Free South of Elfrida by Holley Rubinsky Page A

road calling for Irma, then turned on his heel and waited in his office at the front of the house for Lee. He was inconsolable, and still teary-eyed when Lee came in the door for lunch.
    She marched down the hill to look at the damage and found Cuthbert still throbbing. Matilda was dead, it was true, but poor Cuthbert had existed in a subtle state, hovering between life and death, since the attack. “Gregory,” she shouted. “Gregory!” She made him bring a box and fresh straw, lift the rooster, and carry him up to the house. They decided to put the box on top of the freezer, in its own small room with a swinging door. Lying stricken on the straw, Cuthbert looked like a shred of Japanese silk.
    When Lee came home from her classroom that afternoon, Gregory seemed calmer; he’d tried giving Cuthbert water through an eyedropper. She moved her hands slowly into the rooster’s space until she touched him. She placed her hands side by side on his deflated body. Cuthbert looked at her with one bright little eye. Then he closed it. For ten days, twice a day and sometimes more, she put her hands in the box and let them do the work.
    â€œBut did he survive?” This is Sam. He and Lee are sitting in folding chairs in the shade behind the gyro food truck, while Shirley, Sam’s wife, finishes cleaning. It’s February, and the village south of Tucson, where Lee stays for four months in the winter, is hosting its annual week-long arts and crafts festival. It’s her second year of helping out in the gyro truck, and Shirley and Sam have become instant friends, the way people do who are always on the move. From the truck they sell pressed Greek-style minced lamb and beef cooked on a rotating spit, folded into pita bread slathered with tzatziki, shredded lettuce, and cut-up tomatoes. A food truck is a lucrative business, Shirley says. You get your circuit, you stick with it, you show up on time, you’re clean, you serve good food. Shirley, a perky blonde from Phoenix with a ponytail and eyes that mean business, is the truck’s owner. Her husband, Sam, a younger man on his way to being plump, studied biology at university but short-circuited himself two months shy of his degree. Lee likes him for this; he has a destructive edge.
    â€œHello? Planet Sam to Planet Lee. Did Cuthbert survive?”
    â€œOf course he survived. Didn’t I say that Gregory used the word ‘miraculous’? Would I have said ‘miracle’ if Cuthbert had died?” Sam has heard about Gregory’s death but hasn’t heard Cuthbert’s full story, far more graphic: After the first day he struggled to his feet, his neck so bent his comb touched the bottom of the box, and stood for a moment before sinking like a balloon leaking air. A thick, bloody mucous hung from his beak. “His neck is broken,” Gregory had said. “No, it is not,” she’d said, sounding annoyed. They took turns feeding him a soupy gruel of ground chicken mash and water. “He’s going to die,” Gregory had said. “No, he’s not,” she’d said, adamant. Cuthbert came to recognize her voice as she soothed him, and he blinked as though sending her messages from afar. After eight days, he lifted his head a little and took a halting step. Two days later he raised his head above the top of the box.
    â€œHe survived,” she says again to Sam.
    It’s warm and sunny—she wears cotton pants and a pair of running shoes—but in the days before the festival, vendors just arriving worried that a rainy streak wouldn’t let up. Now everything is so thirsty you’d never know weather had been a concern. Lee smells the heat and dust and dryness. Her skin is always crying for cream or sunscreen in this climate; her hands are parched, the backs patchy with spreading freckles and whitish spots she’d rather not think about. People stroll by, talking and laughing, stuffing food