Don T Cry Over Dead Birds Short Story

Don’t Cry Over Dead Birds My family adopted four chickens about two years ago. Their names were Peep, Cutie Pie, Becky, and Elsa. Elsa was an easter-egger, laid pretty light-pink eggs, and had orange-brown black-tipped feathers with fluffier feathers on her cheeks. She had intelligent bright orange eyes, and anyone could tell she was thinking behind those eyes, not just a docile pet. Elsa was at the top of the pecking order, always the first to jump into action, always the first out of the coop in the morning.
We fed them pellets as their main food, but they ate grass and bugs and treats all day, every day. We had a camera in the coop to make sure they were all inside at night and the automatic door was closed. They ate a lot of treats. They
ate mealworms, sunflower seeds, and leftovers. Chickens, however hardy they seem, need a balanced diet. The diet of our hens was not very balanced.
On a day before school started, I sat down and ate breakfast with my mother, checking the coop camera. We noticed something odd, one of the hens was laying on the floor of the coop. We decided it was Elsa, followed by a few Frozen jokes, however morbid. In a lull in the conversation my mother had quietly said, “I hope she’s not dead,” her voice filled with worry and fear; none of our chickens had ever dropped dead before, for something like this to happen on a warm autumn night was even more unusual. I finished my breakfast and stood up, suggesting she should go visit the chickens, to make sure everything was okay. I went back into my bedroom, on the ground floor near the kitchen and guest room, and continued getting ready for school, purposely not giving much thought to Elsa’s fate.
I heard something odd, and I paused, trying to be as silent as I could. I heard sobbing. Not quiet crying, sobbing: tears unrelentlessly flowing and gasping for breath. This wasn’t as if it was in the kitchen, it was as if it was on a television. I became even more still, holding my breath and unsure if it was real or not. After a few seconds I realized it was my mother in the coop, her voice being carried and amplified into the house by the microphone on the camera. I had only heard my mother cry like this once before, when her Uncle Buddy passed away three or four years prior and only told me so because I was refusing to write a letter to my Great-Grandmother.
I finished packing, not wanting to disturb the now uneasy silence within the house.
I went back into the kitchen and found my mother, her eyes and cheeks red, undoubtedly from crying, and a mournful look on her face. “Elsa is dead,” and I hugged her, wrapping my arms around her tightly, no tears running from my eyes but a heavy sense of dread settling in my stomach. Why wasn’t I upset? Why was I the only one here for my mother? As I matured over the following year, I learned I would not cry often over death, but death would only add to the heavy sense of dread, weighing me down. This feeling would only increase with the deaths of other beloved animals and people in my life: my hen, Peep, who broke her neck, my Great-Grandmother passing, my father’s secretary who I was very close with, a raccoon on the side of the road. I could not escape this feeling, even when I was at my happiest.
As my family is deeply enamoured with science, we all wanted, or rather needed, to know what had killed our beloved Elsa. We sent her body to a laboratory in the city, where veterinarians or biologists did a complete autopsy. She had died of a fatty liver, likely from overeating sunflower seeds. We never got the body back, so we had no burial, no sense of finality to confirm her
death.