The Fiddler
What woke me up was a loud crowing noise. Strangely, the noise seemed to have come from inside my bedroom.
I wondered if a cock had somehow managed to get into my room in the middle of the night.
I felt completely disorientated and literally didn’t feel like myself.
It was still dark but I formed the impression that somehow my body had shrunk and that it was covered in some sort of fluffy material.
I told myself that this was utterly ridiculous.
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I must be asleep and dreaming or I had contracted some dreadful ailment that had made me delusional.
But as light started to filter into my room from the breaking dawn, I was able to look down at body as well see my reflection in the mirror.
I was horrified by what I saw. Instead of arms, I now had feathered wings.
Apart from two scrawny legs with three toes and a spur, the rest my body was also covered in feathers. I had beak and a red plume and wattle.
I now realised that the crowing noise I heard earlier had been made by me.
I was bewildered.
I jumped up onto my two legs in a real flap, trying to shout for my parents to help me but all I could manage was a terrible screeching sound.
I tried unsuccessfully to open the door with my beak. I darted around the room in a complete frenzy knocking over things.
My parents rushed into my room to see what was happening.
All they could see was a chicken running around frantically.
Their son, they thought, was nowhere to be found.
I ran up to them to tell them that I was indeed their transmogrified son, but they shoved me away thinking I was trying to attack them.
I tried to speak to them but my beak emitted only some agitated clucking noises.
After much futile searching, the terrible thought entered my parents’ heads that their son had been kidnapped and as a sick joke, the kidnappers had left a chicken in his place.
They locked me in my room and summoned the law enforcers.
The officers attending the scene came into my room looking for clues.
It was evident that these louts were not to be trifled with. As handcuffs would not fit, they bound together my two legs with string.
Having searched the room and finding nothing of significance, they decided the best thing to do was to take me to the station for interrogation.
As they tossed me into a coop lock up, they glared at me, warning if I refused to talk a bad fate would await me.
I protested but they failed to understand my clucking demands to see my lawyer and be informed of the charges against me.
That night I was only given a dish of dirty water and some rancid bird pellets which I found to be completely indigestible.
The next day was truly horrific.
The law enforcers demanded that I tell them where I had been taken me and the identity of the persons with whom I had organised the kidnapping of myself.
They insisted I lead them to where I had been taken.
I desperately tried to tell them that I was here right in front of them.
But my quarks were construed as signs of my stubborn non-cooperation.
This made them even angrier and they then resorted to very painful measures to extract a confession which involved loss of feathers.
After many days of such harrowing ill-treatment, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I managed to fly the coop, although I wasn’t that big on flying.
Eventually I found a safe haven. In the days following I reflected upon my situation.
Although I was a chicken in body and could emit no human language, I still seemed to be thinking like a person.
Nonetheless I was able to converse with other chickens.
They opened my eyes to the brutality of humans and the abominable way in which humans treated chickens.
They kept hens under appalling conditions in concentration camps called battery cages; they stole their eggs and consumed them, thereby destroying future generations; they slaughtered chickens to provide tasty fried delights to satisfy their insatiable appetites.
I resolved to fight to liberate of all chickens from oppression.
It was time that chickens broke out of their coops and rose up against humans and staged a coup.
I travelled around mobilizing poultry country-wide to join the revolutionary struggle.
Contrary to the false notion of humans that chickens were chicken-brained, chickens are highly intelligent.
The turning point in the struggle came when one of their top chicken scientists devised a substance that when put into the water supply systems of humans made them docile creatures who could be easily controlled. Most importantly, the substance caused them to become violently sick if they ate chicken flesh or chicken eggs.
After widespread application of this potion, it was then an easy matter to take over the reins of power.
The first important task was to elect a leader.
It was a foregone conclusion that I would be chosen.
But just in case, only my name appeared on the ballot paper and at the bottom it said, Vote for Me or Else.
I immediately bestowed upon myself several titled such as “The Great Leader who led the Chickens to the Promised Land”; “The Immortal Boy-Chick Whose Wise Deeds will be Admired in Perpetuity.”
It was obvious that I should have a wife to assist me in carrying out my onerous duties.
I selected the most beautiful hen to be the First Hen and bedecked her with magnificent jewelry.
My Advisory Council endorsed, without question, all my Edicts, the first of which was to make it a capital offence to kill or mistreat a chicken or to insult the Great Leader.
However, little did I know that trouble was brewing.
Although humans could no longer stomach chicken or chicken eggs, their craving for other types of flesh had, if anything, intensified.
A delegation from the Union for the Protection of Cattle, Pigs and Goats demanded that action be taken to prevent the carnage of their members.
I was faced with an impossible dilemma.
If I banned the eating of these other animals by humans and deprived them of their remaining source of meat, they might no longer be passive and controllable.
But I was not called the Great Leader for nothing.
My solution was quite inspirational.
What I would do would be to ban the killing and eating of the other species of animals, but to permit and encourage humans to kill one another and eat their flesh.
To facilitate this process, I provided them with weapons for the mass slaughter of humans.
This solution appealed to humans, particularly males, as it allowed them to manifest their innate instinct to kill and destroy.
There was unfortunately a downside to this fix.
Humans pursued the killing spree so enthusiastically that before too long there were no humans left.
This created a spin-odd problem.
This was there was now a rapidly declining supply of the animal feed as these had been produced by humans.
Clearly the remaining stockpile had to be strictly rationed.
I decreed that only chickens would be permitted to consume animal feed.
Strangely, the other animal species were not prepared to starve to death in the interests of allowing chickens to survive and it was probably just a matter of time before they rose up and tried to overthrow my regime.
There was another problem.
By banning the killing of chickens and the consumption of their eggs, there had been a population explosion of chickens all over the world.
For once I did not know what to do so I hunkered down in my bunker underneath my palace.
I happened to look in the mirror and to my consternation I had been changed back into a human person.
All I could think of was the eternal conundrum, which came first, the chicken or the egg?