Petey's Chickens: A Narrative Fiction

Today’s newspaper says the last chicken in the world has died. It had lived its final days in Taiwan, just as its rooster, who’d died several months back.
The tabloid even showed a photo of the poor thing. It looked nothing like the Rhode Island Red, or the Leghorn I was used to seeing in my life. It looked scrawny, shrunken, and nothing like it was supposed to look.
Chickens were gone now, them, along with the world’s other fowl and eatable mammals. Just like most of the other animal life on the planet, the seas being dredged and raped for food, were at a point they wouldn’t, no; they couldn’t come back from….
I’m sorry, I digress. I’m speaking of chickens. I’ll continue.
When someone stumbled across an isolated village and found the Argentine rooster, Petey as the world named it; on behalf of all nations, a special panel of scientist and those supposedly …show more content…
Our leaders assured us that with careful treatment and worldwide planning, this old but reliable source of protein would be a fragile but new beginning that would grow. Nonetheless, even that folly died because of the strain and weird breeding placed on this food source. We grew fowl too fast, and tried to make too many different varieties. In laboratories and on farms we crossbred one species with another with some success, but in most cases, we created horrors that should have never been in the world. Someone even boasted they’d grown chickens with a flavor that mimicked beef. They did. I tasted it. With our actions, we’d gone too far, way past God’s edge, and because of it, we had to pay. Over time, fowl began mutating to the point where they no longer recreated. We didn’t know it, but in our zeal and with our insane experimentation used to save ourselves we were gently massacring what we attempted to make live. The ducks died, the geese and the smaller wild fowl, and then nothing existed but the