A Hen-tic Act

There was an partridge who swallowed a hen. Imagine that! To swallow a hen! It was a truly baffling decision, even for a partridge who had already proven herself to be a connoisseur of the peculiar. This hen, plump and feathered, had certainly ruffled a few feathers – or perhaps, more accurately, had been recently *un*-feathered in the most abrupt and irreversible way. The partridge, her tiny bird-brain whirring with a logic known only to herself, had decided this was the next necessary step. Why, you ask? Well, she swallowed the hen, of course, to peck the dog.

Ah, the dog. He was still in there, a furry, panting presence that had been doing his best to *catch* the cat. And the cat, oh, the cat! She was still wiggling and jiggling and, most inconveniently, tickling inside the partridge. That tickle was becoming less of a mild amusement and more of an insistent, vibrating annoyance. The partridge tried to ignore it, focusing on the next layer of her internal predicament. She had, after all, swallowed the cat in an attempt to eat the pear. The pear, that innocent, round, and utterly inexplicable catalyst for all this internal pandemonium. And still, the partridge couldn't quite fathom *why* she had swallowed that pear in the first place. It was a question that echoed in the dark, cramped confines of her gullet, a question that, with each new addition, seemed to grow louder, more insistent. With a sigh that was more of a gurgle, the partridge knew, deep in her shrinking core, that she was getting closer and closer to the inevitable conclusion. Yes, she might just bust.

The hen, however, wasn't about to sit idly by, even if she was, in fact, sitting. She was a creature of action, or at least, she was supposed to be. Her mission, as dictated by the partridge's increasingly bizarre internal hierarchy, was to peck the dog. Now, pecking a dog is quite a feat for a hen, even a free-roaming one. But a hen inside a partridge, trying to peck a dog who was himself trying to catch a cat? It was a logistical nightmare.