“I know you still have those birds, Gracie,” Smith said, the toe of his boot kicking open a fresh piece of chicken shit. “I've never known you without chickens. Why not just cooperate?” Smith looked awful smug for a guy who had soaked through the armpits of his shirt. I swear I couldn't believe, right then, that I'd ever shared his bed.

Last month Congress banned outdoor poultry flocks on account of the bird flu, made keeping chickens a Class A felony worth ten years, minimum. An hour ago, my neighbor Fran called to warn us when Extension showed up at her house. Fran is a sweet white-haired lady who made a deathbed promise to my mother that she'd look after me, but mostly she just knits me a hat every Christmas. Fran's birds didn't have bird flu and neither did mine, but Extension was going house to house slaughtering any chicken that even maybe could have touched a wild bird. They didn't test them or anything. Raising chickens is regulated now. You need to lock them inside giant barns, install special ventilation and filters, pay for licenses and inspectors. Only millionaires can have chickens now.

I'm real attached to my chickens, the hens anyway. They're barred rocks, and they have the loveliest black-and-white patterns, not quite speckled but not quite striped either, with bright red heads and combs. Each one has its own shades and markings, which is something you couldn't tell unless you'd spent a lot of time with barred rocks the way I have. It's like what they say about snowflakes and fingerprints. Each one of my girls is only ever just like herself.

I named my top hen Montana because her markings are just like the section of Rocky Mountain range that I can see, on clear days, from all the way out here. That range looks just like a woman lying on her back, knees bent, ready to take a lover, the peaks of her face raised to the sky, joyful and laughing, her hair all swept behind her into a shallow valley. Montana has those same peaks and valleys etched right on her back, like God held her up and traced the pattern to get it exactly right. Sometimes I wonder whether God repeated beauty like that everywhere on purpose, like maybe he hoped humans would learn to see and reflect it, to find a way to copy it in the things we make ourselves. God is probably so disappointed.

“Hey buddy,” Jerry said, looking at one of the agents. “Smith here, your big boss man, is having visions, thinks he's got some kind of psychic chicken second sight. You ought to make some kind of report about that.”