No One Heard a Thing the Night the Chicken Died (Short Story‪)‬

The bulldozers came the summer before and pushed the orange field into hills and mounds. Men dug holes in the ground. They poured cement and made long winding paths. During the summer, my younger brother, Juan, and I sat out back, just on the other side of the fence, eating oranges. Past the chicken coop my father kept and between the avocado and grapefruit trees, beyond the old fence, the men built up the earth, stripping down the orange grove tree by tree. There were oranges everywhere, unpicked and rotting on the ground; the trees sagged with the weight of the fruit. Sawdust drifted in the wind, forming dunes and eddies on the sun-baked earth, filtering through our thin, wire fence and flecking our father's grass. We watched as row after row disappeared, flattened into fairways, bunkers, and sand traps. Within a year our house, like all the others in our Long Beach neighborhood, would look out on the sprinklers crosscutting the El Dorado Country Club. For hours that summer we sat there feeling the ground vibrate beneath us, the chickens in the yard chattering over grass seed, and the sounds from our mother's television drifting out toward us. Strange things came out of the grove at this time. Possums appeared like ghosts from the shadows, rabbits burrowed into our yard from beneath, and snakes slithered along the edges. During these days our father came out and leaned against the fence, putting his arms down across the mesh wire where we had bent it to climb over. "You can almost feel the worms coming out of the ground," he said, looking off into the thinning trees. The orange field had that feeling, like everything was in a rush to be somewhere else. Even our father's chickens started favoring the opposite side of the yard, hopping and scattering at the crack of wood splitting and trees falling.