Rotten to the Mower

Our egg drought is over. Instead of one or two eggs a day, The Pony is now finding nine or ten. That's seventy eggs a week, people. I'm going to need Hick to build a little shack onto the side of my proposed handbasket factory so I can open a specialty restaurant. Imagine the possibilities! Hard-boiled eggs, soft-boiled eggs, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, raw eggs, egg salad, deviled eggs, pickled eggs. Omlettes. Toys for the kiddos! Eggs soaked in vinegar until they bounce like rubber balls. Old-fashioned milk bottles to drop a lit match into, so a peeled hard-boiled egg will suck itself down into the bottle when placed on top. Personalized specialty spoons for egg racers. I'll do for eggs what Bubba Gump did for shrimp!

My egg shack will need a catchy name. I'm leaning towards "Egghead's Egg Shed." But that could just be an equilibrium problem. When my head clears and I'm on even keel again, I'll revisit the name game.

Last night, Hick called me from the front yard. What? You think we're some kind of triathloners in training? Or working out with Izzy Mandelbaum? A Thevictorian would never hop off the Gator and run into the house when a phone call can achieve the same result. Besides, with the price we pay on phones, we might as well suck all the use out of them that we can.

"Send The Pony out here."

"Why?"

"There's a dead chicken under the lawnmower."

"I don't really think he'll want to see that. Didn't he see enough corpses the summer you put him on the chicken deathwatch, after you let those auction chickens in without quarantine, and slowly killed all the leghorns?"

"Send him out."

I did. While wondering if Hick or Genius had been mowing. Had there been a decapitation? A case of yard rage? Did a chicken take yard-crossing lessons from a possum down the road? The door slammed. Apparently, the fowl postmortem had concluded. "What's going on with the chicken?"

"Huh. Yesterday I found about thirty eggs under the lawnmower. Dad threw them all away, because we didn't know how long they'd been there. We can't find all their laying places."

"What's with the dead chicken?"

"Um. It was under the lawnmower. Right by where I found the eggs."

"Did a dog get it? How did it die?"

"We don't know. Dad said it was covered with maggots."

"And you didn't notice it when you pulled thirty eggs out from there?"

"No. I was looking for eggs. Not chickens. I can't believe I failed to see or smell the rotting chicken!"

I knew a trip to the optometrist was on the agenda. Perhaps I need to look into an ear/NOSE/throat specialist as well.