Big Red XVI

Big Red, in the wreckage of his coop

My family has owned a long line of roosters named Big Red. The first Big Red I remember was when we lived in the Nevada desert near Pyramid Lake, but for all I know there may have been many ancestors. That earlier Big Red died one night when coyotes dragged him off into the black desert night, leaving only feathers, and my first lesson about death.

This Big Red, though, he's a survivor. Let's call him Big Red XVI, because it sounds fancy, and like I said, I don't know how many preceded him. He once had six hens. He would fuck exclusively one hen at a time. Often. So often that they died from his affections. When he had fucked one hen to death he moved on to the next, until she died. So on and so on, until Big Red was all alone in the coop my mom had built for him in Slidell, Louisiana, just a few miles from her home in Mississippi.

That few miles made all the difference to Big Red when Katrina hit. Her town in Mississippi was flattened and flooded, the part of Slidell that Big Red's coop was in just had trees down. His roost fell apart, but he survived, missing just a few feathers. And hens.

But the hens were his own damn fault.