Author's Note:
This is a deviation from my typical genres, but why not play around a bit? Take a stretch out side of my comfort zone? I'm quite satisfied with how this came out. It's based off a handful of fan-theories and artwork from the internet; and the conversations of one truly creative individual. (Yes, if you're reading this you know who you are! *wink*) After looking at various artwork of the characters being drawn sometimes all as chickens, and other times all as people, I started wondering: why not create some overlapping world? Clearly the chicken and human characters worked on different wavelengths. Communication between them was impossible in the movie. But what if, just maybe, there was an overlapping?
People say our dreams are sometimes where we meet others: that on occasion they're more than just the pictures generated by our brains as we sort out the days' events. And what if, maybe, just maybe, in this place the humans and chickens did meet as equals?
It takes place directly after the ending of the movie "Chicken Run," and is written with a narrative that I hope sounds more like the lead character, and less like me.
Standard disclaimer: I do not own Chicken Run, or any of the characters mentioned in this. They're all property of their respective creating entities. This is a non-profit piece of fan fiction.
The old stone-barn was destroyed, Melisha was dead.
That was it.
For the first time ever in my life, I found myself truly alone. Even after my parents had died, my brother had still been there with me. When he left, I had already married Melisha. It felt so strange to return to my house after the authorities and mortician had come. Walking past the empty coops, climbing up the tread worn front steps, crossing the threshold. Everything was quiet, still. Even the dogs had run off in the confusion.
Now, bearing in mind and all that things with Melisha had been on the sour for a long time, I still had become accustomed to her presence at the farm house. She was my wife, after all. I'd never truly come around to expecting I'd outlive her. Seemed like she'd be one of these women who kept her vitality for the ages.
I stared at our wedding photo on the wall. It hung next to my brother's portrait. So strange, it all seemed a lifetime ago. Those faces, mine, hers, his in his uniform. Frozen smiles that in the end would outlast us all.
My brother and I had grown up here, you see. As close as any two people ever could've been. And when the war came, well, he went with it. I was too young to join with him. Then, when I was older that old injury to my leg, that break that never did quite heal the way it should've cost me my entrance.
What can I say about the war? Nothing I suppose that hasn't been said by blokes more well-spoken than I. My brother? He was shot down. Not even enough left for a funeral, they told me as they presented me with his medals, a burned photograph of us as boys (the one he always kept in his breast pocket), and their condolences.
And the chicken.
Somehow, my brother's pet chicken had survived.
Of course he'd have a chicken. It confounded his fellows, but it brought a smile to my tear-stained face. Jack and his love of all things, great and small. He should've stayed here on the farm. Or maybe, taken those skills of his and become a medic on the field. But no, he had to be the hero.
Where he'd gotten that bird was anyone's guess. A grey rooster with piercing eyes and a rather cantankerous attitude. The thing even wore a little scarf with an Airman's medal pinned to it. As the men departed, I turned to bring the bird inside. It looked battle-weary itself, some of his tail feathers still burned off. They told me his name was Fowler.
My wife, may I tell the truth and shame the devil, did not share my joy at having one last piece of my brother's life to cherish. In no short order, she quickly banished the bird from the house to the coops with the rest.
I suppose that brings me about full circle. This chicken, in fact all of them, proved more clever than I could've imagined. I knew they were up to something, organizing as it were. Of course Melisha didn't believe that. She questioned my soundness for thinking such outlandish ideas. Come to be honest, I almost started believing her over my own eyes and ears.
That red bird though, she was the ringleader.
Organize they did, and not just escape but flew, in some cockamamie contraption, piloted by none other than that grey rooster himself. I don't know what I felt then, watching them leave. I went to tell my wife, but the explosion in the barn caught her off guard. And that's the last I have heart to speak of there.
It's grown late, the oil in the lamp is running low. I can only hope that sleep takes me soon. This house is too big, too empty to live in alone.
You can't ever tell where reality ends and dreams begin. Things seem to merge. Maybe the reflection in the mirror's just a wee bit off center, or water seemed to be flowing uphill. It's not right, but it's not wrong enough to set the dreamer's mind awake in strangeness.
I know I'm dreaming now.
I'm walking the rows between the hen houses, but the fences are gone and the houses are the size of my own. It's not like I'm shrunk exactly, because the grass is the same as it always were. Chicken coops for people, or something.
And as I walk past them, I peer into the doors. They look like little houses inside. Tables, chairs, pictures on the wall. I see this woman bending over tending to a pack of children that sit around a table.
How can I describe this in ways that make sense? It's like seeing two things, but it's one thing. Blended together. Or I'm seeing both at the same time. That woman, she's also a broody hen. Her children are her wee chicks. I can see her feathers and wings, at the same time her apron and hair in a bonnet. Same with the little ones. They're wearing clothes, but they're also not more than balls of yellow fluff.
I guess the best way to describe it is like looking through the triple-paned glass in the ice house at the farm. When I'm in, loading blocks into the sawdust and peer through those windows I see outside... but I also see my reflection and the room behind me mirrored in the glass. Depending on how I focus my eyes, I can see the barnyard, or the icehouse interior. Or, if I let my vision blur I rather see both in one, a room outside... a yard in the icehouse.
Well, I hope that makes sense. Because that's the truth of the matter. Depending on how I looked at the folks here, I saw either chickens or people, or the vision of both in one.
They didn't seem to take much notice of me as they went about their lives. Another woman passed by carrying a tray of bread. She gave me a nod, and I made to tip my hat to her with my hand... my wing! It was both in one, and I came up short and stared at my hand, flexing my fingers, watching the feathers mimic the movements.
The hen paused, tilted her head. "You all right there?" She asked in a heavy Scottish accent.
"I'm fine, yes."
"Aye, well you best be getting on then, not standing here lost in the middle of the street, yes?" she said with a friendly smile, giving me a pat on the back.
"Right then," I agreed, confused.
My feet moved of their own accord, and like the rest of me, of us, they were both my feet and not in one.
Each house had its own distinct style of decoration, representing the personalities of the inhabitants thereof. I passed one hut that had an American flag hanging on the wall inside. A large, red rooster was sitting with his feet up on a wood bin, plunking away at a guitar. He didn't wasn't the most skilled.
I walked up the ramp to his house and peered in. Definitely an American theme. It was as if that rooster I'd had imported from the states had decorated the place.
I continued my walk through this idyllic little village, then something caught my eye. One of the huts was set back from the others a bit, a dusty path leading up to the front door through the lawn. That wasn't what I saw though. It was the flag flying from a pole beside the front gate. I could've recognized that flag from anywhere. It was the same they gave me when they came to tell me Jack died.
I walked up to the front path, looked up at that flag and felt myself completely lost in emotion, not the least of which, hope. "Jack?" I called out, my pace quickening as I ran towards the hut. "JACK!"
A man stepped out of the house, pushing aside the curtain that served as a front door. He was tall and lean, wearing the uniform of a Wing Commander, the same blue grey that Jack used to wear, but it wasn't my brother.
This fellow was far older, his face lined and serious, he had a grey beard, small and neatly trimmed. His hair was whisky silver, pulled back into a ponytail that fell down past his shoulders. He tightened the white scarf around his neck and glared at me, blue eyes narrowing behind under-rimmed glasses. He leaned on a cane, though it appeared more for style then actual support.
"What are you yelling about, lad?" he barked, voice sharp. "We've got ourselves quiet folk around here, don't need you all about disturbing the peace."
"I'm sorry, Sir," I replied, kicking the dirt with a clawed foot. Chicken foot. Boot, but also chicken foot. I didn't waste time thinking about that. "I thought maybe you were someone else."
The man strode up to me, back ramrod straight. "Jack, eh?" He peered at me through the thick lenses of his glasses. He was half a head taller than me, and his rigid posture only added to the sense of height. I tell you, he looked so familiar, like I should know him from somewhere. The grey feathers, the worn look...
Then it hit me!
Hit us I should say.
"You're -that farmer" "-that grey rooster!" we blurted out in unison.
"Tweedy," the rooster hissed, narrowing his eyes and removing his glasses. He folded them and slipped them into his breast pocket. "I've got more than half a mind to run you off my land forthright," he snapped, jabbing a finger into the center of my feathered chest.
"Fowler," I started, then realized I had no idea what to say next. Because it was a dream, after all. And so did it matter? But it felt real, and I wasn't waking up despite the bizarreness of it all. So I pushed on. "You flew with my brother Jack! And you survived the crash." My hands trembled, I wanted to reach out, embrace the thin officer, but his bearing alone prevented it. "I never thought I'd see you again."
His lip curled. "You planned to turn us into pies."
"I had nothing to do with that!"
He jabbed at my foot with a cane. "Hog feathers!" the old Royal Air Force officer coughed. "Your farm, your land, your wife. Apathy in the face of adversity is the same as approval. You didn't stop it, as such, you condone it! If you don't seek to stop the enemy, you are the enemy. I am done with you. You're not welcome in our village. Begone with you!"
Fowler swung his cane, connected hard across my shin. I yelped, and clutched my leg, caught off balance, and fell into the dust of his front path. I tried to right myself, but wing and arm and boots and claws... it was all confusing and too much. I rolled onto my stomach, the most I could do, and buried my head in my arms. I tasted the gravely earth on my lips. It tasted like so many times the children in the Dales had knocked me down when I was a small boy: my dismay was the aim of their sport.
I clenched my teeth, felt the crunch of grit between them. This was when Jack would come in, knocking them aside, helping me up. He'd wipe the dirt from my face, muttering his soft reassurances that everything would be all right.
Not this time.
Jack was dead.
Even in this dream he wasn't coming back.
Tears, hot and unwanted leaked from my eyes, hastily sucked into the dry earth. I clenched my fingers, I was nothing. The fat fool, the imbecile that Melisha had also said I was. Nothing. A waste. I punched the dirt, sending up clouds of dust from my clenched fists. I kicked. I ground my face against the path. A tantrum the likes of a small child, knocked down one too many times to risk standing up again.
I'd probably be there still if a pair of shoes hadn't come into the very edge of my vision.
I tilted my head, raising my cheek from the earth and looked at the mirror-shined finish of Fowler's military issue boots. He prodded me with the toe of one, a foot that was both a chicken's leg and an officer's dress uniform.
"Come off it. You're embarrassing us both," he commanded.
I rolled on my side, but made no motion to get up.
After a minute of quiet observation, Fowler reached down and extended a hand. I took it, marveling at the wiry strength of the old veteran as he hauled my embarrassingly plump self to my feet.
"What in the name of God and Country are you doing?" Fowler demanded.
I started blubbering right then and there, and to be honest I am just as glad I can't remember all I said. I should've stopped talking, but it was as if the words had been bottled up for too long, and someone had removed the stopper. They fell out of my mouth, pooling around us both, memories, stories, the entire litany of my truth.
And Fowler? God bless him, he listened!
He listened and he stayed until I had no tears left to shed. Then, only after I was completely spent did he talk again.
"You know, I do remember," he began as he leaned on his cane. "You came down to the coops, you painted the Royal Air Force roundels in my coop when your wife banished me from the house. You tried, at least for a time. We could range free around the farmyard, return to our coops at night. There were no fences, no dogs. Life was good for us. What changed?"
"I was weak."
"You were weak," Fowler repeated, agreeing. His words stung, but no more than any other truth. I looked at the dirt on my knees, and hung my head.
"Jack wasn't weak," I muttered.
Fowler tilted his head, shifted his weight. "Jack had his moments," the rooster replied. "There were things you didn't see that I did. I suppose I shouldn't judge you too harshly. But still..." his voice trailed off.
"What's going to become of me?" I asked him.
"What do you mean?" Fowler asked.
"The Tweedys have been egg farmers for generations. With no chickens, no eggs. No eggs, no money. I'll be starving and frozen come winter, if I make it that long. Farming's the only thing I know!"
Fowler stroked his beard thoughtfully. "I might be willing to make you a deal."
"Anything!"
"Let me talk with the rest of the flock," Fowler replied. "But, in the meantime, you're going to have to do something for us. Tear down the fences, get rid of the dogs. Let us be able to come and go as we please, feel the grass beneath our feet. Though they might not know anything but the camps, I remember an earlier time. I make no promises, but I will see."
It took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about. He was asking me to put everything back, to the way it used to be, before Melisha converted our farm into a prison. I was reaching out to shake Fowler's hand-
-And I was awake.
I was sitting up in bed, hand outstretched to no one but the still and heavy darkness.
Of course, just a dream. Nothing more. Still, it seemed more than just some imaging. That strange sort of feeling in my guts that I couldn't explain then or now. So, that morning I was up before dawn ripping out the barbed wire fences, laying fresh straw in the coops, cleaning from sunrise to sun set. No one helped, no one stopped by to ask what I was doing.
The carts on the road passed by without so much as a nod of sympathy to my loss. Poor old Tweedy, I imagined them thinking. He's gone round the bend for sure. And, telling the truth I wondered if they probably weren't right. Still I worked, pulling stakes, tossing the coiled wire in bails by the ruins of the old barn.
That night, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the downfeather pillow. If I dreamed, to be sure I didn't remember aside from one image that stood out in my mind.
"I did it," I told the old bird. "I made it a home again. You can come back now."
Whatever Fowler said, lord knows I'm a simple man. I wish I could recall. But I will tell you one thing. When I woke up the next morning it wasn't from the sunlight or hunger. No. It was a sound I hadn't heard in too long: to crowing of a rooster atop the garden shed.
Fowler and his flock had come home!