Little Chicken

Poultry husbandry is illegal in Boston, as is any other kind of livestock-raising beyond dogs, cats, guinea pigs, lab mice, goldfish, homing pigeons or budgies. Urban animals are encouraged but rural animals are dissuaded from entering Boston's city limits unless they are dead, cut to order, and ready for the frying pan or the oven.

Tonawanda Street in Lower Roxbury, just north of Newmarket and west of Upham's Corner, has been awakened recently by the sounds of a rooster before sunrise. Many cocks crow in the dark in this part of the city, but few bestir the neighbors before alarm clocks are set to go off. Though animal enforcement have been called in, no one has been able to pinpoint the source of the every-AM disturbance. Cock-a-doodle-doo rings out over the rooftops as the sky to the east tinges pink. An insomniac can't even buy a newspaper or a chocolate bar at that hour of the morning. The neighborhood isn't pleased by having its beauty rest disturbed.

Talk around the Ideal Sub Shop, on Dudley Street, most mornings indicates that a brood of "pocket chickens" has been smuggled into upper Dorchester and lower Roxbury from Cuba. It has long been a scheme of the Castro regime to breed miniature farm animals since at least the 1990s and the sound of the mysterious rooster cries on Tonawanda Avenue have been attributed to a communist plot. The goal behind this wrinkle in the Cuban Scientific-Agrarian Plan was to bring the bounty of rural self-sufficience into the apartments of urban barrios. Slogans included: "A Dairy in Every Closet!" and "A Pocketful of Grape-Sized Eggs!" Boston may be a better city in which to explore the ramifications than Havana.

The Massachusetts ASPCA has been briefed to be on the lookout for miniature poultry, most probably chicken but perhaps turkey, duck or goose. Birds are expected to be able to nest in the span of a human hand, but there haven't been any conclusive sitings or measurements. Who knows what mutations have been spawned in sub-topical, jungle, genetic, abandoned sugar plantation laboratories? Who knows what principals of science and nature have been bungled? There may be a new breed of chicken in Boston, a bird fit for a pocket. If true, it will still be illeageal to bread or keep as a pet, if not illegal to eat. Every good citizen around Tonawanda Street is encouraged to turn in information on the source of the mysterious avian crowing. Boston's mayor has offered a $3.oo reward for valuable tips that lead to the discovery and incarceration of alien pocket-chickens.