Four and Twenty?
"This has got to be the stupidest request we've ever gotten."
"Listen, stop complaining and help me stuff this last one in here."
He rounded the table, drying his hands off on his apron, already filthy with flour, milk, and a little bit of brown sugar corn starch and rye paste. The first twenty were okay. Surprising, even. But the twenty first bird stuffed into the pie exploded out the side, taking off a good portion of the crust on that side, and a couple of his neighbors. So, back at eighteen in the pie, the two chefs soldiered on, until they were at twenty three. "Are you sure they're supposed to be live?"
"Pretty sure. She'd asked for them to be live, specifically." She shrugged. "Royalty. Go figure."
"And are we supposed to cook it, then?"
She looked at him. "Umm."
He shrugged, and took it upon himself to slam down a top crust and shove it into the oven. The oven wasn't on, which didn't help matters. Nor did the little page boy, coming in every couple minutes to pester them to get the order out, as the Man was hungry. The oven had just hit 100 degrees (Fahrenheit, not Celsius), when Sheila grabbed the oven door, threw it open, whipped the pie pan, without any gloves on, onto a dinner tray nearby, ignoring the jagged holes in the top of the pie and the claw-like protuberances sticking out the top, and clamped down a silver dome onto the whole thing, and slid it across the table to the page boy.
The two cooks went out back to have a cigarette. As a strategy, it seemed like a good plan. Though when the birds descended, attacking the poor maid nearby at the clothes line, ripping the clothes the shreds, including the ones on the chefs' backs, they came up with yet one more reason why smoking was bad for your health. And birds in a pie turned out to be bad for the King's health, the explosion of wings and beaks out of his dinner gave the poor guy a heart attack. Only the Queen, having an alternate lunch in front of the TV down the hall of bread and honey, was spared what the castle staff would remember as the last day anything experimental was tried in the kitchen.
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