ChapterFive
Layla
For some inane reason, my brother had allowed his wife and kids to get chickens and a rooster. Sounds great, right? And sure, they weren’t serial killers like Evie’s, but they were still psychos. In fact, it’s fair to say, every member of my family who owned poultry ended up with freaks. It didn’t help that one of my cousins’ wives named hers Bojangles and KFC, but could they even understand that?
Anyway, these chickens were cute until you walked past them, then they practically stalked you. That wasn’t so bad, but the fucking rooster, Gilbert, was the reincarnation of Steve McQueen in the Great Escape.
I don’t know how he managed it, but every now and then, he’d break out of the giant roost they had and would end up in the trees that bordered our property. Incidentally, my house was the closest to those trees, so when he decided to wake the world up at the ass crack of dawn, I heard it like he was in my house.
For a few of them, I could swear he was inside my home when he did it, then jumped out the window, and ran or flew up the tree afterward.
Ren and Maya’s kids had been screaming and crying the first time it happened, adamant he was going to fall and die, but after the second or third time, they just thought it was cool. So far, the highest he’d gone on a tree was roughly fifty feet off the ground—most likely when he jumped out of my house.
People could tell me he hadn’t broken in and then back out again until they were blue in the face, but they were wrong.
And this morning, the little bastard was doing it again, right next to my bedroom window.
I was going to cut all the trees down and make a trap like they did in the movies. I’d dig a pit, cover it with foliage, and when Gilbert walked over it, he’d fall into the hole and be stuck for…
Wait, I didn’t have any trees right outside my bedroom window. At the back, sure, but my bedroom? How was he so close to my room?
Hearing him crow again, I threw the covers back, tiptoed to the window, and peaked around the curtain. Sure as shit, the little asshole was right there on the ledge outside my bedroom window.
Glancing around the room for something to catch him in, I almost screamed when I couldn’t get my brain to help me figure out my sinister plan. That was until I stopped on my pillows and realized I could use one of the cases to catch him. They put snakes in them and then tied them up and carried them with those grabber things… it’d totally work on a cock.
Pulling the pillow out of the case, I moved back to the window, and as slowly as possible, I moved the curtain back. Instead of jumping off like I expected him to, Gilbert stayed where he was, his beady eyes on every move I made. Christ, he was freaky.
As slowly as I’d dealt with the curtains, I opened the opposite side of the window to where he was standing, relieved we’d put in the split panels instead of those all-in-one types. That probably wasn’t the right name for them, but they were what they were, and at one point in my life would I ever need to know the correct terminology for freaking windows?
“Hey, Gilbert,” I cooed, putting my hand out and making kissy noises. “Thank you for waking me up this morning. I really appreciate it when you do that.”
His head tilted from side to side as he stared at me, but he didn’t move his body.
“I’ve got a super comfortable pillow case for you to lie on, buddy. Why don’t you give it a try?”
I opened the case and nodded at it with my head.
“Give it a go.”
It was a test of wills for the next couple of minutes—Gilbert’s and mine. I wanted him in the pillowcase, and he just wanted to stay where he was.
To prove this, he puffed out his feathers and crowed loudly, only roughly one foot away from my face. See? Asshole.
As he went to do it again, I sat one of my butt cheeks on the sill, grabbed the case firmly, and launched my arms out to get it over his head and body, almost tipping myself out of the window and plummeting me to my death. Somehow I didn’t fall and die, and somehow I caught him.
Pulling him back in through the window and slamming it shut, I held it out in front of me while I looked at the lump of cock inside it.
“Huh, that was anti-climactic, Gilbert. I expected you to put up a fight or do some sort of escape move.”
That’s when shit went really wrong.
Forty minutes later…
I could tell when it was one of my nieces or nephews at my door by the pattern and the force they used when they knocked on it, and it usually made me smile. This wasn’t a regular morning, so I groaned and dragged my feet the whole way over to it.
Pulling it open, I froze when I saw a teary and distraught Crystal.
“Aunty Lala, we don’t have a Gilbert anymore,” she wailed, throwing herself at me and sobbing into my thighs.