by J K Hughes
Nutmeg is almost perfectly round; like she has stalked out of Stardew Valley, a chibi drawing, a Disney movie. Everybody knows what a chicken looks like. A ball of softness and light, her tail like the bustle on a cartoon Victorian lady.
But when I pick her up, my fingers disappear into the shell and I can feel it: the compact bony scaffolding that lies in the centre of this perfect soft globe, knobbly and vulnerable. She is hot and alive under my fingerpads. She protests deep in her tiny chest at the indignity of them finding her knees and shoulders, the heaviness of her crop. Who even knew a chicken had knees?
When I put her down she momentarily swells to twice her size, feathers on end, before the glossy shell settles back into place. Once more a beachball with two feathered fans stuck to its base.
But as I watch her trundle contentedly across the grass, I know. I know she’s hiding knees in there. That she is a biological machine, levers and pulleys and pumps ceaselessly working away to animate this: this feathered ball that rolls away from me.
Her head tilts; uncountable neurons fire, perform calculations my conscious mind could never begin to understand. Her beak intercepts the tiny hopping thing in the grass with ruthless efficiency. Two seconds. Gone.
As she drifts away, distance fuzzes the details until she is once more a collection of pixels, a swoop of pencil-lines. Chicken. You’ve seen a chicken before, haven’t you?
J K Hughes is an Australian veterinarian who writes primarily scifi and fantasy in her free time. Despite working with many pet species, the only pet that she has ever truly desired is a flock of chickens.