Nice Buns (Cheap Thrills 7)

“I could have Sayla as my sister-in-law. How cool would that be?”

“Girl…”

Pulling away from her, I practically skipped through to the room where the equipment was.

Looking up from her notes, Sayla frowned at me. “Why do you look like you just took a hit, and you’re flying high?” I didn’t say a word back to her.

Instead, I gave her a big wink. “Right,” she drawled. “Let’s get this done.”

The shoot went amazingly well, especially when I turned the UV lamp on and the special paints I’d used for specific details glowed in the dark, giving an outline of their characters, but in a way that made even me go “Oh, sheeeit.”

It was as we were picking what clips to put on which social media platform that Cody yelled, “Mom, don’t forget the chickens.”

“Shit,” I hissed, getting up and looking nervously in the direction of the backyard. “I left them roaming earlier when I went out to give them their time outside the coop.”

Looking at her watch, Sayla shrugged. “So what? They’ve had some spare time to do their thing, and now we round them up and put them to bed.”

Not looking as confident as our friend, Jacinda shuddered. “I hate birds. I watched that Alfred Hitchcock movie when I was a kid, and it scared me straight away from the fuckers. Can chickens fly?”

Chewing on my lower lip, I thought back through what I knew about them. I’d read up on how to look after them, but I hadn’t absorbed details like that. So, I went with what I’d seen them doing.

“I don’t think they can fly like a bird type of flying. But, I know they can use their wings to help them get up onto things like higher levels of the coop, fences, and things like that.”

“My friend went to Hawaii on vacation last summer,” Sayla told us. “She was woken up every morning by a rooster right outside of her window.

“Anyway, on the third morning, she looked out and saw that the damn thing was high up in the tree. We’re talking at least forty feet off the ground.”

“Please tell me you’re lying,” Jacinda begged. “Now I’m thinking I’m going to wake up in the morning and come face to face with a cock of the type I do not want to come face to face with, you dig? What if the window’s open, and it just walks right on in?”

While they bickered, I had a mental image of us having to climb trees and scour the town to find my chickens.

With the way Bob Ross was, I’d end up having my eyes pecked out while I was hanging onto a branch, and then I’d fall to my death.

My headstone would have “Here she lies, taken down by a cock called Bob Ross” on it. The poor man was an artistry genius, and he deserved better than that. Maybe they’d add, “She fell out of a happy tree.”

Fuck. My. Life.

“We need to go and find the feathered bastards.” I interrupted them. “If I’d known they could go that high, I’d have put chicken wire in a dome over the entire yard.”

So, that’s what we did. A normal lady, tired out of her mind by a trauma involving her child and his balls the night before, a character out of Avatar, and a female Terminator all went out to round up some feathered cluckers.

Sadly, the little assholes found us first.

And not once throughout the whole thing did I remember that I’d installed Blink security cameras around the outside of the house to keep my son and me safe.

Ones that Cody had access to the footage of.

The next morning…

After you’re handed your child, your body automatically activates what should be known as your parental clock. It’s a special one that wakes you up when you hear a noise coming from your child, every ten minutes when they’re not feeling well, and it wakes you up an hour before the alarm you set was meant to go off.

Now, there are exceptions to the rule. For example, sometimes you’ll oversleep, or you won’t place enough faith in the clock to wake you up, so you set a ‘normal’ alarm to do it just in case. You may also be so sleep-deprived that you miss the parental alarm. But on the whole, it rules your sleeping habits.

Unfortunately for me, it was that little bastard chicken crowing outside my window that’d woken me up. The one I’d spent two hours chasing last night with my weirdly dressed friends. The one who’d then turned and chased us into the house. And, lucky old me, the only person he actually liked wasn’t able to get out of his bed because he’d just had surgery on his nuts.

Why does God hate me so much?

Alex had come home during it and stood with our other neighbor, the principal at Cody’s school, watching us while they laughed and shared a freaking beer.