Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot

This is the beginning of a story by Robert Olen Butler.

I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I say, and I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really thinking is Holy shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at my wife.
"Hello," she says, and she comes over to me and I can't believe how beautiful she is. Those great brown eyes, almost as dark as the center of mine. And her nose--I don't remember her for her nose but its beauty is clear to me now. Her nose is a little too long, but it's redeemed by the faint hook to it. She scratches the back of my neck. Her touch makes my tail flare. I feel the stretch and rustle of me back there. I bend my head to her and she whispers, "Pretty bird." For a moment I think she knows it's me. But she doesn't, of course. I say "Hello" again and I will eventually pick up "pretty bird." I can tell that as soon as she says it, but for now I can only give her another hello. Her fingertips move through my feathers and she seems to know about birds. She knows that to pet a bird you don't smooth his feathers down, you ruffle them. But of course she did that in my human life, as well. It's all the same for her. Not that I was complaining, even to myself, at that moment in the pet shop when she found me like I presume she was supposed to. She said it again, "Pretty bird," and this brain that works like it does now could feel that tiny little voice of mine ready to shape itself around these sounds. But before I could get them out of my beak there was this guy at my wife's shoulder and all my feathers went slick flat like to make me small enough not to be seen and I backed away. The pupils of my eyes pinned and dilated and pinned again. He circled around her. A guy that looked like a meat packer, big in the chest and thick with hair, the kind of guy that I always sensed her eyes moving to when I was alive. I had a bare chest and I'd look for little black hairs on the sheets when I'd come home on a day with the whiff of somebody else in the air. She was still in the same goddam rut. A “hello” wouldn't do and I'd recently learned “good night” but it was the wrong suggestion altogether, so I said nothing and the guy circled her and he was looking at me with a smug little smile and I fluffed up all my feathers, made myself about twice as big, so big he'd see he couldn't mess with me. I waited for him to draw close enough for me to take off the tip of his finger. But she intervened. Those nut-brown eyes were before me and she said, "I want him." And that's how I ended up in my own house once again. She bought me a large black wrought-iron cage, very large, convinced by some young guy who clerked in the bird department and who took her aside and made his voice go much too soft when he was doing the selling job. The meat packer didn't like it. I didn't either. I'd missed a lot of chances to take a bite out of this clerk in my stay at the shop and I regretted that suddenly.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I regretted not fleeing when I had the chance, not dropping my feces upon that damned clerk the few times he accidently let me loose. Doesn’t matter what come and gone, this is war- meat packer better bring his best, because this is full out war. Honestly, if you think Japan had it bad, you don’t even know what’s coming. I’ll ruffle my feathers to make myself twice as big as the incredible Hulk if I have too.

As I expected, he struck first. Throwing his plush bathrobe over my large black wrought-iron cage the moment we got home, the meatpacker hurled me into complete, damp darkness for the rest of the afternoon. What does he think I am, his coat-hanger? He abuses me like this, exploiting my presence for his own benefit and amusement whenever she’s not home, whenever she’s not around to protect my encaged body from being mistreated. Whatever happened to animal rights? Whatever happened to the consciousness of humanity?

I knew he’d try to mess with me the moment he gave me that grill back at the pet store, so I planned ahead. I called my new friends from Harlem with the typical parrot “cacaw,” knowing I’d need backup. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to take him alone, but with Mokwanda and Tigga-Pooh I had a pretty good chance. I had to protect my one true love from the grimy hands of that tyrannical, grimy runt who was trying to replace me.

To be honest, I have the opportunity to make his damn hands bleed just about everyday, but I’ve never done it. I’ve had the chance to peck his grimy fingers that have been G-d knows where