Pullus Phasma Phasmatis

Prologue

I woke with a gasp. My wife slept next to me. I lay in my own bed. Dawn light had just started creeping into our humble little bedroom. The clock ticked. The garish, bright comforter lay haphazardly draped over my wife and I. The only thing out of place was the chicken sitting on my nightstand. 

The chicken cocked its head and looked at me with one beady, black eye.

"You again! Stay away, you sonofabitch!" 

I sat bolt upright in bed. I fumbled at my nightstand and grabbed my knife. The razor-sharp blade flew out with a satisfying "plok". I brandished it at the chicken. 

"Haven't you brought enough suffering on our home? Avaunt!" 

The chicken seemed unaffected by my raised voice and proffered blade. Beside me, my wife began to gently snore, oblivious as to the life and death conflict between myself and this otherworldly gallus gallus domesticus. I continued through clenched teeth. 

"What is it, chicken? What does this mean? Two years that you've been gone, and now this? Are we pregnant again?"

The chicken shook its head.

"The next time you show your face here, chicken, you have my solemn vow that I will end you, braise you, and eat you. Rest assured."

***

In many cultures, totem animals represent all kinds of people, places, and ideas. My wife is the only woman I know whose uterus has a totem. That totem is the spirit chicken. This is its story. 

I seriously debated whether this topic merited its own blog entry, but when I got right down to it, this whole phenomenon is just too fucking weird not to document somewhere. If nothing else, it will be delightful if, twenty years from now, my son reads this and discovers to his horror that his mother's uterus has an otherworldly chicken sentinel. In the bizarre little movie that plays in my head, his reading of this tale will somehow how infect his mind with the spirit chicken. Then perhaps it will follow him around and leave me be. Poe had his raven. Us Songys have the chicken. 

My first encounter with the chicken occurred on the day of my son's birth, October 31, 2009. 

Allow me to paint the picture. It was Halloween and a full moon to boot. The maternity ward at Bayfront was packed to the rafters. The ward had more ready-to-pop prengant women than it could handle. You could almost feel the chaos radiating off the place. In the hallways, frantic near-fathers paced back and forth with nothing better to do. Pregnant women hooked to monitors walked laps around the ward, wearing dark expressions. You could almost hear them thinking, "Please, God, let one of these steps knock this little parasite loose." I swear to God one of them did shikko, the high-legged, fierce stomp that sumo wrestlers sometimes make before beginning their match. The nurses had dispensed with any dressing-up of their coffee. They drank the coffee black, tossed it back like women condemned to die. The coffee was gulped without adornments like cream or sugar. Such luxuries did not exist for the brave tamers of these pregnant beasts. 

My wife, her mother, and I were on our first night in the ward. The doctors gave Monica a drug to induce her labor. The little beeping monitors advised us that she was having contractions, but she did not feel them yet. At this point, her water had yet to break. 

When we first arrived at the hospital, I felt the adrenaline pounding through my veins. After months and months of preparation, it was finally going to happen. Jack the Destroyer was set to come into the world on the coolest birthday imaginable. 

Somehow, the only think I could think to pray was, "Please, God, don't let me see my wife poop on the table." Not sure why that particular prayer came to mind, but that's what I was thinking. We had made it eight years with a strict "closed door while on the toilet policy", and this was about to blow that streak to hell. 

What can I say? You think of weird shit under stress. 

Anyway, one can only be excited for so long. Excited in this case gave way to anxious. Anxious gave way to bored. Finally bored gave way to Maury Povitch (there's an irony to paternity shows in the labor ward). Povich gave way to sleep. I finally closed my eyes to get a few moments of sleep on the little pull-out father couch in our suite. 

When I dream, it is usually a vast and encompassing thing. Bizarre, intricate plots expand over huge, faraway places. My dreams are the subconscious equivalent of Wagner's compositions (minus all the pro-Nazi stuff, of course). I found it more than passing strange when this particular dream began in the precise room where I had just fallen asleep. That is entirely too pedestrian for my strange, sadistic psyche. 

Monica was sitting there in the dream. Sadly, she was still watching Maury. Ray-Ray's father still hadn't been determined. My mother-in-law still occupied her chair across the room and quietly worked on her laptop. The picture seemed entirely normal... but for the chicken sitting on the bed. It was a rooster, though somewhat young. Cockerel might be a better term. Its bright red comb wobbled as it surveyed the room with its oil spot eyes. It had a deep sense of intelligence, and though I feel positively ridiculous saying so, had an air of menace about it. 

The spirit chicken gave me a meaningful look, somehow raised an eyebrow (despite the fact that chickens do not have eyebrows), and walked over to my wife's extremely pregnant abdomen. The rooster gave it an abrupt peck. 

And then, as my clients so often tell me in the comfort of my office, "shit got crazy." 

After the peck, there was a moment of ominous silence. And then, FWOOSH. A torrent of water exploded out of the bottom of my wife's largely undignified hospital gown. And when I say "torrent," I want you to think of that bloody elevator scene from The Shining. This explosion washed away the chicken in its violence. The room filled quickly, a veritable amniotic white-water rapids. 

In that precise moment, I snapped awake. Monica looked at me, shifted her weight, and then paused meaningfully. 

"Oh shit," she said, "my water just broke." 

That's right. You read the above narrative correctly. The spirit chicken, totem of my wife's uterus, had somehow reached into the waking world and predicted, if not actually caused, the breaking of her water. You have to understand that I am not a superstitious person in any way, shape, or form. I do not spend time pondering the unseen or wondering what lay beyond this world. I freely walk under ladders and more than once have intentionally crossed my own path with a black cat. I care not for these silly things. I am a man of science, like my father before me. 

But despite that, this freaking dream chicken broke my wife's water. I swear it with my hand to fucking God. 

From that point, things got relatively crazy. Her heart rate went all over the place. The baby's heart-rate went all over the place. Hours of labor passed. Pain was intense. Evidently once your water breaks, contractions are royal high bastards. Monica got an epidural and promptly wore out the little "more drugs" button. After a brief, but terrifying bout where we were concerned we might lose the baby, I decided to go with a cesarean section. (And yes, I said that I decided this. Not because I know better, or because I am smart or even that great under pressure. It is just that by that point, my wife had hit the "more" button so many times that she was high as a freaking kite.) 

I won't gore or bore you with the details of that process, suffice to say that I never want to see my wife's innards again. 

Luckily, everyone came out happy and healthy. Jack is a beautiful two year-old at this point, and he is the joy of our lives. Thanks to the extremely rough pregnancy that produced Jack and the wickedly powerful post-partem depression that hit my wife, we opted to shut the baby factory down after that first attempt. 

For two and a half years, the chicken remained blessedly, or perhaps ominously, silent. And then the other day, he made the dramatic re-appearance that I mentioned above. If he can be believed, his appearance doesn't mean anything, but hell, how do you go about deciding whether or not a uterus totem animal is trustworthy? I have no freaking idea. 

Regardless, there is no deeper moral to this story. I have no insight about the human condition to share with you today. I just wrote this because I'm one of the few dudes who has had a spirit chicken break his wife's water, and if you can't share that type of thing on the internet, then what is the point? 

Epilogue

Totally didn't see her poop.