The Last Laugh of the Chicken King

Mr. Lufthansa was tapping his pen on his big, oily mahogany desk at the Royal Chicken Inc. headquarters. Mr. Lufthansa never knew what to do after lunch, but today was different. It was almost April Fools day, the day that would mark his new beginning and his escape from the scaly grip of chickens.

Mr. Lufthansa started working at the local chicken factory when he was 14, raking chicken poop into big, neat piles in the hot Tennessee sun. He had hated the job, and he had especially hated the chickens. They smelled terrible, shed puffs of dirty feathers into the air, and pecked brutally at anything. Sometimes, they even pecked each other to death.  

Still, he occasionally pitied the chickens. Maybe their abominable behavior wasn’t their fault. Maybe the unnatural conditions of being crammed next to a thousand other chickens in a giant warehouse floor drove them insane and brought out the worst in their nature. But these thoughts of compassion disappeared as soon as he caught another whiff of chicken poop.

Despite his hatred of chickens, Mr. Lufthansa kept coming back to the plant. Even when he went to college, he still came back to the damn chickens. He had moved up the ranks of the company quickly, becoming the line supervisor at the local plant, and then plant manager before moving to corporate headquarters, where he had ascended to the biggest corner office as the CEO of the whole operation. 

The whole thing had been strange. Mr. Lufthansa had never felt like he knew what he was doing exactly. He mostly just told people to “handle the situation” in his most sympathetic but authoritative voice, and things just happened. He had made lots of money, but now, he was forced to tell people all around the country to “just handle it” all day long, sometimes 16 hours a day. It seemed everyone needed to be told to “handle it” by someone. He didn’t blame his employees for being so needy and annoying since they were probably half-crazed by dealing with all those horrible chickens every day. 

Still, this job had taken a toll on Mr. Lufthansa. In his remaining spare time, he mostly felt exhausted and angry. He was on his third divorce. He had spent so much of his time dealing with chicken problems he had little energy to understand women or how to deal with people outside of the office. There was no doubt in his mind the chickens had ruined his life and trapped him behind this terrible desk with a phone glued to his ear. It was no way to live. 

Mr. Lufthansa shook his head to concentrate. There was no more time for rumination. It was time to act. He unfurled a map spotted with red sharpie x marks. Pulling up a spreadsheet for reference, he began to make the final marks on his map. Finally, he folded the map and stuck it in his pocket. For once, at exactly 5:00 p.m., Mr. Lufthansa left the office. 

It was 7:30 a.m. on April 1st, and Miss Dolmaine was screaming. The office walls were smeared with a phlegmy coat of yellow and white goop. The office had been completely egged. After a walk through the ruined office, egg shells crunching under her foot, Miss Dolmaine screamed again. There was a chicken sitting at Mr. Lufthansa’s desk, pecking mindlessly at a stack of paperwork. On further investigation, it appeared the chicken had written a note confessing that it had murdered Mr. Lufthansa and disposed of the body. The note was signed in a dark brown substance by the chicken’s pronged foot. Forensic investigators quickly identified the substance as blood, and that appeared to match Mr. Lufthansa’s DNA. 

Mr. Lufthansa was never seen again despite a thorough investigation by the police department, a slew of private company detectives, and even a follow-up inquiry conducted by the FBI. In the days following Mr. Lufthansa’s disappearance, a slew of terrible calamities afflicted Royal Chicken Inc. Over 70 facilities that contained chickens had been attacked through a combination of arson attacks and homemade explosives. No humans were harmed in the incidents, but many chickens were killed and the attacks caused significant infrastructure damage. Many of the remaining chickens escaped their industrial enclosure in the chaos, and though many of the chickens were eventually rounded up, an undetermined number of chickens escaped into the vast world. 

In the wake of the strange occurrences, small rural towns become flooded by runaway chickens. Children became used to chasing chickens while avoiding piles of poop on schoolyard playgrounds. Local news stations and newspapers enjoyed brief revenue boosts from local “man meets chicken” stories, and the national news outlets filled up their 24-hour news cycle with speculations about the strange targeting of Royal Chicken Inc. Many experts supposed the company’s woes were the act of a domestic vegan terrorist. Others suspected it was the work of a disgruntled ex-employee. Former employee Jungus Niel, a former poultry production worker who had been vocal about his hatred of Royal Chicken Inc. and had once tried to stab a fellow line worker was arrested and tried, but the facts simply align, and he was acquitted. Royal Chicken Inc. declared bankruptcy from the disruption but rebounded financially two years later. 

Had Mr. Lufthansa known Royal Chicken Inc. had not closed for good, he would have been disappointed, but Mr. Lufthansa didn’t know anything about the news cycle or the chicken industry anymore. 

Mr. Lufthansa lived somewhere — even he didn’t know where exactly — in the middle of a Tennessee forest by a pile of shaggy brambles that looked beautiful in the misty blue mornings. It was the most silent place he had ever been with only the occasional roaring of an airplane to interrupt his reverie. He learned to love things he had always wondered about — idle walks, wood carving, and shooting with a bow and arrow. He had no idea how long he had been in the forest and he had no plans of leaving. 

He lived in total peace until one morning, at the crack of dawn, he heard the familiar sound of a rooster’s crow punctuated by chicken clucks. Leaping up from the ground, he heard himself shriek like an animal. He burst out of his makeshift hut crazed with rage. Through the mist, the outlines of chickens could be seen roosting in the trees and thick shrub. 

He shot as many of them as he could with his bow and arrow, but every morning they came back like ghosts in the morning fog. He felt himself going mad, and his hair began to fall out in clumps. He ate as many of the chickens as he could, but each day he killed more chickens than he could possibly eat. The chicken corpses piled up. He tried to bury them in a meadow several miles from his hut, but somehow, an unbearable stench of chicken blood and death seemed to follow him— a stench painfully familiar to him. The smell became so unbearable he could no longer muster the strength to leave his hut. He gave up his crusade against the chickens, succumbing to waking up to their crows and clucks in the morning.

He realized the chickens had their utility. He could eat their eggs and cook them over the fire. Every now and then, he would kill a chicken and roast it. These things were nice. They made him feel safe too. If a cougar came — one of his greatest fears in the woods — he knew he would hear the chickens squawking and flapping a warning. He felt a grudging sense of companionship with these smelly, filthy, pooping, pecking, maniacal creatures.

Over the years, towns affected by the chicken overflow lost their fowl interlopers, but naturalists of the Tennessee Smoky Mountains noticed a strange trend of chickens migrating to the mountains. Once, a lost hiker claimed to have come across a small cabin deep within the woods where he saw a man surrounded by thousands of chickens whose deafening clucks made the entire valley ring. The man's beard reached almost down to his shins and was filled with eggs, nestled in his hair. On the top of his matted hair perched a small chick. The hiker explained it seemed like the crowning of a new chicken king. We can only suspect this man was Mr. Lufthansa.