Birds of a Feather

By Brad Shaw 

The first egg that Jessica was pelted with stung with a medium intensity. By the time the fiftieth - or was it the fifty sixth? - one hit her forehead, drawing blood which became instantly viscous, like something out of one of those Alien movies with Sigourney Weaver that her husband...correction, ex-husband had been a fan of.  

He hadn’t exactly been a fan of hers, telling her he’d long since grown tired of her sanctimonious ways.  

In fact, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had been the one that had chucked the last unborn chicken embryo at her; the one that knocked her out, sending her through time and space, not to some ancient time, like Greece circa 323 BC, courtesy of a portal, worm hole or 1.21 gigawatts. 

Her mind, fractured, yet still whole, was the conduit in which the present melted into the recent past, which could only impact her future. As her Granny used to say, “What’s done is done. And what is done cannot be undone.” 

In this case, and with no disrespect intended, her Granny was full of shit.  

What had gotten her here could most definitely be reversed. But at what cost? Only every shred of dignity she held near and dear. Which had made her a standout citizen who would rather have remained anonymous when it came to the latest social media viral trend of wearing a live chicken as a hat.  

It was nothing short of animal abuse to her, all in the grand pursuit of getting likes from strangers; by definition “a person whom one does not know or with whom one is not familiar.” Unfortunately, her stance against this inhumane version of recreating a dance on TikTok or raising awareness about ALS with the Ice Bucket Challenge being all the rage in 2014, had made her very familiar with those who opposed what she considered a level-headed school of thought on the matter.  

But when she saw PETA partaking in the less-than-glamorous shots on their Instagram, she knew that she was sunk. At first, the pushback to her many local news conferences and appearances on National talking heads programming was seemingly harmless with Peeps left on her doorstep for her to step in, a gooier version of dog shit in a bag and lit on fire.  

An array of hats in various shapes and sizes with the top cut out for the ever-trendy poultry were left in her mailbox, underneath the windshield wiper of her Prius; each chapeau was thrown away and would show back up, covered in melted Peeps at first, and then what she thought was ketchup. But it was blood. Then it was blood with feathers in it, until it morphed from a confectionary holiday staple into what the butcher removed from the carcass of Henny Penny.  

The smell was God awful, as Jessica was nearing her second decade as a dedicated vegan. She opened her next speech with that very factoid, and she thought she had the attention of the crowd.  

She did, but not for the reasons she thought.  

And that’s when the shower of eggs began to rain down on her, leaving her dazed, and then unconscious. She finally regained consciousness and put her hand up. The sidewalk in front of City Hall slick with egg membranes, which were put into place to keep bacteria out, and had failed miserably whereas Jessica was concerned.  

She made her way to a young woman, snatched the hat from her head, and put it on hers, a sea of feathers escaping from the chicken that had been comfortably resting atop the blonde girl’s head. As Jessica was about to launch into a speech in which she was conceding to poultry in some perversion of an election, a feather flew into her mouth, and she could not get it out. 

The manic grasping at her throat caused the chicken to fly the coop, and was of no help, as she bought the farm.  

Three months later, she was nothing more than an afterthought, not a folk hero; no chickens erected a statue made from seed to her, nary a postmortem consideration as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.              

Just someone who bucked a trend, which had now moved onto resurrecting the hula hoop craze from the 1950’s. Of course, to up the ante, the hula hoops were set on fire. Next was The Guillotine Challenge to raise awareness for chronic neck pain sufferers, followed by the Russian Roulette-based Bang Bang! Finally, and with much of the population no longer able to participate, came the nuclear war end game, known simply as Kaboom!