Louise Walton

Patsy went missing the same day my grandpa died. There’s only four chickens and the rooster now, all cruckling and flap-rustling as they scramble out of the henhouse door. I let them out every morning, like Pop always did. I could’ve said something like that at his funeral two weeks ago, like people do at those things, sending out messages into thin air, “Don’t worry, Pop. I’ll look after the chickens for you.” Except I didn’t look after Patsy, and I didn’t go to his funeral.

Three eggs today. I weave through the bushy half-acre yard back to the kitchen, where I’ve already got a sweet potato under the grill. My Uncle Steve’s making a coffee.

“Phwoar, it’s warm already, isn’t it? When’s your mum get up, champ?”

He’s only up for the weekend, or he’d know I wasn’t any kind of champion. He drove up from Sydney to check on my mum.

I shrug. “Whenever she feels like it.”

“She’s probably still adjusting to your Pop being gone, huh? Bit of a shock for everyone.”

I shrug again. “Probably.”

I don’t tell him she’s always like that. She’s the reason we missed the funeral. She got stoned that morning and said funerals belong to the establishment.

“We got him right here,” she drawled, patting a loose fist to her weed-filled lungs. Maybe she was trying to reach her heart. “Screw the system.”

I was mad, but I also felt like a traitor after losing Patsy, so I didn’t fuss too much. Patsy was special, even if she did have a blind eye. My Pop used to tell me we had ‘the Call,’ me and him. Wasn’t a cool power, like rocket-feet, but he said when we spoke, animals were drawn to us. I didn’t have many animals to test it on, but I thought he could’ve been right about me because I did get a lot of mozzie bites. But Pop had it for sure. Patsy took to him like Pop was a chicken himself.

And it wasn’t just chickens. “No need to pick the poor buggers up,” he told me once, as I tried to catch a tiny tree frog with a bung leg. “Call them and they’ll come to you.” That frog jumped right onto his arm, just like Patsy did a moment later… and ate it. Pop said ethics wasn’t his strong point and the animals could figure that out.

But if I ever did have the Call, I lost it when Pop was gone. In the commotion of finding him lying in the work shed, and ambulance sirens, and Mum rushing off after him, Patsy went missing too. I called her late into the night, but she didn’t come back. Neither did Pop. 

“Think you might try high school next year?” asks Uncle Steve, scooting his skinny arse into Pop’s favourite chair.

The floorboards creak as Mum comes in wearing my shorts and a dressing gown. “To learn what?”

“Might be good for him.” Uncle Steve splits his index finger and thumb to clean coffee off his sparse moustache. “He needs the socialising and discipline.”

I’ve always wanted to try school but the way Uncle Steve describes it takes the excitement out. I think he has the opposite of the Call. Though, to be fair, most of my school daydreams were of magical schools for kids with mediocre animal powers. My imaginary lessons were full of koala bushfire rescues, and bees doing tricks inside detergent bubbles. Pop.

“You think he’ll learn about the world by being taken out of it and locked into a tiny box with desks?” She pours coconut milk and flaxseeds into the blender with half an avocado and a spoonful of our honey, from our bees she never looks after. Pop did that, plus all my home-schooling. Guess I’ve graduated now.

“Everything with any kind of order is toxic to you, isn’t it, Rach?” He sets his cup down and half-outstretches his hand, like he’s sensing her aura. “I pray for you. It’s a spirit of rebellion and you need freeing. You couldn’t even make the funeral and send off your own father.

“I sent him off my way, and it was better than anything you could’ve done.”

“You’ll never know, because you didn’t come,” says Uncle Steve, folding his arms, until his preaching arm slips out again. “It was beautiful, you know. I had a divine word to proclaim, and so did Wendy, and Costa, and Pastor Daniel, and I’ve never been to such a spirit-declared heaven-celebration in my life.”

I throw a fork at him and bolt outside, slamming the door behind me before he can tell me off. Pop didn’t like the Pentecostals. I bash through the weedy, angry garden, stepping over chickens as they forage for bugs. It’s already hot, fuzzes of flies swarming the manure in the chicken shed, grating my eardrums like Uncle Steve’s nasal twang.

Pop said Pentecostal theology blew around like loose dag on a sheep’s arsehole, and no one wanted to hear forty-seven repeats of hand-waving claptrap in one song, not even God. Pop liked playing The Old Rugged Cross on his dirt-clogged phone speakers to Patsy as she sat on his lap – Johnny Cash version, of course. “Now, that’s a hymn,” he’d say, his tattooed arm stroking Patsy’s emerald-black feathers. We all loved Johnny Cash, especially A Boy Named Sue. Patsy could cluck the whole song. I think I got the best U.S.-country-music education of any Australian thirteen-year-old that ever lived. Guess I’ll write that on my graduating certificate.

I did learn a lot from Pop. But I wish he could’ve told me what to do when there was no one left to tell me what to do. 

The back door squeaks open. 

I duck. Weedy cucamelons climb from the work shed to the chicken shed, sprawling over heavy choko vines, swamping passionfruit creepers; a criss-crossed green web, trapping mosquitoes and tomatoes below. I crawl underneath, breathing wet, sour earth. 

There’s no way they’d bother looking here. Although I’d be surprised if they looked anywhere at all. Uncle Steve doesn’t like the heat and Mum lights up when she can’t see me – mostly a joint, but I’ve spied on her before, and she looks more relaxed when she’s alone.

Maybe I am too. It’s nicer than you’d expect under here. Above, there’s tiny freckles of strained light trying to get in. A green, stained glass, like a proper old church or a James Boag’s bottle. Pop would have chosen both those things for his funeral.

I mumble his ringtone as I lie there… have you ever been lonely, have you ever been blue… He’d want Patsy Cline playing at his funeral for sure. Johnny Cash too. A real funeral. He deserved a real one, not a pot-fogged high or a crazed-pentecostal clap-fest. I half-growl what I remember from The Old Rugged Cross, ignoring my hot eyes. “This eulogy goes out to my Pop, because, excuse me, he needs a real one, Steve.” I kind of hope my uncle did come looking for me now.

I yell a bit louder. “Did you even know him? Guess what? He had a God-given power like none of you have, like a magnet to bees with broken wings, and lost birds and…” I decide to leave out the frog. “He helped them all and he didn’t need your hand-waving spirit-powers to do God’s work ‘cause he was a real champion. None of you have any idea!”

I push up on my elbows, bash a tomato with my fist, and holler A Boy Named Sue: “My name is Sue! How do you do? Now, you gonna DIE!”

Cluck.

I freeze. “Die?”

Cluck.

I scrabble and drag forward through the shady tunnel. She’s hidden real well, right up the back, against the shed where it’s dry. Tiny cukes dangle over her like fairy lights.

“Patsy!”

She’s been here the whole time. Hiding. 

I try to hug her but she croons low and long, almost a warning, though she barely moves. 

“What’s wrong, girl?” Her eyelids are half-closed, and it hits me, she’s in a broody stupor. She’s nesting.

But then I see her eggs. Or what’s left of them – goanna got them, probably – it’s a scene from a horror movie… there are fluids and two strewn bodies, and shells as broken as my spirit right now. Almost worse than finding Pop face-down, lungs-empty, stock-still on the shed floor three weeks ago, air compressor still running from pumping up the ride-on lawnmower tyres. There’s some things you wish you never saw and this is one of them.

I stroke Patsy’s ruffled back slowly. She warbles again but she lets me.

We’re just as busted as each other.

I’ll clean it up later. Right now, I just want to lie here. Me and Patsy. We can plan our own funerals, so whoever dies next has it done right. “Don’t tell Pop, but I also want the Foo Fighters played at mine,” I whisper to Patsy, but I can’t seem to squeeze out a smile. Or a tear, although it’s building up. Can’t catch a break. World seems full of goannas right now. I let my head fall back. 

Cheep.

That’s not Patsy. Cheep.

I sit up. It’s so faint.

I freeze, only my eyes moving. It gets louder.

And there, peeking out from under Patsy’s wing is a lone, black chick.

Alive.

I laugh.

And then I cry.

Shoulder-heaving, tear-burning, breath-gasping sobs.

I cry because I love that baby chick. Because Pop would have loved it. Because he never saw it, because Patsy’s here, because Mum isn’t, because Pop’s not coming back, because there’s such a broken mess and because this tiny fluff-ball should’ve been crunched to a pulp but made it anyway. 

My call is all shuddery and wet. “Come here, you little nugget.”

And it tiptoes right into my hand.

This piece was previously published by The West Australian

Louise Walton lives on Australia’s east coast with her husband, three children, chickens, rabbits and a dog. She loves word play, comedy and Aussie dramedy, and is especially drawn to finding the sweet moments of function within dysfunction. She won the 2025 Spring Writing Battle, April 2025 Not Quite Write Prize, Eleventh Writer’s Playground, and 2024 New York City Midnight Rhyming Story contest, and was short-listed and published in the 2025 Furphy Literary Anthology. In 2026 she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best Microfiction award, none of which she was remotely close to winning but it’s a flex.
Author Page: https://twistedtournament.com/author/louisewalton