Short Story:Hollywood Chickens

Cover by Josh Kirby

Preserved for posterity in the book of collected writings A Blink of the Screen, this tale is Terry Pratchett's attempt to explain to the world exactly how the chickens crossed the road. The road in question is a mega-highway in California somewhere in the Greater Los Angeles Conurbation. Based on a true story about the survivors of a lorry crash involving a farm wagon full of poultry, which not only escaped death but established a thriving colony on the central reservation of a US interstate highway (ie, free from all predators), this tale even offers an existential answer to the question of why the chickens sought to cross the road. Accelerated evolution has something to do with it.