A Bird in His Cage

While we played dominoes, the parrot sat in his cage on the side of the house near the kitchen. He was a macaw, multicolored, around twenty years old, intelligent—intelligent in that unsettling way that made you wonder how smart he might really be, you know, if he was somehow pretending to be just a bird in his cage. Like other macaws, he could talk, imitate some of the phrases he heard from the people around him—my girlfriend’s family. The unsettling thing about this one was that when he would talk, he produced the words low and gravelly. Now and then, I would get up from the couch to get a drink and on my way to the kitchen try to pass his cage subtly, slyly, hoping I wouldn’t be noticed, but he would see me right away, of course, and then speak in that way of his: Mira . . . Mira . . . Mira . . . Staring at me the whole time. Not to sound like I have a thing against birds, I do love animals, but it was a little disturbing.