(AN: Hi again!
After watching all of my Garfield and Friends DVDs—all seventy-two episodes—I finally feel that I am ready for, to my knowledge, the first U.S. Acres fanfic on this site. I hope it will be good… I hope I'll be able to keep everyone in character… yadda yadda yadda… but most of all, I hope you all like it. And if you don't think it should be in this category, please tell me, and I shall move it! Whee!
U.S. Acres, Garfield and Friends, and related stuff don't belong to me. If it did, I'd be writing official stories, not sitting here writing fanfiction. So Jim Davis and/or any of his legal eagles, if you're reading this, please don't sue me. I'm just an incoming college student with an over-active imagination.)
O.o.O
As usual, it was a sunny, pleasant day on the farm.
And also as usual, Orson Pig was floating in an inner tube in his wallow, completely engrossed in a book… today, that book was 1984 by George Orwell.
"Wow…" Orson mused to himself, "how could one ever live in a world where the vocabulary keeps getting reduced?" He suddenly looked up. "Oh, hi! It's great to have you here. And you picked a good time to come, too. If you had come just a week or two ago, you would have stumbled into a chaotic mess! It all started when—wait, don't leave! I promise you, this is the probably the single greatest thing that's ever happened here before! Please, sit down and get comfortable… there's a log over there, if you don't care for mud. Can't understand how you couldn't, but anyway… It all started on a morning very much like this one…"
O.o.O
"Wake up, llama-breath."
Booker groaned as he rubbed sleep from his eyes. Ah, yes, now I remember why Sheldon and I usually sleep in the old chicken coop instead of with our other siblings. "Tonya, has anyone ever explained to you the concept of 'sleeping in'?"
Tonya just flashed Booker her grin that had made her infamous throughout the entire coop. "Hey, Booker, whaddaya call a midget fortune teller who's just escaped from prison?"
"I don't know, and I don't care," groaned Booker. Tonya was constantly cracking jokes—most of them bad ones.
"A small medium at large!" Tonya threw her head back and cackled as only a chick on the verge of becoming a hen can. "Get it? Isn't it the most… ha, ha!… the most hilarious thing you've ever heard? Ha ha ha!"
Booker chose to ignore his sister's merriment as he jumped to the ground. "Have you awoken Sheldon with one of your hilarious cracks yet?" he asked his sister.
"Yeah, the same one," said Tonya. "He seemed to like it better than you."
"Well, no offense to him, but being stuck in an egg for your entire 'life', if you want to call it that, can make one a bit insane." Booker headed for the doorway.
"Don't tell me that you're going to be out chasing worms all day," said Tonya, suddenly blocking his way out. "You need to spend quality time with your siblings!"
"I do!" cried Booker. "Why do you think I hang around with Sheldon all the time?"
"I mean your other siblings, meat-head! Alison told me that she almost forgot your name!"
"I doubt that," snapped Booker, giving Tonya a cynical look.
"Well, okay, she didn't say that, but she did say that she wishes that you were around more often! Come on, Booker! Sheldon's not your only sibling!"
"But I like Sheldon better than the rest of you. I mean, Sheldon's never sprung any traps on me when I enter the coop."
Tonya let out a guffaw. "I'll never forget the look on your face as you hung there upside down… one of my better efforts, if I do say so myself!"
Booker held out his wings, silencing Tonya. "I rest my case—"
"Booker, look at your wing!"
"Look, Tonya, whatever stupid prank you have in mind—"
"No, I'm serious!" Tonya bent Booker's wing up so he could see the underside of it.
"OUCH!" screamed Booker. "Tonya!"
"Sorry," she said quickly. "But look! You've got a white feather!"
Examining his wing, Booker's eyes grew wide. "You're right, I do. I wonder why?"
Tonya shrugged. "Let's go ask Mom."
Booker made a face. "I'd rather not ask Mom anything."
"Jeez, Booker, can you hold a grudge or what?" cried Tonya incredulously. "Look, even though you're still mad at her for 'abandoning' you, you've gotta admit that she's the only one that can tell you what that is."
Booker folded his wings and pointed his beak in the air stubbornly. "We could ask one of the other hens."
"You've gotta be kidding me!" cried Tonya. "You know how stupid they all are!"
"True…" Booker said reluctantly.
"Come on," she snapped, pulling Booker out of the coop.
O.o.O
"Well, Booker, what do you know!" cried Joanna, inspecting her son's wing. "You've got your first white feather!"
"We kinda figured that one out," said Tonya impatiently. "What does it mean?"
"It means that you're growing up, Booker," said Joanna, trying to pull her timid son Alexander off her leg. "Pretty soon, the rest of you should be getting white feathers too."
"And then we'll be all white, just like you?" Nicole asked.
Joanna nodded. "You chicks are growing up so fast… except you, Sheldon." She turned to her son Sheldon, who still hadn't hatched from his egg. "Sheldon, you've got to hatch now! Your growth will be stunted enough! You can't live your whole life in there!"
"I'd rather live my whole life in here than out there as a mutated chicken!" said Sheldon defiantly, his voice muffled from behind his shell.
"Wow… I'm growing up?" cried Booker. "This is… this is great! Come on, Sheldon, let's show everyone else!" Booker leapt out of the coop, motioning for his agoraphobic brother to follow him.
O.o.O
Joanna's chicks were considered by all the other hens to be "weird". Joanna, while not using that exact phraseology herself, did have to admit that her chicks stood out from the other hens'. In a good way, of course. Her chicks were smart… just like she was.
Tonya and her pranks, Alison and Logan's many checkers rounds, Alexander's extreme shyness (except to his mother and sister Tonya), Nicole's depth of thought, Karley's photographic memory, and Julius and Ryan's habit of building just about anything they could out of sticks were all abnormalities in the normally slow chicken. And that was leaving out Booker and Sheldon, quite possibly the most abnormal chicks of them all.
Was it because they had been hatched by a… pig?
The new chicken coop was still under construction when Joanna laid her ten eggs in the old one, the one that she had raised her previous chicks in for years. When the new one was finished, Joanna gathered all of her eggs and moved them there. Or so she thought. When she got there and counted her eggs, she realized that she was two shy.
After finding other hens to sit on her other eight eggs (and that was harder than it sounded, as the hens didn't want to sit on anyone's eggs but their own… and besides, they might confuse her eggs with theirs!) she hurried back to the old coop and found, to her complete surprise, a pig in there!
"What are you doing here?" she asked, trying her hardest not to laugh.
"Oh…!" cried the pig, clearly surprised to see her. "Are… are these your eggs?" he asked, sitting up and pointing to the two missing eggs.
"Yes, I must not have grabbed them all when I was moving them to the new coop," said Joanna, smiling incredulously at the thought of a pig trying to hatch chickens.
"Oh… well, you see, when I saw these two eggs here, I thought that they'd been abandoned and so I thought I'd better take care of them and… you want them back, don't you?"
Joanna nodded. "Thanks for taking care of them while I was gone, but I think I can manage them from here."
"That move must have been tough," said the pig, standing up and stretching his legs. "How many eggs did you lay?"
"Ten," said Joanna with a sigh.
"Wow, that's a good number of eggs!" The pig looked at the eggs and smiled, almost sadly. "Well, you two get to go back to your mommy now."
"Hold it." Joanna couldn't believe what she was seeing and hearing. "Did you actually want to hatch those eggs?"
The pig clasped his hands behind his back and traced the ground with one foot in an embarrassed manner. "Well… although I wasn't sitting on them long, I was getting pretty attached to them."
Joanna finally let out her first uninhibited laugh. "If you want to that bad, then sure, you can hatch them."
The pig looked shocked. "Really? You wouldn't mind?"
"Mind? I'm glad of it! Now I only have eight eggs to sit on. Still a lot, but less than ten! You can hatch them, then bring them to me. And since you'll have done so much for them already, I'll let you name them. That is, only if you want to do all that."
"I'd love to!" cried the pig, sitting back down on the eggs.
"Is that your final answer?" asked Joanna with a twinkle in her eye.
"Of course! You have my word! Say, how long will it take to hatch them?"
Strolling out the coop, Joanna flashed him a smile. "About a week or so."
"A… week?" The pig looked like he was about to faint.
"Yep. Have fun." Chuckling, Joanna left the old coop, hearing the pig heave a heavy sigh.
About a week later, the pig came to the new coop. Joanna had been expecting him, as all the eggs she had been sitting on had hatched—five girls and three boys.
"Oh, there you are. Did you hatch my last two chicks?" Joanna asked with a smile.
The pig laughed nervously. "Well, you might say that I did…"
Joanna glared at him. "What?"
"Well, here's one. I named him Booker." The pig reached behind him and handed Joanna a perfectly healthy chick. "Because, well, I like to read, and…"
"Where's the other one?" screeched Joanna.
Hesitatingly, the pig reached behind him and held an egg with two legs sticking out. Joanna quickly fought down a hearty laugh that formed without warning in her throat.
"I don't think he wants to hatch any more than this," said the pig apologetically. "So I named him Sheldon."
"Well… thank you… I'm sure he'll hatch eventually," said Joanna, giggling madly. "Thank you very much for hatching them… well, for hatching Booker and half-hatching Sheldon."
Perhaps because of this, as Booker and Sheldon grew, they daily did something that most chicks never did at all—they wandered out of the coop and explored the rest of the farm, getting to know all the other non-chicken residents. Not only getting to know them, in fact, but becoming fast friends with them.
Thus, when Booker was told the meaning of his white feather on the underside of his wing, he wanted to tell all of his friends.
"I wonder what I'll look like when I'm all grown up," he mused to Sheldon as the two made their way to the main part of the farm.
"Probably like Mom, I'd guess," said Sheldon.
"Yeah, but Mom's a girl. I've never seen a grown-up boy chicken before!" said Booker suddenly. "I wonder if they look any different? Oh, hey, Roy."
"Hello, pip-squeaks," said Roy, the resident rooster. "What are you two chattering about?"
Booker proudly showed Roy his white feather. "I'm growing up!"
"You've got to be kidding me!" cried Roy in surprise. "It just seems like yesterday when you two were born! Or half-born, in Sheldon's case."
"We were wondering what Booker's gonna look like when he's all grown up," said Sheldon.
Roy grinned and tossed his head back, causing his comb to wave dramatically. "Well, I'd assume that you'd look a lot like me."
"Why would I look like you?" asked Booker cynically. "You're not a chicken."
Roy stared at Booker, blinked, and then threw back his head and roared with laughter. Of course, Roy roaring with laughter was not an uncommon sight, but it left both Booker and Sheldon nonplused.
"What's so funny?" asked Booker.
"Ah haa haaa hee hee ho ho… hah ha ha!" Roy was on the ground, clutching his belly from laughing so much. "Of course I'm a chicken! What else would I be?"
Sheldon undoubtedly blinked. "I thought you were a rooster!"
"Well, of course I'm that too… 'rooster' is just a fancy way of saying male chicken! Just like a hen is a female chicken… you know?" He finally stopped laughing. "You guys seriously didn't know that?"
"You mean," said Sheldon thoughtfully, "that we're going to grow up to be roosters?"
"Well, Booker will," said Roy, grinning maliciously. "And if you ever get out of that shell, you might too."
"Wait!" cried Booker. This new revelation—that he was the same species as Roy, imagine that!--brought up another question of his. One that he had had for a long time, but he had never asked, because the answer didn't seem all that important. Besides, probably only his mother would have known, and he only talked to her when it was absolutely necessary. "Does that mean that you're our… father?"
Booker was hoping that Roy would have said "Of course not!" or something to that effect, even though he almost knew the answer before he asked. "Of course I am! Do you see any other roosters around here?" Roy bit his wing to keep himself from laughing any further. "Wow, all this time I thought you guys knew…"
Booker couldn't take it anymore.
"AAAAAUUUUGGGHHHH!" he screamed, pressing his hands against his head and running of like a madman… mad chicken.
"Jeez," mumbled Sheldon, "it's not that bad."
"I don't see what his problem is," said Roy disapprovingly. "He thinks he has problems? Look at me! I've got an oblong sphere for a son!"
"Yeah, but… HEY!" cried Sheldon.
Roy ran off, laughing insanely. "Wow, you guys are making me laugh so much it hurts to breathe! Ha ha ha ha ha!"
Sheldon sighed to himself. "Great… now Booker's going to go into his nervous breakdown stage. I'd better go warn Mom… although he's probably already there."
"Help! Help! Panic and terror!" Heeeeelp!"
"Oh great…" mumbled Sheldon. He had no time to mumble anything else, for the constantly panic-stricken duck Wade had grabbed him in pure fright.
"SHELDON, WE ARE ALL DONE FOR!"
"What is it now?" asked Sheldon.
"It's…" Wade thought for a moment. "I do not know, actually. But I saw your brother running and screaming, which surely means that—"
"It's alright, Wade!" cried Sheldon. "Booker's just screaming because he found out certain things about his heredity that he would rather have not known—"
"Di-di-did you say heredity?" stammered Wade, the terror in his eyes growing more pronounced.
"…yeah…" Sheldon said slowly.
"OH, FLEE IN TERROR! HEREDITARY SECRETS FRIGHTEN ME SO! WHO KNOWS, NEXT ONE OF US MIGHT DISCOVER THAT WE ARE THE LONG LOST DESCENDANT OF LOUIS PASTEUR! HEEELLLP!" Wade tore off into the distance.
"I think I'll go lay down for awhile…" said Sheldon.