It was not the size of the thing that disturbed him—though it must be said, the size was unnatural. It was the presence. The sheer absurdity of it. A chicken, sprawled in silent judgement across the eastern paddock, stiff-legged and vast. Thirty kilograms, if it was an ounce. He stood beside it, boots sinking slightly into the damp earth, and whispered aloud:

“This is no bird. This is a sermon.”

The farmer—whose name was Elias, though he’d long since stopped answering to it—had seen many strange things in his years on the land: calves born with two tongues, a man who claimed to be his uncle returning from the war with no memory and the wrong-colored eyes, and once, a tax inspector who smiled. But this… this was new.

There were no signs of injury. No feathers out of place. No track marks, no drag, no frantic squabble. The creature had simply arrived, as if delivered by a god too drunk to care about subtlety.

It lay like a prophecy.

Elias knew better than to call the police. He had once reported a dead deer that fell off a truck and ended up with six months of inspections, a threatened fine, and a mysterious man from the Ministry of Animal Dignity. He had no appetite for that again.

Still, something had to be done. You couldn’t just leave a thirty-kilo chicken in your field. Not in this climate. The vultures would come. Then the neighbors. Then the gossip.

He considered the options: burial was slow and left a trace. Fire was faster, but ash was a talkative thing. Dismemberment? Too much effort—and besides, the thought disturbed him more than it ought to have. In the end, he did what any rational, slightly cracked man might do.

He ground it.

Slowly, methodically, without drama. He fed the fowl into an old industrial meat grinder, whistling quietly as the blades churned. It was not murder. It was management. Waste disposal. Agriculture.

By nightfall, it was gone.

And yet—and yet—he could not help but wonder, as he stirred his soup alone, whether the creature had meant something. Whether it had fallen there for him, or because of him. Whether all of this was part of a joke he was not yet clever enough to understand.

And whether the taste of the broth that lingered at the back of his tongue was chicken… or penance.