Chicken, again!?

Drunken chickens from another planet were invading my garden. I don't know what brought them into my little slice of paradise, but they were ruining the creeping phlox and pulling up brick pathways while looking for worms and, their favorite I would later learn, centipedes.

I was sleeping in that day because of the three day holiday and other than a lingering morning dream hadn't given any thought to goings on at work. It seems a boss three times removed was questioning my work ethic and I was sniveling and hem hawing, then I woke up and had breakfast. Waffles and a hot cup of black English tea. The dog noticed the intruders before I did.

Hamster plummeted down the steps from his rumpled bed in my room and jumped against the patio glass barking his fool head off. I figured it was a rabbit and got up to let him out. No way could my little fluff ball catch a rabbit, and more than that, I was fairly sure the rabbit, if it stood its ground, could kick Hamster's furry butt.

A nice morning, I was going to follow him out and sit on a bench in the corner of the garden with my tea cup to watch the morning dew drip off the leaves. Cripes, I saw them. Not rabbits, but space alien chickens, staggering around my backyard. They had laser blasted my weather vane and left scorch marks on the fence. Paving stones littered the grass and one of them had fallen into a birdbath and apparently drowned in his own puke.

I didn't dare let my little doggie out there. These avian sots were liable to shoot him as soon as let him lick them into a lather, then dine on his charred...ugh, I can't bear to think on it. Instead I gathered up the pup and secured him behind closed doors listening to him frantically yap. The inebriates were clucking and weaving on the west end of my yard where the greater portion of my garden lies, while on the opposite end I have a garden shed. I worked out a plan to gain access to the shed and hopefully rid my yard of these foul winos before they destroyed everything I had spent years constructing and lovingly planting. There is dirt so deep in the crevices of my hands that I will never be rid of all of it. That garden is like a child to me and over the spring and summer months I spend hours a day fiddling and weeding about in the crisscrossing brick paths and crouching under weeping trees pruning and picking suckers. I couldn't allow these marauding rummy space hacks to land in my ajuga and set me back ten years on my backyard Eden.

I stealthily departed via the front door and circled around to the back of my tall privacy fence. The rest of the neighborhood seemed quiet, excepting a barking dog 3 or 4 houses down and the whining hum of a blower from a removed addition. Then I climbed up and over the fence to land behind my shed. I had only to creep around the side and open the door to get inside and gather a few tools.

The shed has a little window facing out over a deck into my yard, and I could easily see the bumbling chickens bumbling about and causing general mayhem. Their rocket ship was ass over end and quite nearly broken in two, so I was guessing their stay would be an extended one, at least until they phoned their equivalent of triple-A for planetside assistance. As I watched one of them actually unlatched its helmet to test the air then clutched its throat and expired in a mound of geranium. Its tiny talons stuck up over the dainty pink blossoms. Hilarious. If I merely waited, perhaps all of them would peaceably off themselves.

Hamster still yowled in the house. I saw him in the upstairs' window clawing at the glass. I wheeled about and saw one of them looking up at me. It had wandered into the shed and was leaving jumbled steps on the floor from the wet grass. In its right gloved wing it clumsily held a blaster which it whipped up and fired, but the laser missed me by a foot and ricocheted off a rafter. I grabbed up a shovel and bashed it over the brain case sending feathers cascading into the muggy air. They settled in a pile upon its broken heap.

I had done interstellar murder, but it was in self defense. Space birdocide; was it a crime? But I couldn't wait to find out, they were into my purple garden tearing out the clematis and weaving it into party hats.

The blaster made no sense to me, or I would have cracked open the window and methodically peeled off the bibulous chickens one by one. One was planting a brightly colored flag in a raised bed of asparagus now. Damn these cockeyed cluckers!

I yanked out my mower and ripped the cord. This fine piece of mulching machinery never let me down and started on the first pull. Grabbing up the shovel in my left, I backed out of the shed and pushed down on the handle, raising the deck of the mower to a 45 degree angle, and crouching I lunged forward at the biggest mass of invaders. A third scattered and teetered at me but I deftly swung my spade and set them spinning into the lawn. The rest I eviscerated under spinning death blades. Then I let go the handle and sprung into the midst of them wielding my lethal shovel like a double handed halberd, effectively obscuring their vision by knocking helmets askew and piling them bodily into the ground-cover.

Disabled, I relieved the surviving clutch of their lasers and gathered them and their comrade's tattered remains into a wheelbarrow. Three trips, including the transport of the busted rocket ship, and I had rid the celestial space vermin from my ravaged yard, dumped into the overgrown weeds beyond my fence line. They could sleep it off in the thistle for all I cared. I kept the blasters, figuring once I learned their use I could put them to work eliminating dandelions from my bluegrass.

The flag I rolled up and tossed into my shed, as a souvenir from my day battling space chickens, and as proof if SETI ever came calling. No pissed poultry was coming down from the stars to claim my garden, by God, and I assert my right to dig, sculpt, mow and plant its borders as I see fit, damn the foul that impinges my property line in search of conquest and grubs! Stand up, all you backyard weekend warriors from suburbia. Raise your shovel, hoist your rake and shout at the heavens: This Land is My Land!

And have another beer, or two.