“Would you shut those damn things up?”
Samantha stuck her head out the bathroom door, eyes wide, mascara tube in one hand. “What?”
“Those goddamn birds. They won’t frigging shut up.”
A roll of the eyes he knew all too well, followed by, “Jesus, Mike, they’re just birds. It’s morning. They’re happy.”
Since he couldn’t come up with an answer to that without sounding like a Grade-A asshole, he settled for scowling at the birds in question before he grabbed his sweatshirt and headed for the relative safety of the kitchen.
What kind of lunatic kept a cage full of birds in her bedroom, anyway? When he’d first started seeing Samantha, he’d thought the finches were kind of cute, in a wind-up toy sort of way. And they really hadn’t been that noisy at night…at least as far as he could recall. [More...]
But then he lost his job, and Sam suggested he move in with her, and now he was stuck in the condo all day while she was at work, and he had to listen to those damn birds hour after hour. And they didn’t even sing like normal birds, for Chrissake – they beeped. Or at least that was the best word he could think of to describe the sound they made, which might have been tolerable in small doses but now was slowly driving him nuts.
He couldn’t complain, though – oh, no, then Sam would only give him one of those knowing looks, the kind that somehow managed to be pitying and yet also told him he was the world’s biggest loser. And he knew he shouldn’t be bitching, because she let him stay here rent-free and only asked him to chip in for groceries and part of the utility bills out of his meager unemployment checks. Of course, now he was doing all the housework, but he had to do something, right?
The beeping of the birds followed him into the living room, and Mike picked up the remote and turned on the local morning news, pumping the volume so the co-hosts’ inane chatter effectively drowned out the sound of the finches. He drifted into the kitchen and spent his time fixing a second cup of coffee. Hell, why not? It wasn’t as if he had to shower and shave for a job interview.
When she appeared, Sam had that faint pucker between her eyebrows that told him she was less than thrilled with his behavior, but luckily it was almost 7:30, and she had to get out the door now so she wouldn’t be late for work. Her kiss was perfunctory at best, but at least she did kiss him.
“Don’t forget the laundry,” she said, and then shut the front door behind her.
Oh, sure, how could he forget? She reminded him about it every ten minutes.
He drained his coffee and went back to the bedroom, where he started yanking clothes out of the hamper and stuffing them in the laundry basket. At least the condo had a small stackable unit in a closet off the kitchen; he didn’t think he could have handled the indignity of facing a public laundry room while washing his girlfriend’s bras.
The whole time he was sorting laundry, the little birds kept beeping at him. He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore them.
That was pretty much his whole week. Grit his teeth and endure. The gentle questions about his job search, the polite but pointed reminders about all the chores he had to do. At least he was still getting laid, but he was starting to wonder if his dick was just going to shrivel up one day because of all the nagging.
He’d tried covering up the birds during the day so he wouldn’t have to listen to them, but one day he forgot to take the sheet off the cage before Sam came home, and she gave him holy hell about it.
“You can’t do that,” she snapped. “It messes up their biorhythms.”
Fine, what about his biorhythms? Sometimes he felt as if he were going to start screaming if he had to listen to those little bastards for one more second. And they got their revenge, anyway, because the day he had kept them covered up too long they spent half the night beeping, and he couldn’t get any sleep at all. Finally Sam got out of bed, picked up the cage, and carried it out into the living room, but he knew that was only temporary. Sure enough, the birds were back on the dresser the next afternoon.
He started fantasizing about letting them go. It would be so easy – just take them out onto the condo’s balcony, cluttered with Sam’s less than successful attempts at container gardening, and open the door to the cage. Fly, be free, you little fuckers.