The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir by Staceyann Chin

away.”
    He gently puts the chicken down. We form a circle around it. The heaving brown body lies there for a tense moment before it struggles to its feet.
    “Hold him! Don’t let him run away, Delano!” Shane is shouting.
    Delano grabs it again.
    “See, it not dead, just lazy. I bet it still strong enough to carry all of us on it back,” Shane pronounces.
    “Okay, let’s ride him, then,” Samantha suggests.
    “I don’t think we should,” I caution.
    “Why not? Shane just said it could carry us!”
    Delano says nothing.
    “Is ’fraid you ’fraid?” Samantha taunts.
    “Yes, is ’fraid you ’fraid?” Shane adds.
    The worst thing to do to Delano is call him a coward.
    “I not ’fraid of nothing! Make we ride him.”
    We sit on top of each other. Shane, the biggest, sits first. Then Delano sits on him. There is a thin cry from the chicken when Samantha settles on her brother’s lap. By the time I sit, there isn’t a sound coming from below.
    “Make him move, Shane,” Delano urges.
    “I’m trying.”
    “Hit him, like a horse,” Samantha volunteers.
    “Yuck! I think it’s having diarrhea, and it’s all over my pants.” Shane leaps to his feet.
    The rest of us tumble to the ground.
    I land on something wet and brown and warm. We scramble to our feet and look at the chicken, which is flat and oozing a dark fluid from its tail. It looks pitiful; its bruised, bald, head twisted to one side.
    One eye stares wide open. The other is closed in one-half of a blink, leaking some kind of watery stuff. It’s crying, I think, the poor little thing is crying.
    “I think it dead.” Delano’s voice is small in the big backyard.
    We all stand there uncertain of what the long pink neck—curved and elegant even in death—means. If I look at one eye, it is alive but tearful. If I look at the other, it is dead.
    “I’m telling on all of you!” Samantha breaks the silence.
    “If you tell on us, you have to tell on yourself!” Shane counters.
    “But I didn’t do anything.” Samantha is crying.
    “Yes, you did!” insists Shane. “You was the one who said to ride it. And you helped to ride it. Maybe it was your big fat batty that make the fowl dead!”
    Samantha looks at Delano and me. We both look steadily at the dusty ground. She stands there for only a second before she turns her back and stomps toward the house.
    “What we going to do with him?” Shane asks, the next adventure glimmering in his eyes.
    “I don’t care. You do what you want with it,” Delano mutters before he turns and walks away.
    I follow my brother to the ackee tree at the farthest end of the backyard. I think of the chicken blinking when it is alive. Not blinking when it is dead. I can’t get the image out of my head.
    “Delano, you saw the chicken eye? It look like it was crying, don’t? It did definitely look sad, don’t?”
    “Stacey, right now me nuh care ’bout how the chicken did look. Right now me just thinking ’bout what will happen if Aunt June find out that we kill her chicken. If she and Uncle Harold find out that we was in it, they will think that we ungrateful to them for making us live here. They might make Grandma take us to live somewhere else. Grandma don’t have nowhere else to live.”
    “We could go back to Lottery. The house not big like this one, but is our own. We could go back and go to school at Miss Sis.” I miss our old teacher. I miss the head rubs and the smell of thyme. The thought of going back makes me happy.
    “How you so stupid?” His anger surprises me. “It was never our house in the first place. We did only rent it from somebody. We can’t go back there now. Somebody else live there now.”
    I know that Grandma tells Delano things she does not tell me, but I am the one who was born in that house. My navel string is buried in that yard. I know I am only in Bethel Town because of Andrew. As soon as he gets bigger we are going to move back to our own house in Lottery. My mother