(This is a satirical article. Wish fulfillment, dystopia, or both — you be the judge.)
The following is from a newspaper clipping dated July 8, 2084. It was discovered among the personal effects of Clarabelle Henson, the former egg-laying champion turned chickens’ rights attorney who played a pivotal role in the Great Chicken Coup (Coop?) of 2084. The newspaper smelled faintly of cornmeal and was partly obscured by what appeared to be a grocery list written in chicken scratch, but the clipping was in otherwise good condition. It is currently being transported to the International Museum of Barnyard Revolutions in Denver, where it will be placed on permanent display alongside the letters of Cardinal Anthony Featherington.
It’s another day for the history books here in the Republic of Benedict. Three short months after toppling human regimes around the world through a combination of wits, blackmail, and identity theft, the Intercontinental Coalition of Chickens, also known as the ICC, have scored an even sweeter victory in court against their longtime nemesis: Chik-Fil-A CEO and U.S. presidential candidate Christian Straighter. Known as much for his ovophobic rants as for his slipshod management of the world-famous fast-food franchise, Mr. Straighter had a long history of ruffling feathers with his questionable marketing practices, his open contempt for free-range farming, and his televised diatribes against “yolk indoctrination” in public barnyards.
But there was one insult above all others that set Straighter irrevocably on a collision course with chicken justice: his 2081 decision to use the likeness of ICC President Shelly Nestor in the redesigned Chik-Fil-A logo without her permission. It was a humiliating blow that shook the flock to its core. “Look, Shelly could handle a lot,” recalled Nestor’s cousin, the stand-up comedian known as Rhode Island Fred. “Personal attacks, condescension, even the occasional roasting didn’t bother her. But that stunt with the logo? It’s bad enough he didn’t ask permission, but he couldn’t be bothered to find an artist who could draw a proper beak. Made Shelly look like a damn parakeet.”
In the end it was President Nestor’s daughter, a three-time Olympic egg-laying gold medalist and renowned chickens’ rights attorney named Clarabelle Henson, who would doggedly pursue vengeance against Christian Straighter, using every legal tool (and a few illegal ones) at her disposal. Never content just to wing it, Henson methodically tracked down former Chik-Fil-A assistant managers and plied them with free lunch at Boston Market to get them to spill the dirt on their boss. And readers, there was so very much dirt: money laundering, illegal chicken bleaching, workers forced to watch “Foghorn Leghorn” cartoons whenever they clucked in late, shady donations to rubber chicken manufacturers, insider trading on 4Chan—the list went on and on.
Having accumulated a mountain of damning evidence against the fast-food fiend who had wronged her family, Henson began taking steps to ensure the courts were in her favor before pressing charges against Straighter. From her secret meetings with ten chickens in a trench coat posing as a reporter at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Henson knew she was unlikely to prevail as long as the courts were packed with human justices, many of whom owned stock in Chik-Fil-A. Henson determined the only way to bring Straighter to justice was to overthrow the systems that had placed him in power and were set on protecting him. And she would need allies on the inside.
So it was that Henson struck a bargain with Straighter’s daughter Brette, an avowed pescatarian and aspiring stage director who had long chafed at her father’s expectation that she take over the family business when her real ambition was to adapt the Hunger Games trilogy into a series of Sondheim-style musicals. Henson proposed that Brette, who had access to thousands of hours of audio tapes of after-hours karaoke parties at Chik-Fil-A Corporate Headquarters, could force the resignation of virtually every Straighter-affiliated justice by threatening to leak audio of the December 2080 Billie Eilish singalong. Once that was done, Henson would signal the leaders of the Revolutionary Chicken Brigade and their allies from the Kangaroo Kingdom to literally kick down the doors of key government buildings and demand worldwide human abdication. The stage would then be set for a swift trial and easy guilty verdict against Straighter.
As we all know, the plan went off without a hitch, and the unlikely alliance between Clarabelle Henson and Brette Straighter resulted in nothing less than an overnight inversion of the world order. Chicken and kangaroo leaders moved quickly to pack courts and legislatures with animals sympathetic to their causes, and in a few short weeks Christian Straighter and hundreds of other once-untouchable avatars of privilege were arraigned on charges ranging from corruption to worker mistreatment to criminally off-key drunken singing.
Straighter himself was clearly unprepared for these developments; by the time he realized the tables had turned, the only legal representatives he could find were a squeaky hamster wheel, a condemned block of flats in downtown Edinburgh, and a YouTube clip featuring a Bela Lugosi deepfake. That didn’t prevent him from attempting to force a mistrial on the grounds that he was being tried in a kangaroo court, and to be fair, he was correct: the judge was literally a kangaroo, and an ill-tempered one at that. As Clarabelle Henson observed with mounting dismay, Judge Roody was fond of delivering roundhouse kicks to uncooperative witnesses and had an ethically questionable habit of appointing her sons as bailiffs. (They all went by the name of Joey, which Henson wasn’t entirely sure she could write off as a tough-guy affectation.)
In any case, Christian Straighter’s protests availed him little. With few sympathetic jurors and judges to be found among the chickens and kangaroos who had brought about the demise of human hegemony, a guilty verdict against Straighter and other men like him was a near certainty. Indeed, had it not been for a last-minute plea for mercy by a remorseful Henson, Straighter would have faced life imprisonment in a barn, cleaning up after rooster frat parties and watching nothing but Bachelorette episodes. Instead, Henson persuaded Judge Roody to hand down a lesser sentence of ten years learning how to draw chickens properly—and, of course, transcribing the libretto for his daughter’s Mockingjay musical by hand.
With personal and musical scores finally settled, Clarabelle Henson now says she wants to focus on reining in the more punitive impulses of the government she helped install. “I know some would say that horse has already left the barn,” she told reporters during an impromptu press conference last week. “But I have to believe we can make things right, or at least better. That’s why I got into this in the first place.” She paused and smiled ruefully. “Though I must admit, what with the kangaroo court and the whole oppressed-becoming-the-oppressors twist, I’ve come out of this with quite a bit of egg on my face.”
When a skeptical horse reporter asked Henson if she’d just staged this elaborate coup solely for the purpose of dropping a bunch of horrendous puns, Henson gave what could only be described as a cagey response. “Well, Mr. Neighsayer,” she said with a sly wink, “omelet you draw your own conclusions on that one.”
The Shellshocked Cassowary Rises 