There was outright panic when children began coughing up tiny chickens. On playgrounds from Ankara to Accra, Uppsala to Utica, children paused what they were doing, opened their mouths and coughed out miniature plumed Brabanters, speckled Houdans, or snowy-toed Sultans. Clouds of feathers burst from their little mouths, followed by the squawks of chickens having to use their wings for the first time.
This did not scare the children. After they spit out the stray feathers, they found it funny, like a hilarious party trick. The chicken expulsions looked a bit like the speech bubbles of comic books. One girl doing her braids in Ghana coughed out a Leghorn that hit the ground strutting. In Palermo, a boy on a scooter waiting for the traffic signal to turn green hacked up a Rhode Island Red the color of bloody satin. A girl from Ville Platte, Louisiana, barely out of her toddler years, coughed twice hard, and expelled a Buff Orpington with a loud squawk and in a shade of yellow only ever seen in illustrations of pots of gold in fairy tales. Even the heritage breeds were represented. A boy in Estonia coughed up a glossy, black Ayam Cemani who landed gracefully, its cockscomb like a piece of burnt leather glued to its head. The friends of one little boy selling tea on the street in Bali had to smack him on the back several times to help him clear the long, dramatic black-and-teal feathers of a Onagadori, and a little girl in Albania managed to clear a stunning Dong Tao despite its tumorous-looking legs and Ankylosaurus head. The children found it hilarious. Magical.
It was the parents who freaked out. At first, everyone thought it must be some toxic exposure, something that had turned the children into incubators for barnyard fowl. Doctor’s appointments became impossible to book as mothers of chicken-expellers competed for time slots with the mothers of children who had regular old flu. The stricken parents needed to have their children examined, they said. Take throat cultures, they told the confounded pediatricians. Do blood tests, they insisted.
But there was nothing medically wrong with the children who, each morning, brushed their teeth and drew on their little mittens or sandals, eager to get outside and see what sort of chicken they and their friends coughed up that day. Their parents watched with worry from the windows, half-listening as the morning talk show hosts blathered in the background about what it could possibly mean if a child expelled a Pita Pinta as opposed to a Sicilian Buttercup. A well-known TV evangelist assured his flock that they’d be okay so long as no Deathlayer was expelled, but then a little girl in Cuba coughed one up and seemed no worse the wear for it; the world kept going as usual, except for the sudden multitude of tiny chickens, and that was that.
There were some who posited that it was a sign of superiority to hatch a Dorking versus, say, a Scots Dumpy. They suggested the children should be separated out to be genetically studied. But since no one knew what it actually meant to exhale a Barnvelder or Ixworth, and since there was no apparent tie between the origin of chicken breed and the sort of children who hatched them, the push to classify, to make lists, and to separate into groups faltered.
Meanwhile, as the adults argued and worried about the implications for getting their child into the college of their choice and whether this meant there was a greater risk of avian flu, the children, delighted with this new trick of theirs, continued to sit criss-cross-apple-sauce in their treehouses, cuddling their tiny chickens between their legs, making colorful friendship bracelets with the feathers of their hatchlings.
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Elizabeth Rosen’s stories have appeared in journals such as the North American Review, Baltimore Review, Gargoyle, and Pithead Chapel, and been nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net awards. Her story “Maw Maw’s Cheese Balls” is the 2026 winner of the Raleigh Review Flash Fiction contest. Colorwise, Elizabeth is an autumn. She mourns the loss of Tab and still wants her MTV.