Backstory

The Large Chicken began as an ordinary chicken — the kind that pecks, naps, and files minor complaints with the coop committee. Then it discovered vegetables. Not a salad. Not a side dish. Vegetables as a lifestyle. It ate its greens, its yellows, its oranges, and, eventually, the neighbouring garden’s greens, yellows and oranges. The neighbours were not consulted.

It is a normal chicken, but bigger. Not special, not mutated, not blessed — simply the result of an eating programme pursued with the dedication of a bird that has decided the manual is wrong and the garden is right. It has been eating its vegetables, and the vegetables’ neighbours, and by now it has a diet plan the farm’s nutritionist refuses to discuss in public.

On the field it is slow, patient and enormously hard to stop. It does not sprint, sneak or explode. It walks, and every cheap tower that plinks at it simply confirms what it already knew: there is more of it than there is of your ammunition.