The Rewiring

She couldn’t sleep.

The chateau wouldn’t let her.

Her body lay still in the dark, heavy with exhaustion, but nothing inside her settled. The rooms stayed awake around her, not loud, not restless, alert in a way that made rest feel impossible. As if something in the walls refused to stand down. As if the chateau itself did not trust the night.

A faint hum lived behind the plaster, low enough to doubt, steady enough to hear. Every so often, something clicked and stopped, unfinished, like a thought that reached for rest and lost itself halfway there.

She lay there with her eyes closed anyway, hoping her body might finally rest and drift off on its own.

It didn’t.

The air felt charged, thin, and watchful. The dark wasn’t empty; it pressed close to her skin. She could feel the chateau holding its breath, waiting for something it couldn’t name.

She had learned to live with energy that wouldn’t behave.

Some weeks, the chateau ran too bright. Every room felt like it was awake at once. Every bulb blazing as if light were something to be spent all at once. The air buzzing with urgency, thoughts careening from wall to wall with nowhere to land.

This had happened before.

A pop.

A crack.

A bulb giving out, glass and crystals scattering across the floor, sudden and final.

It had been the light in her writing room. A vintage crystal fixture that caught the sun in the mornings and scattered gently across the walls.

Chicken learned to clean it up quietly. She knew how to kneel on the hardwood long after the brightness was gone, the floor cool beneath her legs, gathering shards that still felt warm. She learned how to sweep the evidence into her wings without cutting herself. Learned how to erase proof of how overwhelmed her world had been just moments before. Learned how to grieve just how beautiful life had been just moments before.

After that, she left the socket empty.

Her desk stayed where it always had, facing the window.

And so she started to write by sunlight instead, by something that rose slowly and crossed the floor without urgency. 

Morning light. Afternoon light. The kind that never surged, never shattered, never asked her to keep up.

She trusted that light. She did not trust her own.

Other weeks, the power vanished when she needed it most.

She would flip a switch, and nothing would answer. Stand there in the dark, waiting, as if patience alone might coax the room back to her. Sometimes it didn’t, and mostly she just stayed there, numb, the darkness a mirror reflecting on her.

There was no dial for the length of time the darkness planned to stay. No middle ground, or negotiation. No off switch, either.

Only too much, or not enough. And no way to ask it to slow down.

Tonight felt like both.

There was no breaker she could reach from inside herself.

The hum. The pressure. The sense that something in the system was already running past its limits.

Her body was exhausted, but her mind stayed lit.

She turned onto her side. Then onto the other.

Pulled the blanket closer, as if weight might anchor her. Kicked it away when it didn’t.

Nothing shifted.

The dark behaved like it meant to stay, as if it had known her longer than the light.

At some point, the frustration sharpened, not into panic, but into the quiet, grinding anger of things that should work and don’t. Systems that refuse to cooperate when you need them most. Negotiating with something that lives inside you and answers to no one.

Eventually, she gave up pretending sleep might come.

She slid out of bed and padded into the kitchen, careful and slow, letting the pale wash of moonlight guide her. The room felt unfamiliar in the dark, edges softened, shadows pooling too deeply in the corners.

The refrigerator thrummed too loudly. The silence between sounds felt charged.

She knew which switches to flip slowly. Which rooms to avoid on certain nights. How to make herself smaller when the current surged.

The kitchen light had always flickered.

Blinking on and off before settling and sometimes cutting out entirely, leaving her standing there with her hand still on the switch, waiting. It annoyed her, but not enough to fix. She knew its rhythm. When to pause. When not to flinch when the room briefly went dark.

Despite her frustration, she dealt with it.

She always did.

Standing there now, wings folded tight around herself, exhaustion curdling into something bitter, she didn’t expect it to hurt.

She expected the usual failure, a flicker, a delay, or darkness asking her to wait again.

She reached for the switch.

The shock was instantaneous.

The moment her fingers made contact, the current surged, violent and uncontained, racing up her arm and breaking open inside her head.

Behind her eyes, pain flared, not sharp at first, but total, as if light itself had turned against her.

Her vision folded inward. Sound collapsed into a single shrill note that swallowed everything else. The force of it knocked the breath clean out of her, and before she could understand what was happening, her knees buckled.

She hit the counter and slid to the floor.

And above her, the light stayed on.

No flicker. No hesitation. No blinking out.

For the first time since she’d lived in the chateau, the kitchen was perfectly lit.

The world returned unevenly.

Distant and wrong, as if it had been pushed several feet away from her and left there, unreachable. Light pressed down on her, thick and bruising, exposing everything she couldn’t move fast enough to hide.

Her head throbbed violently now.

Pain rolled behind her eyes in heavy waves, spreading outward until it felt like her entire skull was filled with it, no edges, no escape, nowhere for it to drain.

This was different from the bulbs shattering.

This wasn’t something she could sweep up afterward.

Chicken pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her wings around them, folding herself inward as tightly as she could. She pressed her face into the soft curve of her feathers and cried there, muffled, shaking, trying to contain the pain the way she’d learned to contain everything else.

Each sob sent another sharp pulse through her head.

She cried anyway.

Curled on the cold kitchen floor, wings trembling, she rocked slightly without realizing it, an instinctive motion, like she was trying to soothe something inside herself that had already been hurt too badly.

Above her, the light stayed steady.

The electricity hummed calmly now, satisfied.

By morning, the pain had not left.

It sat deep behind her eyes, a heavy, insistent pressure that made every movement careful. She pressed her fingers to her temples as if she could hold her skull together that way. She felt fragile in a way she had no language for.

She stayed on the kitchen floor, elbows on her knees, face in her hands, holding her head as if it were something separate from her body, something injured she was responsible for carrying.

As if keeping it still might keep it from breaking further.

Time passed without shape.

When she finally looked up, the clock read 7:00 a.m.

Pale light crept through the window, thinning the darkness. The sky softened from black to blue to something almost gentle, as if the world were continuing out of habit alone.

She watched the light touch the walls, the counters, the place where she had fallen.

Nothing changed.

She called her dad.

He arrived quickly.

He looked a lot like her, but older, feathers dulled to a soft gray around the edges, the color of ash after a long burn. The gray gathered most at his temples and along his chest, not dramatic, just earned, the way time marks someone who has stayed through a lot. His glasses sat low on his beak, thin wire frames smudged from use, always slipping slightly no matter how often he pushed them back into place.

There was nothing rushed about him, even when he moved fast.

His shoulders were rounded from years of leaning in, toward problems, toward people, toward light. He moved with quiet steadiness, his loud laugh echoing through rooms long after he’d passed through them.

Entering the chateau, his eyes, magnified just a little by the lenses, took her in all at once: the way she held her head, the tightness in her posture, the way her body seemed braced for another blow.

He looked concerned in an unsurprised, practiced, and careful kind of way, the kind that comes from loving someone who has been hurt before and knowing how easily it can happen again.

He took one step into the room, and the air changed.

Not because anything had been fixed yet, but because she was no longer alone in it.

He moved slowly, deliberately.

He reached up and turned off the switch above her head, carefully this time, then crouched down in front of her, bringing himself to her level, steady as gravity.

“Hey,” he said softly. Then, quieter, “Are you okay, hun?”

Chicken tried to answer.

Her mouth opened, but nothing organized itself fast enough. The pain flared at the effort, sharp and punishing, and all she could manage was a small, broken shake of her head.

That was enough.

He shifted closer and wrapped his arms around her carefully, like he already knew where it hurt. Chicken collapsed into him immediately, forehead pressed against his shoulder, wings tightening around herself as the sobs finally broke loose, deep, uneven, helpless.

“I’m here,” he said into her hair. “I’ve got you.”

She cried like that for a long time.

He didn’t rush her.

He stayed, holding her steadily, one wing firm at the back of her head, the other braced against her spine.

“It’s okay,” he said softly. “I’m here.”

When the sobs thinned into quiet, shuddering breaths, he helped her stand.

They moved slowly. Deliberately.

He guided her to bed and pulled the curtains just enough to soften the light.

“You don’t have to sleep,” he said. “Just rest.”

Then he turned back to the chateau.

The hum pressed on, familiar and relentless, vibrating through the floors, the walls, the space behind her eyes. She had learned to live with it the way you live with weather. Always present, shaping every day in a different way.

He shut off the power at the breaker.

Everything went still. 

Chicken’s shoulders dropped. She loosened a long breath, as if it had been pacing a dead end, and finally found a road forward.

He opened the walls where he needed to, tracing damage that hadn’t happened all at once,  wires brittle, cracked, darkened from carrying more than they ever should have.

He let out a breath and knelt closer, fingers hovering over the wiring as if listening for where it hurt most.

He arrived with his toolbox, tools for tightening loose fixtures and replacing what had burned out. He seemed to know, without being told where the chateau had been hurting.

He replaced what couldn’t be trusted and rerouted what had been overloaded. Gave the current a wider, safer way to move.

The energy didn’t disappear. But it learned restraint.

When Chicken woke from her long-awaited rest, the pain was still there.

Deep. Bruised. Present.

But the hum was gone.

She followed the silence into the hallway, where bright new wires ran cleanly behind the open panel, steady, capable, no longer straining under what they carried.

The bulbs still burned bright sometimes. But they no longer exploded.

And when the light dimmed, it came back on its own.

Her dad stood beside her.

“It’ll take time,” he said gently. “Homes need time to settle after rewiring.”

She nodded, unsure whether he meant the walls or her.

“It’s going to get better now,” he said. “And you don’t have to deal with it alone.”

Her head still hurt. But the chateau no longer worked against her.

She had survived the surge. The crash. The cleanup.

Once, the chateau had spoken louder than she could.

It flickered. It surged. It went dark without warning.

Now it answered her differently. The walls listened. The lights waited.

And when the current moved, it moved with care.

The new wires working behind her walls did not heal her. But it stopped arguing with her presence. And she stayed.

After thanking her dad and giving him a tight hug, Chicken went back to her writing room.

Her desk faced the window, as it always had.

She gazed up at the ceiling. Now the light was back, not identical, but close enough to remember the one that had collapsed around her.

Her dad had replaced it while she slept.

A new crystal fixture, cut in the same old style.

It offered the same quiet magic, the exact soft reflection along the walls, but held itself differently.

Thicker glass. Stronger joints. Built to bear what the first one couldn't.

She stood beneath it. Her body tightened automatically, memory pulling her shoulders in, half-expecting the familiar warning, the flicker, the surge, the sharp sound of glass giving way.

But the light held.

It didn’t flare. It didn’t dim. It didn’t shatter.

Chicken stayed where she was, letting it exist above her, letting herself exist beneath it.

And she knew, for now, survival was enough, even when living felt unbearable.

The Rewiring

Each morning, I return 

to the same small work, 

sit, wait, let the current pass.

No banners. 

No cure proclaimed.

Only the body learning 

another way to hold itself.

Some days the charge is heavy, 

leaves its bruise behind the eyes. 

Some days it loosens, 

just enough to breathe through.

They say the lines are changing. 

That what once burned 

is being taught a steadier route.

I believe them 

the way you believe in soil, 

by kneeling, 

by touching it daily, 

by trusting what grows 

slowly, underground.

Above me, light holds. 

Not brighter. 

Not kinder. 

Just steadier 

than before.

I am not finished. 

I am not fixed.

While flowers bloom on graves,

 I rewire myself, choosing to stay.

CHK