The Chicken Hut Changes Its Name: Flash Fiction

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This story is from Guild meeting prompt for the August meeting.  The goal was to build a writing around three randomly selected words/phrases : alligator, run, and Sad Bob.

The Chicken Hut Changes Its Name

Once the Alligator Farm was abandoned, the inevitable occurred.  It didn’t happen overnight, it crept up over time.  The alligators, penned in their pond, began to realize that they were no longer being fed.  Wildlife was becoming non-existent.  No more chopped chickens tossed to them.  No more birds stupid enough to wander into their parameters.  Without cleaning or filtration, the pond was becoming more polluted and devoid of life other than the several hundred alligators confined there.

It was the feeding season, the time between April and October when they were active and hungry.  A solution must be found.

And it was.  The first to go were the young.  The baby alligators were just too accessible to resist.  But that did not last.  Soon the bigger were consuming the smaller.  It was social Darwinism at its purest.

Some of the gators with more pronounced personalities and physical characteristics had been given names by one of the farm hands, Randy Banderson.  But that generous anthromorphication did not help them survive.

First, they lost Happy Mary, the gator with the widest smile.  She smiled big, but her size was not sufficient to fend off the bigger gators.  Then Stumpy Tom, the one who had already lost a part of tail, was next to go.  Then there was Speedy Hosea, whose fast gait was not enough to save him when trapped in a small area with other bigger, meaner gators.

Then there was only one left.  Sad Bob, the alligator with little raindrops of white, streaking just below his eyes, descending to his powerful jaws.  It was as if God had thought to make an albino alligator, but changed his mind early on.

Sad Bob had grown huge off his consumption of everyone else.  He was over twice the size of a large male alligator, 24 feet long and a massive 1300 lbs.  He was large enough that the fence surrounding the pond was no longer a problem.

He crashed through and roamed the outskirts of Dixon County.  There was some wildlife, but he found the tastiest treat of all at the Horton’s family farm.  Who knew that people could taste so good?  Some of the family would run from Sad Bob, but never fast enough. The run just made it more fun.

But the feeding season ended, and the hunger that drove Sad Bob fizzled out.  Now he just wanted to find a comfortable swamp or pond to rest in.

His wanderings took him to Dixon County’s largest town, Crowley, and to the parking lot of The Chicken Hut.  Customers began to shriek and run, but Sad Bob was no longer interested in catching them.  What he did want was the pond behind The Chicken Hut.

One of the customers was Randy Banderson, and he recognized Sad Bob right away.  He was startled by how big Sad Bob had gotten, but thought of him as a sweet fellow.  Fake tears can do that.

They built a fence around the pond, and Sad Bob was content to stay there.  He became a significant tourist attractor, and in his honor, they changed the name of their fast food establishment to Sad Bob’s Chicken Hut.

The plan was, when feeding season came around, to feed Sad Bob generous chunks of raw chicken parts. 

Sad Bob, however, had other plans.