--
   An alien borg made of nanites and new physical laws walked into a bar.
   "Ow!" said the alien borg made of nanites and new physical laws, "Why
   did somebody put a bar right at head level here?"
   --
   A chicken sat in a chicken coop.  The chicken coop was cozy, but
   sometimes a fox stalked nearby, and sometimes a farmer came by to
   kidnap their young, the beloved eggs.
   Out the door of the chicken coop, a road was visible.  Sometimes cars
   or trucks would drive down the road.  Across The Road was a fabled
   Other Side.  The grass always looked greener, the sky bluer.  The
   chicken imagined on the Other Side there would even be more worms,
   because their were fewer cooped chickens eating them.  Most
   importantly, there was a zombie infestation on this side of the road.
   The zombies were always swarming the farmhouse to try to get at the
   farmer's family, and the farmer would blast a long metal stick at them
   to slow them down.  The chicken didn't see this happening on the other
   side of the road.
   Chickens had been and gone from this coop.  An old message had been
   scrawled across from the chicken's roost, on the wall in chicken
   scratches.  The chicken read this writing on the wall frequently while
   warming her eggs.  It was a joke, or at least other chickens said it
   was.
   "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

   She wasn't sure.  Chickens never crossed the road.  The trucks were so
   loud!  Who would want to risk it?
   Today, this chicken, who's name was Little, was casually roosting on
   her eggs when a tough young man from the farmer's family came in and
   kidnapped her!  "It's LaughinSunshine's turn to make the chicken dinner
   tonight, Little, and you're going to be the star attraction!"
    "Squawk!  Squawk!" said Chicken Little as the young man hoisted her
   around.  She had never been kidnapped before, and it seemed the blue
   sky itself was crashing down around her as she was rushed across the
   yard.
   "LaughinSunshine, it's great to have you visiting our fine family.
   Here's the hatchet, here's the chicken, we are just yearning to learn
   what a vegan chicken dinner tastes like.  And tonight we get to shoot
   more zombie cyborgs!"
   Chicken Little had her legs tied and was planted on a chair.  Outside
   she could hear a rumbling noise, and a glance showed all her chicken
   friends rushing one by one towards the road.  "The fireman's red
   suspenders!" yelled one fervently as it dodged a large box truck.  "The
   other side!" exclaimed two more.  "Too many knuckle sandwiches!" jibed
   an anxious-looking chicken.  "KFC across the street!" moaned another.
   Little even saw her love, the rooster, crossing in the drove.  Her
   heart went out to him.
   As the mass of clamoring excited chickens, who had clearly all read the
   writing on the wall, coursed like a great river across the street,
   there was a loud "Crunch!" and a rift opened in the street, cracking
   the pavement from the weight of thousands and thousands of chicken
   jokes traveling to the Other Side.  Furniture shook, and things began
   sliding on surfaces in the kitchen, as the ground tilted.
   "Lands-sakes-alive an earthquake!" somebody exclaimed over the sound of
   football on a television.
   LaughinSunshine was a beautiful girl in her twenties with incredibly
   long hair and freckles and all-plastic shoes.  She was in the middle of
   opening the oven, revealing a huge block of broiled tofu.
   As the ground shook, she got anxious.  She looked at Little with
   incredible distress.
   LaughinSunshine looked deep into Little's eyes, and after a pause
   begged "I'll do my best!" out, as if the chicken had asked something of
   the human.
   "Squawk!  The sky is falling!" burst out Little in reply, as a
   teakettle tumbled off a tilting shelf with a "clang!"
   LaughinSunshine yanked open the window, grabbed a butcher knife, cut
   Little's ropes, and tossed her out through the window with a fervent
   "Be free forever, my love!"
   All Little knew was that the sky was flying around her everywhere.  She
   flapped.  She squawked.  As she tumbled through the air, she caught a
   glimpse of the rooster, on the other side.  Was he waving his wing at
   her?  Then a horn honked, a huge car-carrier coursed between them, and
   Little kept spinning, the rooster lost amidst the flying pieces of sky.
   By this time the rift opening in the road had widened.  The earth
   rumbled and shook, as the weight of tens of thousands of laughing
   chickens sunk the part of the tectonic plate holding the other side.
   "There are no zombies here!"  "This ecological niche has so many
   grazing opportunities!"  "I never have to answer my boss's questions
   when I take my chicken salad to the park!"  "Everyone else really was
   doing it!"  Chickens could be heard clamoring and clamoring about how
   great it was to Cross the Road.
   As the earthquake continued, the ground grew more and more slanted, and
   once Little landed she was quite distressed.
   "The sky is falling!  I must run!" said Little, as she clawed at the
   grass and nearby objects with her wings and feet, trying desperately to
   keep herself from tumbling into the dangerous road as she coursed down
   the ground tilted by the weight of chickens already crossed.
   Her efforts were fruitless.  A zombie saw her and tried to give chase,
   but couldn't keep up with the steep incline.  As she tumbled over the
   pavement, the road seemed almost to whisper to her:
   "This is your path across, not mine along.  Chickens have been
   traveling this way since the dawn of time.  I move under you, never you
   over me."
   As the earthquake shook the ground harder, the rift grew into many, and
   pieces of the road seemed to almost hunch up under the farmer's
   property, shuffling Little across.
   A fleet of freight trucks was coursing down the bumpy road, their tires
   too large to care about the changes in its structure.  Little was right
   in their way, on a collision course.
   As the freight trucks were about to strike Little, she managed to grasp
   a broken piece of pavement with one foot, and held out her wing to stop
   the fleet of freight trucks.
   "The. Sky. Is.  Falling!  Squawk!  We must run!" she said
   matter-of-factly to the freight truck drivers.
   The freight trucks struck her fear of the sky like a brick wall.
   Collapsed engines and steel boxes, huge pallets of products for big box
   stores, ruptured cement mixers spilling cement, tumbling logs that were
   heading to a lumber mill, spilling everywhere.  Huge screeches as steel
   ripped, immense crashes as objects smashed each other.  The truck
   drivers got out and began running across themselves.
   On the Other Side, the rooster was there.  Little walked up.
   The other chickens and the rooster all asked, "Chicken Little, why did
   you cross the road?"
   Little smiled warmly and replied:
   "You were there.  The sky itself couldn't have kept me away."