When I was a child, she used to chain my hands to the chicken pen only after my sister went off on the yellow bus.

She was a grandmother, but not mine.

“Why do you do this to me? I do not like it,” I told her.

Her back was to me, and I saw her eyes looking up toward an aeroplane flying above us. While staring at the engine in the air, not moving her stance, she pulled her arm backward and lifted the nail from the latch that kept the pen locked.

Slowly, the hens and roosters sauntered out.

I wondered whether anyone in the sky was looking down on me, could see me here on the ground. I wondered if I one day could fly like they did. I wondered if one day Manda and I could escape.

She turned to me.

“You pretty little gay boy, what shall become of you? I know you are too scared to tell anyone. Don’t worry, I would be, too. We’re together in this.”

I didn’t know what that word meant. I knew I was a boy. I knew she was a woman. My wrists bled.

I had stopped speaking. The birds started to swarm the aged woman, both on ground and in air.

They pecked her feet, and sparrows swooped upon her, disorienting the woman. They ripped her hair out. She was lucky to have adorned bifocals, for they started to crack against the incessant pangs of the beaks.

She fell.

The roosters came, followed by the chickens, and they stared at me, unmoving.

I then saw a black and white car with flashing red lights pull up into the driveway.

Manda looked at me through the backseat window.

I don’t remember much else of that day, besides seeing the back of the grandmother not my own walk with the men to the car.

Her hands were chained.