Now, I've seen a lot of chickens in my day. But none to compare with the bird that stood before me now, flapping her great, bony wings,

Her  had a greasy texture, she sported slippers of the very style and color I'd given Doreen, my wife, on our most recent anniversary. Staring into her hard, beady eyes, black as an oil slick, I knew I'd seen that look somewhere before. Then it hit me: she was a dead ringer for Frank Perdue.

 I had been dimly aware of a faint but growing  in the room,  like an army of rats' feet , skittering over marble tile, or a teeming mass of maggots, feeding on a cadaver.

The dank basement was filled with , all shaking and cracking, as a thousand oversized beaks pecked their way out. Within moments, the room had filled with a sickening smell as oily heads of dozens of oversized chicks began to emerge from their shells -- each with those same  greasy feathers. As the last piece of eggshell fell away, I watched this herd of  superchickens lumber out into the room, shaking the very floorboards as their  pink-slippered feet moved across the floor to encircle me, cheeping and cackling and pecking at my pant legs.

The mother hen broke free of her chain. She put her wings under my armpits and lifted me up by my  with my legs flailing.

"Hey Rooster," she called out to a scrawny old bird who had been resting on a bale of straw up until now with the TV on -- tuned, I realized, to a Dallas Cowboys' game. "I bet this here's a two hundred pounder."
  ANSWERS  feathers noise eggs neck