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The morning the rooster learned to crow in Italian, Carina DeLuca-Bishop decided the countryside had it out for her.

He started at 4:57am, with a strangled “coo-ree-koo” that sounded like someone trying to pronounce “cock-a-doodle-doo” after three espressos and a mouthful of biscotti. Then he did it again, louder, like a tiny opera singer who’d been told his audience appreciated encores.

Maya reached across the bed and patted empty air. Carina stood at the window in a faded Station 19 hoodie over silk pyjamas, frowning like a woman who had been rudely woken, which is exactly what had happened. The yard beyond was all rumpled gold: a rectangle of field rough as stubble, a chicken run banded by fresh wire, the low red barn, and the old apple trees lining the gravel drive. Early mist dampened the grass and curled around the fence posts. The rooster, an arrogant little bundle of burnished copper, puffed himself up on the roof of the coop like a warlord.

“Maya,” Carina said, in the deeply patient voice of someone trying not to swear in three languages. “Your bird.”

“Our bird,” Maya corrected into her pillow, with a smirk. “Equal-opportunity bird.”

“Your bird is culturally insensitive.”

“He said buongiorno. He’s trying.”

“He is going to be tonights dinner if he isn’t careful.”

Maya dragged herself upright, hair a tangle, eyes bright in the silly way they always were out here. When her friends heard the words “Maya DeLuca-Bishop” and “farm,” they’d pictured disaster. But the truth was that Maya loved a complicated project the way other people loved indoor plumbing. A farm was just a house that was on fire all the time, except the fires had hooves and opinions. She swung her legs out of bed and kissed the sharp worry line between Carina’s brows until it softened.

“Give him a week,” Maya said. “If he hasn’t learned to sing in key, we’ll arrange for… voice lessons.”

“From whom? Pavarotti’s ghost?” But Carina leaned into Maya anyway. The rooster crowed again. Carina sighed. “I miss the steady hum of city ambulances. I miss sirens that sound like sirens.”

“You’ll love it,” Maya promised for the thirty-ninth time since they’d bought the place. “It smells like apples and wet hay and hope.”

“It smells like the inside of a boot.”

By six, the household had found its rhythm: Maya in muck boots and a flannel shirt that made her look absurdly pleased with herself; Carina in designer rain boots and a scarf tied with surgical precision, as if the chickens would appreciate a good knot. The pigs, two gilts the previous owners claimed were “docile, like fat golden retrievers”, stood at the fence of their paddock, evaluating their new landlords. They were polka-dot spotted and shaped like duffel bags. Their names were supposed to be Laverne and Shirley. From the profound, slightly bored intelligence in their eyes, Carina suspected they preferred Dr. Laverne and Signorina Shirley, Esq.

“You know,” Maya said, shaking grain into the trough with the swagger of a woman who had definitely watched three farm tutorials on YouTube at two in the morning, “they’re smart enough to learn their names.”

“Good,” Carina said. “We can teach them to call a taxi.”

She held the bucket while Maya counted chickens, which Carina felt was an exercise in both futility and slapstick. Chickens, as it turned out, moved like thoughts she had in the shower; vivid, erratic, fond of escaping. Every time Maya announced “nine,” a tenth would appear from behind the waterer, then a third would vanish beneath the coop, and the rooster would strut through like a tiny, pompous marshal making sure the band remembered the bridge.

“Ten,” Maya concluded, triumphant. “See? Easy. We are farm geniuses.”

“Your genius is eating the rake.”

The biggest hen, she had the stately low sway of a bouncer and wore her tail like a fascinator, had seized the end of the rake between her beak and was marching away with it. Carina instinctively clicked her tongue the way she did with interns wandering off during rounds. “No, signora,” she scolded, following at a dignified pace. “We do not decorate ourselves with hardware.”

The hen paused as Carina reclaimed the rake, highly unimpressed.

By eight, the sound of the place had layered itself into something like music. Pigs snuffled while chickens argued. Two barn swallows stitched the air. Maya kept up a cheerful monologue about compost and rotational grazing, which Carina privately suspected was a cult disguised as math. They were both smeared with tiny evidence of life: mud on boots, hay stuck to sleeves, a surprising amount of chicken manure on Maya’s collar, which Maya refused to acknowledge.

While they took a coffee break on the back steps, the rooster patrolled, his little head darting like an aunt assessing the appetiser table at a wedding.

“Confession,” Maya said, offering Carina half a cinnamon roll. “This is my dream.”

“It is very… rustic,” Carina conceded, which in her accent came out sounding like a diagnosis. “You are glowing. It is almost suspicious.”

Maya looked out across the field as if she were memorizing it. Sometimes Carina saw the firefighter still in her, the woman who took a halligan bar into the mouth of chaos and insisted that a person could come out alive. She’d brought that stubborn faith here, set it down beside the barn, watered it, waited. Carina had teased. She’d said she would try. She was trying now, counting herself lucky that for all the rooster’s opinions, for all the concern about the cuts of mud that never quite washed out of jeans, she got to be here, with Maya, at the start of something ridiculous.

“Also,” Maya admitted, “I already bought sweaters for the pigs.”

Carina choked. “What. Bambina, are you serious?”

“Handmade,” Maya said, eyes dancing. “From a lady named Edna who sells at the Saturday market. She does custom. I sent measurements.”

“Of the pigs.”

“The pigs were very patient. I told them it was for science.”

“Ah, yes,” Carina said faintly. “La scienza.”

The pigs, listening from a distance, snorted like old men at a café, not fooled by anything.

~•~•~•~

Their first serious argument with the farm happened two days later, when a chicken developed the glamorous idea of laying her egg somewhere unexpected. The nesting boxes, sturdy, lined with straw, every chicken interior-designer’s dream, were apparently passé. New York was out; Paris was in; the place to be seen depositing an egg was the tool shed.

Carina found this out when she opened the door to grab a hammer and was physically confronted by a hen who looked like a Victorian duchess appalled by pants.

“Excuse me,” Carina told her.

The hen huffed.

Maya called from the porch, “Everything okay?”

“Una signora has taken a studio in your tool shed,” Carina said, and then yelped because the hen had fluffed herself to twice her size and was making a noise like a tea kettle.

“Broody,” Maya said, arriving with the cautious optimism of someone who believed most situations were solvable with snacks. “She might be broody.”

“Is that curable?”

Maya squatted eye level with the hen, whose name, Maya announced, was now Florence. “We can let her sit,” Maya said. “Or we can relocate her. Gently.”

Florence made a sound not typically associated with gentleness.

Maya tried bribery. Florence ignored the kale leaf, almost eyeing off Carina. Carina tried reason. “Madam,” she said, “this is municipal property,” which wasn’t true, but felt correct. Florence rotated an eye like a periscope. Finally Maya scooped her gently, smoothly, like a firefighter lifting a child from a bath. There was flapping. There were feathers. There was dignified retreat (Carina) and cheerful coaxing (Maya) and Florence’s deep theatrical sigh as she realized she had been outmaneuvered by an opponent with thumbs.

They resettled Florence in Box Three, complete with a privacy curtain, being an old tea towel Carina clipped up using surgical clamps, which made her feel both useful and slightly deranged. Carina patted the hen’s back once, experimentally. Florence made a sound like a soft door closing. Carina, to her own surprise, looked pleased.

“See,” Maya said. “You’re a natural.”

“I am a board-certified obstetrician, Bambina,” Carina said, but there was no heat in it. “I was not informed I would be doing prenatal care for birds.”

“You’re doing postnatal care for birds,” Maya said. “It’s very advanced.”

As if on cue, the rooster walked by the open shed door with the air of a man who’d paid the mortgage and wanted it noted. Carina narrowed her eyes. He paused, executed a tidily ironic crow, then continued.

“I will make coq au vin, if you’re not careful” she announced at the smug looking rooster.

Maya gasped. “You can’t threaten Giuseppe.”

“You named him Giuseppe?”

“It suits him.”

Carina mulled this. “Fine. He can be Giuseppe. I will make his cousin coq au vin.”

Giuseppe paused two yards away, bristled, and did something with his wings that looked a lot like the chicken version of flipping them the bird.

“Rude,” Carina said. “I will remember this.”

~•~•~•~

The pigs waited with patient interest for the sweaters.

Edna mailed them in a brown paper box tied with twine and a note that said, “For the girls, tell them they’re divine.” Carina opened it at the kitchen table with two fingers as if defusing a bomb. Maya hovered, vibrating. The sweaters were the color of sunsets. They had little holes for stubby legs. Each had an appliqué: one with a tiny carrot, the other with a heart.

“This is absurd,” Carina said, and promptly took a picture, sending it to three separate group chats showing what her life now entailed.

They carried the box to the paddock, stopping on the way so Maya could pick up the camera. “We need documentation,” she said. “A fashion spread.”

“I married you because you are beautiful,” Carina said, deadpan. “And because your ideas are terrible in a way that makes me laugh.”

Maya blew her a kiss as the pigs came forward like queens greeting courtiers. Laverne sniffed the heart sweater, snorted thoughtfully, and chose the carrot as if selecting an entrée. Shirley waited, lifting one hoof with the delicate precision of a ballerina.

Maya had done the reading. She approached them the way you approached any large, glorious creature with teeth: confidently, respectfully, with snacks. There were apple slices and very patient persuasion. You would think a pig would object to knitwear on principle, but both accepted their attire with an air of amused indulgence. In five minutes Carina had tears in her eyes and forty pictures of two pigs in sweaters.

“They are models,” she said reverently. “Supermodelle.”

Shirley struck a pose while Laverne trotted in a circle. Maya held her stomach laughing. “Look,” she wheezed. “It’s the fall collection. Top notes of apple, base of mud, with a persistent finish of farm.”

“Edna is a genius,” Carina said, which was the truth.

They were still admiring the runway show when Giuseppe discovered the box and climbed into it. He sat there like a third-rate magician about to saw someone in half, then pecked the twine, then crowed because he had done a crime. Five hens gathered to observe and Carina folded her arms.

“No,” she told him. “You do not model. You are not in SAG.”

Giuseppe tilted his head and the hens oooohed. Maya took a photo of Carina scolding a rooster and saved it as her phone background.

They spent the afternoon repairing a fence line, Maya whistling an old Seattle radio jingle so cheerfully that Carina began harmonising without realising. A neighbor drove by with a wave and a loaf of bread, which he handed through the truck window like contraband. “Heard you got pigs,” he said. “They’re talkers.”

“Chiacchierone,” Carina hummed, and to the neighbour’s delight, the pigs oinked like they were being praised for their oratory.

At dusk, the farm turned itself down: not silent, but gentler, as if someone had laid a quilt over the day. The sundogs rimmed the clouds. Somewhere in the trees, a tiny chorus of crickets tuned up as Maya set her chin on Carina’s shoulder on the porch. “Okay?” she asked, because she’d learned, finally, that “you’ll love it” wasn’t a plan, but a promise that needed evidence.

Carina sighed. “Okay,” she said, and then, because she also loved to keep a negotiating position, “We will see how I feel about the rooster at sunrise.”

“I can’t control the sun,” Maya said. “But I can make French toast.”

“If its in your little shorts I love, then bribery accepted.”

~•~•~•~

The first escape came Sunday.

It was the kind of morning that made you want to walk everywhere: crisp, new, the sky so blue it looked hand-washed. Carina was in the garden staking tomatoes in her small herb patch with a technique she’d learned from YouTube and stubbornness. Maya was refilling the waterer when Giuseppe discovered the coop door had not latched. He gave it the gentlest nudge with a wing and it swung open as if in a farce. The hens regarded freedom.

“One at a time,” Maya told them instinctively, which was a thing she said in the firehouse and on the road and now, apparently, in the yard. The hens heard not a word. They streamed past her boots like a feathery river and fanned into the orchard, which technically was not an orchard yet but aspired to be. Carina looked up, hands on hips, and saw ten discrete problems blossom like fireworks.

“Maya. Bambina,” she called, very calm, oozing an Italian calm that was mostly foam over geyser. “Did you mean to release il pubblico?”

Maya looked down at the open door. “Huh,” she said. “I see the issue.”

They set off after the escapees, which was exactly like being asked to pick up feathers with a salad tong. Maya used her body the way she did at a fire, blocking, guiding, anticipating, generous. Carina stage-managed, deploying her authority voice, which worked on humans and horses and occasionally reluctant interns. It did not, unfortunately, always work on a chicken. The hens considered the blueberry bush, considered international law, and decided to renegotiate both.

By the time they coaxed the flock into a ragged unit, the pigs had joined as curious observers. Laverne ambled at the rear like a crossing guard. Shirley offered commentary that sounded like snorts but translated loosely to “Have you considered a treaty?”

They made it halfway to the coop when a squirrel ran along the top rail of the fence, flicking its tail like a tiny flamenco dancer. The hens lost their minds, fanning again, and Carina recognised with visceral clarity the expression on Maya’s face: the look of a captain hearing the roof groan.

“Okay,” Maya said, voice soft. “New plan. We’ll split them. You go high; I’ll go low.”

“Is this football?”

“Everything is football if it helps.”

They closed slowly, arms raised. Carina talked to the hens as if to a skittish patient: calm, kind nonsense with a melody of reassurance. “Brave ragazze,” she crooned. “Brrrrave.” Maya made tiny encouraging pshh-pshh sounds. Laverne offered her broad pink belly as a suggestion of comfort. The hens, obviously charmed, allowed themselves to be guided home. Giuseppe waited beside the door like a maître d’ who has seen it all. Once the last hen trotted in, Maya closed the latch, then flipped it again, then slid a carabiner through for good measure.

Carina leaned against the fence and laughed helplessly, happy, ridiculous and out of breath. Maya wiped a smear of dirt from her cheek with a thumb and pressed a kiss to Carina’s forehead where the scarf had shifted. “You okay?”

Carina nodded, still laughing. “I will admit something.”

Maya’s eyebrows lifted.

“I enjoy being ridiculous with you.”

Maya grinned. “Lucky,” she said. “It’s pretty much my brand.”

~•~•~•~

By the time the tractor arrived, a birthday present from Maya to Maya, Carina had made her peace with several indignities. She owned two pairs of pants that had seen things that her designer pants never would. She knew the names of more weeds than she’d ever wanted to. She could identify the exact pitch a pig achieved when a slice of apple was insufficiently large. She still kept the city in her pocket: scheduled calls with the hospital, a stack of articles to review, a dozen friends who needed her to say something brisk and true.

But out here she had also learned the pleasures of the small, the specific: the way the yarn at the cuffs of a pig sweater pilled like a favorite mitten; the sly weight of an egg in her palm, warm as breath; the surprise of a hen falling asleep tucked under her elbow during a thunderstorm, trusting as a child. She was not sentimental. She was something denser, more difficult to shake.

The tractor, which was a cheerful red, arrived on a trailer pulled by a man named Toby who looked like he had shaken all the hands in the county. Maya climbed up to the seat with a rapture that made Carina lean against the barn and watch her the way some people watched shooting stars. The engine turned over with a chuff. Maya whooped. Giuseppe, offended by the change in acoustics, crowed directly at the muffler and nearly fell off his perch.

Carina, who had been very clear about the fact that she did not drive machines larger than herself unless they were equipped with anesthesia, allowed herself to be coaxed into the passenger stand for a slow, cautious lap around the pasture. Maya’s hand sat warm and steady at the small of her back. “You’re safe,” Maya said, absurdly. “I’ve got you.”

“You always say that,” Carina teased, but her voice did a little thing in the middle like a bridge on a familiar song.

They parked by the pigs, who were curious of the tractor. Laverne snuffled the tire. Shirley put her front hooves on the step as if requesting a ride to town.

“No license,” Maya told her. “Insurance would be a nightmare.”

Carina fed them apple slices, standing so close to Maya her shoulder pressed into Maya’s bicep. It was one of the odd miracles of the farm: the way it kept building chances to stand shoulder to shoulder and do something together, however silly. In the city they’d been ships: scheduled, efficient, passing in their own gleaming grooves. Here, they were two people carrying a bucket, laughing at a rooster, arguing about kale. There was nothing glamorous about it. But that might have been the point.

~•~•~•~

Giuseppe never learned to crow in English. He did, however, develop a taste for opera. By month’s end, he would perch on the fence post nearest Carina’s herb garden to supervise evening kitchen prep, and if she sang, absently, the way you do while chopping garlic, a little thread of “O mio babbino caro” or “Nel cor più non mi sento”, he would tilt his head and echo very softly, as if he too had feelings about fresh basil.

The pigs discovered acorns, and then every walk was the Acorn Quest. The hens continued to lay in slightly experimental places: behind the wheelbarrow, on the third stair up to the hay loft, once in the crook of Carina’s elbow while she read on the porch. Maya built a lattice for beans that leaned gently to the left like a man with a secret and Carina pretended not to adore it.

Friends came out on weekends, bringing wine, staying to watch while the farm performed its charming, ridiculous acts. Neighbors traded recipes for egg-heavy desserts. Someone taught them to make a frittata in a cast-iron pan, which turned out to be Carina’s love language. Maya learned to fix the well pump by watching the most anxious tutorial series known to humankind and inventing three new swear words. Carina stitched a tear in a pig sweater and texted Edna, who wept with gratitude and then mailed a silk scarf “for the doctor who saves knitwear.”

At the end of one long Saturday, when too many hands had petted the pigs and too many neighbour’s small children had asked whether eggs had bones, Carina fell asleep on the porch swing, feet tucked under a blanket, head on Maya’s lap. The farm’s last light smudged itself across the fields. Maya stroking her hair was an old kindness. Carina woke at the rooster’s mutter and the thud of a pear dropping from a tree. She looked up into Maya’s face, open and unguarded, and into the wedge of sky above the barn, and did something that felt like both surrender and victory.

“You were right,” she said, because sometimes she was, and it was good to say it. “It smells like hope.”

Maya’s grin was slow and extraordinary. “It smells like pigs,” she said, practical as ever.

“Ah,” Carina said. “Hope with a base note.”

Giuseppe chose that exact moment to clamber onto the porch railing and offer a perfect, understated little crow like a waiter gently clearing his throat before offering the dessert menu.

“Bravo,” Carina told him. “Finalement, you learn restraint.”

They ate pears and told stories until dark. The stars rose with the same determined insistence as everything else on the farm. When they finally went in, they checked the locks, counted the heads, and said goodnight to the animals by name.

“Goodnight, Giuseppe,” Maya murmured.

“Dormire bene, Florence,” Carina added.

“Sweet dreams, Laverne. Shirley. Behave.”

“Dream of sweaters,” Carina said.

In the morning, the rooster crowed at 5:03am, which was objectively an improvement. Carina opened one eye and found Maya watching her, hopeful and a little sheepish.

“Well?” Maya asked.

Carina rolled onto her back, listened to the symphony, the rooster and the pigs, the faint click of hens, the tractor ticking as it cooled in the shed. She felt the familiar slide of a day assembling itself with chores and the unexpected. She felt her life, ridiculous and tender and speckled with hay, take a breath.

“Coffee,” she said as she snuggled into her wife, “And French toast.”

Maya saluted, then bounded out of bed with a joy that made Carina laugh softly into the pillow.

On her way to the kitchen, Maya paused at the window and looked out. The mist ran like milk along the pasture. Giuseppe, the tiny tyrant, stalked the fence line, his chest lifted, his comb scarlet as a marching band plume. Beyond him, the pigs nosed the dirt with the professionalism of antique appraisers. The hens, a quilt of motion, murmured among themselves, as if deciding who got the best box.

Carina joined her, leaning into her side. “I still think he is culturally insensitive,” she said, but the words were threaded with affection.

“He’s learning,” Maya said.

“So am I,” Carina replied, and when Maya turned, surprised, she stole a kiss that tasted like morning and pears.

As Carina opened the door to the day, the rooster crowed a small, dignified note that might have been buon appetito. The pigs cheered while the hens stamped a tiny rhythm. And in the bright kitchen, Maya whisked eggs while Carina sliced bread, and it was very simple, and it was very good, and maybe they were country people after all.