, my claws digging into the human’s skin.  I jumped off the human’s hand, wildly flapping my wings. For a terrifying seconds, I thought I was going to crash, but then a slight breeze from one of the large windows caught me.  The air whooshed under my wings, ruffling my feathers in the most satisfying way.  

For two seconds, I was free.