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Read or Die!

A home for people who want to give back to the community: write and read.

Member-only story

Humor

Chickencide

4 min readJun 26, 2024

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A red chicken struts across a green lawn
Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

50 Ways to Lose Your Legbar

A chicken’s demise is usually slated before their beak even forms. Many predators, humans included, don’t even wait for them to break out of the shell before we’re sliding them down our gullets as we dream of a thousand ways to throw them and their older counterparts into a delicious recipe

Do we think this has gone unnoticed? Do we think they don’t internalize all this impending doom?

Once they’ve de-shellistrated — or hatched — they go into a brooder pen, peeping and pecking around, seemingly content except for shrieks of terror when we interrupt their chickening–until …

Millie, a three-day-old Welsummer, goes lethargic and cowers in the corner of the pen. Her “friends” ignore her for a time, but sooner or later, they sense her weakness and lay siege. Before you know it, you find Millie crammed under the brooder warmer, flatter than an omelet. Forensics reveal little information.

One day, Bob, a gorgeous two-year-old Orpington rooster, is making Farmer Belinda protect her legs from his murder daggers. The next, he’s stretched out under a wall of nest boxes like the mechanic underneath your 1992 Pontiac Firebird, the one with the perpetual oil leak no one could figure out. Although the car had some warning for its demise and Bob’s…

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Amy Stinnett
Amy Stinnett

Written by Amy Stinnett

Amy Stinnett is the iconic author of The Chicken***t Series and other LGBTQ fiction. She is also a part-time editor for other novelists.

Read or Die!
Read or Die!

Published in Read or Die!

A home for people who want to give back to the community: write and read.