The chickens started getting mutilated about the same time my older sister decided she had been abducted by aliens. “Where was I when the aliens came?” I asked my sister.

“Asleep,” she said.

“How is that possible?” I said.

“You’re a sound sleeper,” she said.

But that was a lie. I wasn’t sleeping at night in my bed; I was awake, listening. My family moved from the suburbs to the farm when I was 6 years old. Even at that age, the sense of isolation hit me squarely in my chest with a solid ache. On moving day, I lost all my neighborhood friends—Debbie, Jay, Michael, all five Adams kids, and even bird-haired lanky Evelyn, whom everyone hated but me. I had to start over, but on the farm there was no one to start over with. As time passed, my desperate solitude was fueled by memories of neighborhood dodgeball, red rover, and all cycles—our favorite game, where we pedaled our bikes as fast as we could in a circle until someone wrecked and someone cried. The long, lonesome farm days closed with dark nights punctuated by the wind whistling through the hickory trees at the back of the house, and Tootsie the beagle baying all night at the barn. I lay awake in bed, straining my ears for any noise that would indicate there was someone else out there to play with.

“You’re crazy,” I told my sister. “I would have heard a spaceship.”

“It’s silent,” she said.

“Why’d they pick on you?” I asked.

“Because I’m psychic,” she said.

And so, a couple of years after I moved to the farm and lost all my friends, my sister was abducted by aliens and became psychic.

A week later, I found the first mutilated chicken. She was beak down in the straw with her back torn off. Skin, blood, and sinew lay splayed in a horrific open-winged display. I saved the bloody remains for Dad to review because though he was a part-time farmer, he was a full-time surgeon.

“Looks like an autopsy,” he said.

My sister chimed in, “An alien autopsy.”

“Shut up,” I said. I didn’t want to believe my sister, but the evidence was building at a rapid rate that aliens were visiting the farm. And though I had wished for some playmates, these were not the ones I had in mind.

After the second mutilation, I refused to go to the coop by myself.

“It’s just some critter,” my dad insisted. My sister rolled her eyes psychically, indicating otherwise.

That night my sister told me, “Dad is going to shore up the chicken house.”

“How do you know that?” I asked eagerly. “Psychic impression?”

“No,” she said, “I heard him and Mom talking after dinner.”

Dad drove to the feed store and purchased lumber and chicken wire. He and I spent a Saturday hammering, stapling, and securing the chicken coop from outside animals. That was Dad’s big plan to stop the aliens from mutilating our chickens.

It didn’t work. The aliens mutilated another hen. Dad walked the coop’s perimeter, looking for the way the “varmint” was gaining access and dissecting his chickens.

He called his friend, Father Hymen, who was a Catholic priest but mostly another chicken aficionado, for an opinion. Father Hymen drove from his parish in the city to cast his eyes upon our latest victim.

“That’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. Then, Father Hymen exorcised the coop.

Aliens were one thing, but demons were an entirely different animal. Though Dad managed a good front, I figured he was as scared as I was. He raised my allowance, bribing me to accompany him to the chicken coop in the mornings. While he gathered the eggs and closed the metal nests, I opened the henhouse door. Then, we both filled the waterers and feeders. The plan worked perfectly and expeditiously until the day I unlatched the henhouse door from the outside, and heard my father screaming on the inside of the coop.

Before I could run for my life, the chicken coop shook, and a possum the size of a small German shepherd blew through the open henhouse door as if it had been catapulted. Dad had kicked him like a football with his size-11 work boots. The alien-demon-chicken-killing possum lay dead at my feet with a broken back.

Rather than bury the animal, Dad threw it into the deep ditch on the farm where we burned our garbage. He tossed a dry-rotted tractor tire on top of the carcass, along with a gallon of gas and a lit match. Black smoke billowed into the air like a funeral pyre of some head of state, and though I would like to say the burning scoured my soul and ended a very lonesome and odd period in my life, it did not.

The possum-tire fire burned for three days and three nights, sending giant billows of stinky black smoke into the crisp country air. A neighboring farmer, from over a mile away, called our house and asked Dad what the hell he was doing.

“Disposing of vermin,” Dad said matter-of-factly, and slammed the phone back onto the receiver.

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Wichita Sims is the pseudonym of a writer living in Pacifica by the beach, and that big Taco Bell.

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