A Chicken Crosses a Road in Brookfield

Living in Brookfield the past 10 years has taught me many things. Get to know your neighbors — they’re generally great folks. The Brookfield Farmer’s Market is one of the best in Southeastern Wisconsin. Always adhere to the city’s waste and recycling guidelines, or you’ll get a sticker on your garbage can that is really hard to remove. And expect strange — no, outright weird — things to happen on a fairly regular basis.

As a fiction writer, I’m no stranger to literary devices. We authors have a huge number of techniques in our toolboxes — there’s the “Epiphany” when a character receives a sudden insight or revelation (a la “Holmes! I’ve pieced it all together — the Professor killed the Colonel in the Drawing Room with the candlestick). There’s the “Deus ex Machina” or “god from the machine” which appears (usually at the end of a story) and solves everything (a la the children rescued from a passing naval officer in “Lord of the Flies,” or when the conflict in “War of the Worlds” is suddenly resolved by microorganisms.) Nowhere in my literary toolbox is there “Weird in Suburbia.” The truth, it seems, is just too far-fetched for a literary device.

Case in point — driving down a quiet Brookfield road not too long ago, a chicken crossed the road in front of my car. Now, it’s important I wasn’t alone. My passenger also saw the chicken, and confirmed I was not hallucinating. Although neither one of us is an expert on chickens, we were pretty confident it was a chicken. It was brown or gray (apparently with the shock of seeing a chicken in Brookfield we blanked this fact from our memories). It walked in that unique motion that reminded me someone going over hot coals, bobbing its head vigorously. Thankfully the chicken scooted to the side of the road and disappeared in the brush before I could hit it.

“Was that a chicken crossing the road?” I asked my passenger.

We agreed it was. We haven’t seen it since, although we travel the same road frequently. I look for it every time we pass the spot. No chicken. 

I have friends in other cities that raise chickens in residential areas. When we got home, I looked on the City of Brookfield’s website to see if they passed a law allowing chickens. Nope. I searched for farms that might be in the area. Nothing even close.  

I was left with burning chicken sighting questions. How long had this chicken been walking around Brookfield? Did it escape off a chicken truck passing through North Avenue? Is someone keeping illegal chickens in their back yard? I didn’t think so — I didn’t see anything vaguely resembling a chicken coop in the nearby area. Besides, chickens are pretty hard to hide in suburbia. Could it be a wild chicken, if that’s even possible?

After racking my brain trying to explain our chicken sighting, I fell back to the literary device of the “moral.” And I discovered the moral of this story is that sometimes a chicken will cross the road and you won’t be provided an explanation. You’re left with a mystery.

Such is life in modern day suburbia.