The henhouse creaked as I stepped on a loose floorboard. These girls were making more than I could have for breakfast, so I placed the eggs that would flow over into a separate, larger basket. I was thrilled to have a surplus.

Now I could finally fix this shed that was falling apart. The girls clucked in random intervals like popcorn on the stove, popping up, then settling. I shielded my eyes with a hand as the morning sun rose in earnest.

I pulled my hand away when I noticed a green smudge on my thumb, then wiped it on my pants. Must have gotten a little something on my hand from the henhouse. I grumbled when it remained after I wiped it.

Oh well, I've been stained worse. Life as a farmer meant I had to get a little gritty. I revved up the engine of my truck and pulled out. My house remained in the rearview for quite some time, as it was a flat land with no neighbors for miles.

Finally, I met the first road that connected to the farmer's market. I glanced down at my grip on the steering wheel and noticed that the smudge on my thumb had grown just a little bit. I wrote it off as having spread from my wiping it along with my perspiration.

It was turning out to be a hot day, and I couldn't drive without pulling the visor down to keep the sun out of my eyes. I rubbed my face under my glasses when I met my reflection in the mirror. I nearly wrecked into the ditch on the side of the road.

Underneath my left eye, there was a green ring. It was right on my cheekbone, below the dark circles that were normally there after a full day of toiling in the sun. My lower lid lifted when I touched my cheek, and my index finger came away green as well.

"Huh," I said.

I resigned myself to needing a shower when I got home. I didn't care what other people thought about me as I pulled up and got out of my truck. Two people stood behind the stand in front of a small shop with a harvest mural painted on the top half.

"Howdie-do!" the woman waved.

The man regarded me curiously, his eyes fleeting toward my green one.

"Top of the morning," I greeted them.

Saddling up next to them on my own stand that spanned about ten inches or so, I laid out my basket of eggs and the sign that read, 'Farm Fresh and Organic.'

My whole hand was green. I pulled away from the placard fast, gripping my wrist with my other hand. I stared at my appendage with a mix of curiosity, such was on the face of the man, and wide horror. I choked back a scream.

What could have been the cause of this? I went to the doctor four times a year and nothing came up that could possibly indicate me turning green. Last I checked, there was no such condition outside of gangrene and last I checked, even that didn't spread quite this fast!

I sat in the metal foldup chair behind me, grateful for it or the alternative would be that I would simply pass out. I hid both hands under the stand as another truck pulled up next to mine, blue next to fairway green that matched the color on my face.

The other man stepped out, boots squeaking slightly against the gravel as he neared. He fished out a few dollars and handed the bundle to me.

"Two eggs, please," he said.

I grabbed one, then another with my non-dominant hand, avoiding showing the other lest I be looked at as a freak anymore. The man didn't seem to notice or mind the smudge under my eye, and that was good enough.

I handed him the eggs, which were covered in green polka dots. I gasped and dropped the two. One cracked on the stand and the other rolled to the pavement below. They broke open to reveal two green yolks inside.

The two farmers in the next stand flew from their baskets of lemons screaming. They crossed the pavement to their own yellow truck. The other man did not even flinch as the two yolks grew in size and transformed before my very eyes.

The man grabbed the basket, and I turned to look at a feathered hand.

"You will be next," he said.

His voice carried not like a human but a squawking mimicry, a bird vocalization. He looked directly into my terrified eyes with his beady ones, black as pits and shrinking as he began to cluck. Two baby chickadees joined him in the noise, their green polka dots beginning to dot their feathers like a dalmatian grows their spots.

The chicks darted forth faster than I could blink and chased after the yellow truck. It was flung into the air and it didn't come back down. It was simply gone in the air. I did the first action on impulse so that I would not be next in line for that.

I gripped the metal of my chair and flung it at the man and ran to the side of the store. I caught my reflection in the glass. The green spread down both of my arms to my collarbone. I let out a loud scream.

The clucking drew near as the man-chicken-whatever-he-was hybrid chased me on his ever-thinning legs. They grew yellow and they clicked on the ground as the boots were too big and he freed his hardened, clawed feet.

He was chasing me with the basket of eggs in his one feathered hand. I looked behind me to duck in time as an egg sailed past my head. The man, or the chicken rather, was throwing them at me like they were ground-burst bombs as he clumsily hooked around the sharp turn.

I ran around the next, nearly full circle around the market when I turned to realize that he had stopped chasing me. Eggs rolled across the smooth pavement and stopped in the gravel. They wiggled and hatched one by one.

I stared, unable to run in my shock as they grew and loomed closer. They flapped their wings as they sprouted green and white feathers and they clucked, the gooey substance of their shells stretching in wide strands as their wide mouths open.

I prayed to wake up from this nightmare!

***

I awoke. The early morning sun greeted me and relief as I'd never before felt washed over my half-conscious body. I was back in my room, in my bed, and the events washed from my mind as a distant memory.

I concluded that it had been a crazy nightmare, one born of all the stress I had been through lately. The chickens just weren't laying eggs like they used to. I had to replace five of them in the past week as they had mysteriously fallen over dead of some unidentifiable condition.

It put a strain on my pocket, and now I was careful not to eat so much. My stomach growled as a consequence, so I pulled my body out of bed. I had to have lost a few pounds because I felt a little lighter.

Something made contact with my foot and rolled on the hardwood floor. I looked down, my eyes widening in the same mixture of curiosity and apprehension I had in the dream. The nightmare only hatched further from there.

I watched with a peculiar expression frozen on my face as the egg grew green polka dots and then rolled out of the crack in the door. I followed it down the hall and opened the door to the front as it punted against it.

It rolled outside onto the wooden planks of the porch and down each step. Curse my curiosity, I had to know why this strange, alien thing was here. It hatched open in the dirt and two clawed feet made indents in the yard.

"Why have you come here?" I asked.

If I didn't know, it would haunt my dreams for at least a whole week. It simply clucked and pecked at the dry soil, unable or unwilling to communicate. The pecking in itself, however, appeared to be a signal, as out of the sky came a green spaceship.

Behind the glass was a beaked face. The dome transformed into the windshield of a truck, as did the rest of the ship, looking indistinguishable in everything but the color from my own dusty blue, dented pickup.

The truck was illuminated with a bright green light underneath. It wobbled against the earth for a brief moment before there was a hiss and the door opened. The same man from yesterday got out moments later.

He looked almost human, except for his completely black eyes. He spoke in the same scratchy birdlike tone from before.

"We have come to take you, brother. Escape this planet now with us, or face the wrath of sickness and famine. It will not stop. The destruction has begun."

He held out a feathery hand toward the barn that had been latched closed. I bought a lock for it to keep any wild animals out. That was before I realized that the thing killing my chickens could not be locked away.

It was indeed a sickness from inside of them, one that couldn't be identified by anyone else, except for this entity. Not a cluck came from the henhouse. I walked over to the barn and he followed, opening the door to find that every single one of my chickens was laid over dead.

Tears flowed down my face and I realized that they were a virescent green. The chicken man put a feathery hand on my shoulder.

"I came to you to warn you in a dream. This has what happened to our kind."

I blinked unseeing through the darkness of the barn, then shut the door. I followed the man wordlessly to the spaceship.

"Do not worry, we'll see to it that you're checked up. You see, you have fallen from our race when we tragically dropped some of our eggs in our rushed flight from this planet many years ago. We have come to collect the survivors from this diseased land."

I nodded.

I looked down at my hands, completely green, the tips of my fingers sprouting feathers. As a child, I always wanted wings, and always wished that I could fly. Well, chickens couldn't fly very high anyway, but a man can dream.

Anyway, I always knew that I was different. Only now I could accept the truth.

"Now that I know what I am, everything makes sense," I said.

It was difficult to elaborate on what I meant by everything, this planet, my want for isolation from it. The chicken man nodded as though he understood. We approached the truck, and I took one last forlorn look at the henhouse, then mine, the only home I had ever known.

"You will have everything that you have been lacking here once we check you over. Those human doctors don't know anything about your condition. They lack the sufficient skills to understand us."

With that knowledge, my racing heart finally slowed. Not only did it all come into place, someone was finally going to help me. The same entity that I thought was only a nightmare, was my kind.

I got into the passenger side of the truck and slowly it lifted off of the ground.

"We can't fly very far or fast, but our ships can break sound," he said.

It was as though he had read my mind, and perhaps he could. Perhaps I had that ability. A cluck escaped my throat.

"You've been very strong to survive for this long on this planet unaware of why. Now, buckle up!"