Muffin woke up to the feeling of rough eggshell pressing down into her hip.
“You’re awake,” came an off, clucking voice.
Muffin pressed an arm into the straw and pushed herself up. She was laying in a straw bed that was pressed up against the side of a large henhouse. Looking at the source of the voice, Muffin saw another anthropomorphic chicken sitting on its butt in a similar bed of straw across from her, a slight bulge evidence in her belly.
“Are you…?” Muffin asked.
“RK?” the new chicken replied, “I was. Now I’m Cookie, thanks to you.”
“But I…”
“But you what, Muffin? BUT YOU WHAT? You turned me into an egg laying skunk in a henhouse?” Cookie shouted, “what did you think was going to happen? What did you think the auditor was going to do with that?”
Muffin hung her head.
“Where is…”
“Where is Rusty?” Cookie gestured towards another hen off to side. The new hen’s stomach was bulging out, her eyes were squinted and her breathing was heavy. It was clear she was in the process of laying.
“That’s Lemon. Rusty doesn’t exist anymore, he had the good fortune to not be holding a book when reality changed. Unlike us, Lemon has no idea she was ever anything but this.”
“So use the books to change us back!” Muffin shouted.
“They’re gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone Muffin. In this reality we’ve always been three hens who were poorly uplifted in a back-alley gene-mod clinic. I seem to have kept most of my intelligence, but who knows if I could read the books anymore – its not like there’s any reading material in here for me to find out.” RK replied, the tinge of anger evidence in her voice.
“It doesn’t matter. In this reality we never got the books. In this reality we’re just egg laying hens living on your neighbor Clint's farm. All we’ve ever done is to sit in this house and lay these eggs,” Cookie said, gesturing to a freshly laid egg sitting next to her.
“And since you decided to make my egg fertile, it seems that Clint brings a rooster by once a month to fuck us. I assume he’s breeding more hens but he takes the eggs away all the same so who knows.”
“This is our life now Muffin.” Cookie sneered, “this is what you did to us.”
Muffin wanted to say something. She wanted to apologize. She didn’t mean for this to happen. She had just wanted to be normal again. She had just wanted to be Troy.
But as a small amount of fluid rushed out of her womb, soaking into the straw below her, her recent conversation with Cookie began to rapidly disappear from her memory, Muffin realized that it was time for her to lay.
So she did the only thing she could do. She did the only thing she would do - for the rest of her life.
Muffin pushed.