by Kate Donahue

 

            Near a river there lived a hen and a rooster and their three chicks: Robert, Debra, and Susie. Susie was the oldest and so busied herself with thoughts of important things, like what was important and what she should be thinking about. Debra, the middle chick, was mainly concerned with what the other two were doing, and Robert had no concerns. The three of them only went to school when it was relevant to the story and on this particular day it wasn’t because Robert had decided to make some wings out of cardboard so that he could fly. Susie was under the house looking for treasure when Debra yelled to her.

            “Robert is going to jump off the roof!” Debra and the other chicks could speak English because they lived in a house.

            “Tell him not to!” Susie yelled back. She was in charge because their parents were out somewhere.

            “Don’t jump off the roof, Robert,” Debra told him.

            Robert was perched on the gray peak of their roof with his wings open and large cardboard flaps supported by magic markers (snapped end-to-end) taped to them. He had made his cardboard wings out of the box the new washing machine had come in (even though they didn’t wear clothes their mother couldn’t hold her beak up in town if she didn’t own one). Debra didn’t want to be held responsible for Robert’s death but she actually wondered if the wings would work. They looked big enough.

            Robert prepared himself to run and Debra looked on excitedly.

            “Don’t die!” she advised him. Susie crawled out from under the house, dust clinging to her yellow down, and blinked at Robert up in the bright sky.

            “It’s not my fault,” she said as Robert dashed towards the edge, but came to a stop at the last second. He must have had one concern, but it was too late because a small breeze picked him up off of the eaves, pulled him towards the river, and dropped him in.

            Debra and Susie gasped and ran after him. When they got to the bank of the river they could see Robert’s big cardboard wings keeping him afloat as the current carried him away. Debra and Susie quickly built a canoe out of reeds, ran into the house to get a broom for a paddle, grabbed the keys to the house, and locked the door behind them. Debra and Susie jumped into the canoe and paddled as fast as they could to catch up with him. When they weren’t gaining on him, Susie threw her keys out of the boat. They moved faster without the weight but still not fast enough. Robert was nearing the white water when the chicks decided there was only one way to catch up. Susie, the ever older and wiser one, came up with the plan. They jumped into the water and now the canoe was travelling fast enough. Unfortunately, Susie also realized the flaw in her plan, actually Debra’s plan because Susie was always right.

            “Oh no! There was a flaw in my plan, our plan, actually your plan,” she told Debra as the canoe hit Robert in the back of the head.

            “Hey!” Robert said. He let the canoe pass him as Susie and Debra shouted for him to grab it, then swam to catch up.

            “Robert! Why didn’t you catch it!?” Debra panted when they finally reached him.

            “I couldn’t. I don’t have apposable thumbs or fingers at all!” he complained. In fact it is unclear how Debra and Susie were able to make the canoe in the first place and how Robert was able to make his wings or why they had magic markers.

            “Oh stop making up excuses. Now we’ll all have to swim to the city where the canoe will get caught in the dam,” said Debra.

            So they all swam to the city where the canoe was caught in the dam. Here the water had a thin, mossy, green film on the top and when the wind blew a certain direction they could smell grease. Debra and Susie climbed aboard, their feathers sticking to them, then watched Robert struggle, his cardboard wings still attached to his useless ones.

            “Come on, help me up!” he shouted.

            “You’re the reason we’re down here shivering you know,” they responded, but finally did help him into the boat and began to delicately pull the cardboard pieces and tape away from his downy feathers as the canoe bumped up against the dam.

            “Ouch,” Robert complained.

            “Look,” said Debra, pointing to a moustached, white faced man smiling down from the top of a building. “KFC.” Debra could read as well as talk.

            Susie followed Debra’s extended wing and recognized the man and the greasy smell. She gasped dramatically, waiting for the others to ask what was wrong.

            “What is it?” Robert quickly gave in.

            “That stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken! They fry chickens in there!” Susie shouted.

            “What?! They can’t do that! Somebody should do something about it!” Debra said.

            “Yea! Somebody should!” Susie said.

            “Yea! Let’s have a protest!” agreed Robert, without realizing that he wasn’t really agreeing.

            “Well we could, or somebody else could.” Debra explained to the smallest chick.

            “Yea, PETA could do it,” Susie offered.

            “But we have cardboard and markers!” Robert exclaimed, offering his dripping wings, “We could make signs.”

            “Well that’s true.” And the three chicks sat in their canoe making two wet signs to stop that smiling, moustached man. When they were finished and had also come up with a chant, they left their canoe and walked to KFC where they stood in front of the door. Then they had a fight over who got to hold which sign. Since Debra and Susie were older and bigger, they got the signs. Susie got the one that said “Chicken Pride: Better Not Fried.” and a picture of a live chicken next to a fried one with an X through it. Debra’s sign read “KFC, Let us be.” They let Robert lead the chanting, since he didn’t have a sign.

            “What do we want?!” he peeped.

            “KFC to stop frying chickens!” Debra and Susie responded.

            “When do we want it?!”

            “NOW!”

            They repeated the chant again and again, sometimes switching in “Chicken Pride: Better Not Fried!” and “KFC! Let us be!” At first nobody noticed them because they were so small, but once one person almost stepped on Robert and he bit her toe, a crowd began to build and chant around them. “Chicken Pride: Better Not Fried!” soon became “Chicken Pride: Better Not Hide!” as fewer and fewer people in the crowd actually knew what was going on. Susie began so worry when the only thing they could see were human feet surrounding them and “KFC! Let us be!” had became “KFC! Let us eat!”

            “Lets get out of here!” she shouted to the other two and she led the way through a maze of legs trying to stay close to the one visible wall of KFC and trying not to be stepped on.

            Finally the crowd was behind them and they were running back to their canoe which was still bumping into the dam. They waded back into the water and climbed aboard before they realized that they would never be able to go back upstream even with their broom paddle.

            “Now what do we do?” Debra whined as they looked back at the crowd they had escaped from.

            As they watched, somebody shouted “What do we want?!” and when nobody had the answer, the protest began to break up.

            “Well I guess we’ll have to leave the canoe and walk,” Susie sighed, but Robert was already salvaging the tape from the bottom of the canoe and rebuilding his wings which were now dry again.

            “Robert, if you think you’re flying home without us then... well... you’re not!” Debra said as Robert taped the cardboard to his wings.

            “Debra, we can make our own wings out of the canoe!” Susie suggested, and she was right as always.  So they set to work, and just as it is unclear how they managed to build the canoe, it is even more unclear how they were able to make wings out of it and catch a wind that dropped them off at their doorstep. But that is what they did.

            Luckily their parents were home because otherwise they would have been locked out. They took off their fake wings as Mother Hen came out to tell them it was time for dinner. And they walked inside, glad to be home, and sat down to their favorite dinner: roast chicken and potatoes.