It was the egg, the chicken realized! The closer she came to laying, the more she turned into a chicken! But hadn’t she always been a chicken?
Her skull shrunk, squeezing the memories out of her brain. She couldn’t remember her name; couldn’t remember why she was here. She couldn’t remember anything other than laying egg after egg in this chicken coup… and the book.
The book! Looking at the book reminded her that this wasn’t normal, that this was a punishment for a poorly thought out wish, that her only hope to save herself was to somehow keep the egg in. So while she didn’t know what normal was right now, she knew that couldn’t lay this egg, that she had to somehow hold it in. But that was easier said than done.
Her muscles kept squeezing, kept straining, kept painfully bearing down as the egg pushed closer and closer to her exit. No matter what she did, no matter what command her little bird brain tried to send, the egg just kept coming.
She could feel it pressing into the back of her cloaca. She could feel herself stretching as the egg parted her flesh on its way out of her body. Her teeth melted into her beak, her back shortened, her chest plumped up, her butt pushed out. She was almost fully chicken, almost fully gone. Thinking was so hard, memories were so foggy. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to stop the egg. She threw up her arms and let out a loud cluck in frustration…
That was it! She still had elbows! She still had arms! So she did the only thing she could think of and thrust one of her arms as hard as she could into her cloaca, smashing it into the tip of the protruding egg and trying to push it back as far as it would go.
Her arm pushed back against taunt muscle. Fire burned through her muscles while pressure strained against her pelvis. It hurt so bad. For an instant she was afraid that the egg would break under the strain, that her journey to chickenhood would complete itself with the feeling of egg yolk dripping out of her. For a minute nothing happened. Her muscles strained and her arm pushed, counterbalancing one another, while the egg hung slightly protruding from her bottom.
Then the chicken felt a strange vibration run through the air, as though the world itself was saying “fine, I give up. Have it your way.” Her muscles began to relax. The egg started moving back up. Her plan worked!
Her butt pulled back in. Her back lengthened. Her bed of straw got bigger. Her chicken coup grew until it was the size of a large shed.
Muffin remembered her name. Memories of the gene-mod facility where she was born flooded back into her mind. She remembered them uplifting her. She remembered the people looking at her with disappointment.
“We’re sorry, the process didn’t work right,” they had said, “its much easier to make a mix a human with an animal than it is to mix an animal with a human.”
While her brain was the right size, it was still smooth like a bird brain – it was big enough for her to think, just too smooth for her to think the kinds of big human thoughts that they had hoped for. Then one of them had held her arm, disappointingly commenting on how she didn’t have hands.
They were nice to her, but sad. They didn’t know what to do with her, didn’t know where to put her. Didn’t know how she live on her own among humans.
Then she had laid her first egg. It was so big, so painful, so much worse than anything she had endured before the procedure. But the scientists were happy with it, they were happy with its size. Then, a few hours later, she had later another. And another. And another. She was exhausted, but they were ecstatic.
“Don’t worry,” they had said, “we’ve found the perfect place for you.”
They’d brought her here, to the backyard of this house. There was a nice chicken coup just for her. All she had to do was lay eggs all day. She didn’t have to think big thoughts, didn’t have to worry about big things. All she had to do was lay her eggs and then every so often the nice dog who lived in the house would come by and collect them. Rusty… that was his name. Then a few days ago he got a new friend, a skunk, though Muffin hadn’t learned his name yet.
Muffin thought they were both cute. She secretly hoped that one of them were come in, late at night, and take her. But neither of them seemed very interested in her beyond the eggs. She didn’t quite understand why. They were both men… shouldn’t they be as interested in her as she was with them? That was a big thought. And she was busy enough with her eggs that she didn’t have much time to think it.
Muffin remembered Rusty picking up her eggs last night, accidentally leaving a strange black book behind in her coup. She’d tried opening the book and looking through it, but it was just filled with scratches that she couldn’t make any sense of. Even though it was filled with nothing, there was a strange aura radiating from it. She knew it was dangerous, just not why. Then, this morning, she’d said some words while touching the book and it had tried to turn her back into a chicken, tried to steal her humanity, to steal her life. She didn’t understand what the book was, she just knew she shouldn’t touch it again.
Muffin was brought back to reality by the feeling of the egg growing inside of her. She felt it pressing out into her belly and, looking down, saw her stomach slowly inflating out in front of her. That was good, she realized, when the book had first started changing her it started by giving changing her reproductive system back into the way it had been when she was a chicken – that was why the egg had felt so small at the start, it was just a normal chicken egg. But now she was being restored to normal.
She felt her anus migrate to the edge of her cloaca, break through her skin, then move backwards as it formed a small, tight asshole. Meanwhile, her oviduct divided itself in half, with the top half turning back into her uterus – which the egg was now growing to fill – while the bottom half restored itself into her vagina. She felt her cloaca lengthen as a small, tight labia formed around her opening, converting back into a human like vulva.
The egg continued to put on weight until it was a healthy 7 pounds. That was similar to a human child, Muffin thought with pride. That fact, that her eggs were human like in size and weight was a source of pride to her. It showed just how far she had come, just how little similarity there was between her now and the hen she had been born as.
As she felt the egg stop growing, Muffin felt an overwhelming sense of satisfaction, content in the knowledge that she had beaten the book, that she had stopped it from reverting her body, from stealing everything that the benevolent gene-mod people had given her.
She felt her uterus contract as it resumed its effort to lay her egg, pushing it down against the stub at the end of her arm. This time she didn’t resist. She pulled her arm out, flicking a small amount of feminine moisture off the feathers at the end of her stub, all while she bore down with everything she had, helping her body to lay the overdue egg.
While ordinarily laying was a long, painful process for Muffin, her earlier struggle against the book had left her vagina pre-stretched, and the egg easily descended down through it. It only caught very briefly as it exited her vagina, which needed to stretch just a little bit more to accommodate the widest part of the egg. But after a hard push and a slight stringing sensation, her vagina stretched and egg slipped free, pressing down into the straw beneath her with a slight rustle.
She looked down between her legs and saw the large white egg nestled in the straw of her bed. Relaxing out of her squatting position, Muffin sat down gently on top of it. She was so happy, so proud, so excited to have beaten the book and laid her egg that she couldn’t help but let out the loudest cluck that she could muster.