THERE'S POPPA
By Suzanne Nielsen

I killed the little feathered fucker. I sank my canines into his bony gray cockatiel feathers, and punctured a lung or something. He took his last two spastic steps, still squawking, and then keeled over. Just like that. A drop of blood the size of a 4mm pearl formed on top of his water resistant feathers.

The Missus swooped me up. For a minute I thought I was flying. She was mumbling “ohmygodohmygod,” over and over again while the Mister, in the kitchen sticking a needle full of insulin into his stomach, yelled, “What’s happening?” The Missus carried me under her arm in a football hold, sank down in the rocker and answered, “Poppa’s dead. The bird’s dead.” As we rocked back and forth, my stomach started to churn, and my legs started to shake. I needed to go to that bird on the floor and confirm it. He was dead. Wasn’t he? The Mister yelled out, “He moved! Poppa moved.” But then his sobs began to echo off the kitchen walls. “I loved that little guy,” he’d say every so often. Missus stopped talking, she and I just rocked—back and forth. Eventually Mister pulled himself together. He dug up a black towel, picked up Poppa’s carcass with salad prongs, wrapped him in the towel and placed him in an empty Marlboro Lights carton. It was a tight fit. Still crying, he urged the Missus to go outside with him for a ceremonial burial. That was the beginning of my decline, or should I say that was when the Missus thought a lunatic had moved from the grass to the hall into my head. This is how it happened.

The other day, two weeks ago in fact, the two of them came home with Poppa, a noise-making home wrecker. Poppa, named eight years earlier, was a humane society reject, surrendered for obvious reasons, “Too Active.” The Missus was comforted by the fact that he’d lived with dogs in the past. What never occurred to this dingbat is that we had not lived with birds. And we didn’t want to. At least I didn’t. Within an hour, the house became a screeching asylum with me locked inside.

Poppa ruled the living room; his cage was three times the size of the kennel they acquired for my puppy training several years back. They placed it by the fig tree on the left side of the antique library table, four feet high and even with the window. The Missus never intended for the bird and me to make eye contact. Years back I was kenneled overnight for chewing on the leg of that same table, but I hold no grudges.

From the beginning Poppa screamed, an unrelenting high-pitched screech that made my ears bleed inside my head. Talk about headaches—and the Missus has the nerve to never shut up about hers. That bird’s pitch wound me so tight that I began to fear my own unraveling. My partner, Nate, an overweight, over aged Pomeranian, half deaf and dumb as a ring, slept through it all. Nate’s lost his sense of smell unlike me, an astute terrier with no birdbrain. That bird smelled up the joint within 24 hours and I was the only one to notice. By day two, Poppa was cat calling to the Missus every time she left the room. “Oh, how cute,” she’d say, returning to his cage and offering him kisses through the metal bars. By day three, he was kissing her back through the bars. She never noticed the open sore I’d created on my hind leg from incessant nervous chewing. She screamed to the Mister, “look, he kisses me back,” and made him watch over and over again. Day four she decided to have his wings clipped, something she said would tame him. She told Mister that he’d be able to roam the house and return to his cage of his own free will eventually. She said that as she adorned her hands with heavy-duty workman’s gloves for protection from his constant biting while toweling him in order to capture his squawking self for a trip to the vet. While he was gone I relaxed enough to take a poop on the rug in front of his cage, my first dump in three days, and just in time. They returned unannounced with a vengeance.

The vengeance from that day until Poppa’s end included Nate and me spending an inordinate amount of time locked in the bedroom while Poppa enjoyed endless playtime with the Missus, riding around on her shoulder for hours on end. No more work gloves, he’d tamed. Who did he think he was? I had to put him in his place; his playtime was my prison sentence. The hair on my tail was starting to fall out. My nails were chewed to the quick. But my physical disturbances didn’t register until the Missus held me tight in that rocker. I had to get her attention, didn’t I? The bloody spot I left on her lap from my gnawed-to-the-bone ankle was bigger than a whole pearl necklace. After the burial the Missus dug out her headache medication and she’s been sharing it with me ever since.

I’m not sure how much time has lapsed, but I do know that when the Missus pops a Fiorinal, she breaks one up and gives me a slice. My leg is healing; I’ve got No Bite on my nails. The bald spot on my tail is growing a downy fur. But I’m not back to normal—not by a long shot. There isn’t a nap where I don’t see him; usually he’s molted his feathers for a tight-fitting leotard and swirling black cape that assists him in flight. He’s grown horns in place of ears. His beak’s transformed into two wicked bicuspids and he swoops down, trying to pierce my lung but I always wake up just in time. I look in his beady eye and there’s Poppa.