It’s hard to impress me with chicken. Until now. There was a time when chicken and eggs were just breakfast and dinner foods, nothing special. But everything changed when they soon became scarce.

The shift came gradually at first, just whispers of the prices slowly rising. But then came the flu, it didn’t affect humans, only chickens. It crept through coops across the country like a shadow. Not just chickens got sick, but so did the eggs they passed on. The eggs went bad before they even hit the shelf, turning soft and green.

I worked at a small grocery store at the end of a plaza. I only noticed the prices of eggs and chickens rise because customers started conversations about it. Then the eggs and chickens vanished, people’s minds started to scramble– no pun intended. “What are you guys doing to the egg prices?”, was one thing that I heard from a customer. “Ma’am, we don’t change the prices, the company that ships the eggs does.”

People started to steal eggs, fights happened, farms got raided, people became desperate for a dozen eggs. Chickens soon became so rare people started hoarding them. They started selling the eggs their chickens made, making a ton of money off of them. But it became so bad that people sell their valuables for eggs. The currency in the U.S then slowly shifted from paper money to eggs.