Bird Brained

“Did you know–”

‘Why do all his sentences have to start with ‘did you know’?’ Mrs. Miller wondered.

“Did you know there’s a part of your brain that means you can lie?”

Mrs. Miller had just been passing through her lounge room when her son had stopped her to ask this. She had a pile of folded washing in her arms and she looked down at him, sitting in her armchair in front of the television, looking up at her with marked eagerness. The TV was playing some sort of scientific documentary; no surprise to her. She sighed. Jeff was only six. Her other children hadn’t even known where in their body their brain was located at that age.

She didn’t respond, so Jeff continued. “This is about a person who got in a fight and lost the lie-making part of their brain! It’s true!”

“That’s very interesting, Jeff. But don’t you want to go to the pool with Lucy? She’s going soon.”

“Nah.”

Jeff was already glued to the TV screen again and his mother didn’t bother asking him another time.

If Jeff’s mother had at any point realised the level of inaccuracy Jeff’s favourite documentary show was running at, she would have stopped the stream of misinformation entering his impressionable mind. But she never payed enough attention to her son’s wacky interests to find out. She wrote them off as his “dinosaur phase” and only turned off the screen when it got too bloody for her tastes. And because of that parenting ‘miss’, Jeff grew up with more than one funny notion about how science worked - especially neuroscience. In highschool, his science teacher hid plenty of smiles behind his hand as he tried to teach Jeff. He actually found it so amusing and distracting that he tended to keep quiet when he could have corrected some of Jeff’s pre-conceived beliefs. ‘What could it hurt,’ he thought. The kid knew more than anyone else in the class anyway. Letting him believe that ostriches had a “flight, fight, or hide” response to danger as evidenced by the ‘fact’ that they would hide their heads in the sand at the approach of danger didn’t seem too bad to him. He didn’t know that, in the future, Jeff would spend over 50 hours researching the “hide instinct” only to find out that it was entire nonsense.

As he got older, Jeff discovered the internet. With this goldmine of information he was able to iron out a lot of the misunderstandings he had picked up, but it wasn’t the perfect tool. With a combination of online forums and out of whack data, he even picked up some more mistakes. But overall, Jeff learnt and experimented and gained more and more knowledge about how the brain functioned and a whole lot of other sub-topics which fascinated him.

His mother imagined he would be fired from a few dozen jobs before he could afford to live on his own, but she was proven wrong when he found a job at 14 and stayed there until he started renting a place. Apparently he and the owners had clicked and they appreciated his dedication.

Jeff moved into a strange old house which his siblings tried to avoid visiting after they noticed the occasional noises, smells, and vapors that drifted up from the cellar. Best to leave their weird brother alone, they thought.

So Jeff’s scientific, experimental side existed only in the laboratory below his house and on obscure scientific chat forums. And he was quite happy.

----

One day, Louise was driving home from work, listening to piano music when she glimpsed something strange out the corner of her eye. She turned her head to the sidewalk to see a plump chicken striding down the pavement.

“What the–” She looked again, having to turn her neck as she had driven past the bird now. It was still there. A magnificent orange chicken, walking down the footpath without a care in the world.

Louise tried to keep driving, but she wasn’t able to ignore what she had just seen and she pulled up to the curb before she drove too far away and got out. She walked down the footpath, wondering what could have made the chicken appear there in the first place.

As she approached the chicken, she slowed down, trying not to frighten it away and said, “Hey. What are you doing here, Popcorn? You don’t belong in the city. I don’t even think anyone around here has backyard chickens.” She looked around at the streets and houses. Wrong place for a chicken.

In the meantime, the chicken hadn’t slowed it’s walking and she had to follow it down the road. Louise looked at the bird with a raised eyebrow. She had had chickens before when she lived with her family and she had never seen a chicken behaving like this before. She skipped a few steps lithely and grabbed up the determined chicken into her arms, avoiding any scratches or bites.

The chicken didn’t seem too worried about being handled and she guessed that it must be an escaped family ‘pet’. As she looked the bird over, Louise noticed a bald spot on the chicken’s head and something tied around it’s neck.

“What’s this?” She pulled the feathers back and inspected the neckband. It was metal, only a centimetre high and had a few different tiny metal boxes hand-welded to the band. She looked at it, slightly worried about what she might be dealing with since she had no idea what it could be.

‘That is so weird…“ She turned the ball of feathers over and looked at the other side of the band, noticing a QR code engraved into the band. Excited that she might be getting somewhere, Louise pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket and scanned the code. A page loaded and she smiled a little when she saw that it was an information page about a project that was happening where the aim was to make a chicken go all the way to the top of the country. From the information on the page, she gathered it was some sort of homing pigeon style experiment but with chickens instead of pigeons and involving a tampering with the bird’s migration instinct. She laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of what she was learning. A few seconds meant she had found the project instigator’s work address and she logged it into the maps on her phone.

She held the confused bird carefully and made her way back to her car. “You and I are going to take a little detour. Okay?”

She didn’t know what she was expecting to find at the address exactly but it wasn’t a single-story brick house lodged in between a row of similar houses all with mediocre front gardens with a couple of children playing out the front of one. Feeling rather stupid, Louise got out of the car carrying the large orange chicken in her arms and marched up to the front door of the house she supposed it had come from. As carefully as possible, she knocked loudly on the wooden door and rang the bell for good measure. A while later she knocked and rang again, but there was no response.

“Well… That’s a bit rude, isn’t it?” She said to the chicken. After another attempt at rousing the inhabitants, Louise stepped back from the door. Noticing a pathway around the side of the house, she decided to head around the back. She walked down the side, knocked loudly on the back door twice and then was about to give up as she headed back around the the front on the other side of the house when she noticed a doorway which was open onto a set of stairs going down.

"Maybe your owner couldn't hear the doorbell," she suggested to the chicken. She took a look around and then started down the stairs.

When she was almost at the bottom, Louise heard soft pop music coming from the doorway at the bottom and she shook her head scoffing at the stranger's music choices.

Boldly, she hurried down the last few steps and burst into the room. At the other end of the room, Jeff stared in shock as a young woman burst into his basement laboratory holding his chicken in her arms. She also looked shocked, perhaps not expecting to walk into a science lab.

He recovered his speech first. "Have you never heard of knocking?"

"Oh, sorry--" The two young people were lost in each other's gaze for nearly a minute before the squawking of the chicken in Louise's arms snapped them out of it.

"Um, I found this chicken and... It was behaving weirdly."

Jeff's look seemed to say that the chicken wasn't the only creature to be doing that. She hurried to explain herself.

"I looked for an address on the info page the QR code took me too. That's how I found this place. You didn't hear the doorbell."

Louise couldn't believe how stupid she sounded. This guy was ruffling her feathers with nothing more than his looks and his lab. That wasn't okay.

"Yeah, that's my chicken and she was doing /just/ what she was supposed to be doing. Thanks a lot."

If Jeff wasn't so thrown off by Louise's miraculous appearance in his lab and her gorgeous appearance, he would have been extremely mad. As the case was, the mellow romantic soundtrack that was playing fit the mood far more than I should.

"Well I was only trying to help," Louise protested, which wasn't quite true. She had also been irresistibly curious. "I don't know what you're trying to do here but it's... well..." Something made her think twice before saying "weird". "Well, I've never seen something quite so ridiculous as this chicken marching down a suburban roadway all on its own."

Jeff looked just a little relieved. He gestured to a kettle and coffee station. "Do you want a coffee?"

"Are you going to put sulferic acid or something in it?" Louise joked. She nodded. "Thanks. I brought lunch."