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Click the play button below to listen to Chera Hammons read “Classroom Hatch.”
My husband tells me every chick his fifth graders took home last year died cruelly: crushed by younger siblings or drowned after falling into a basin of water. One timid girl’s dog swallowed her chick whole the moment she set it down, believing it to be an offering. This year we have already had enough of senseless loss. So he brings the chicks home, and in our fragrant kitchen we can hear them chirp, chirp, chirp from their plastic bin in the garage. Asking for what? They flee to the corners when we feed them, trembling and trilling loudly in alarm. When I was little, I had a duckling that slept in my lap while I read, and later I had a white rabbit kit I carried with me in a sock when my mother went into the houses of the wealthy to do their ironing. They used to ask her to salt the snails that lived behind their cool green hedges, too, and she would. We are all set into a day that we can’t live beyond, and I know this. I try to feed the chicks mealworms from my hands, crouching there sometimes for hours. I can’t remember how to make them believe in kindness.