A Few Minutes Alone, Please

I hear him in the other room, where he's in his cage, upset I won't come get him. If I just sit quietly as I can, not moving, his screams will taper, then abate. He will think I have gone.

I just need a few minutes to myself.

The little terrier mix, Lulu, wants to go out and bite the tires of the lawnmower Jonesy is pushing around the yard. L yips in frustration.

TK, our Rottie mix, harrumphs from her dog bed under the kitchen table. Ignored again, she sighs.

It's Sunday and the week is about to begin, and I cannot breathe.

I should be folding laundry, buying food for the week, looking for and applying for a job. I should be weeding and scrubbing and sweeping.

In the novel Allen Stein, Matthew Stadler writes about Sunday being the "bruised, tail end of the weekend" if I remember it right. I have carried this quote or its semblance around for years. Allen Stein is a book I took months to finish the last chapter--it was too painful a subject, and too beautiful in its language. I did not want it to end. (Lolita, though, I cannot seem to persevere through, despite its lyricism.)

At last, SSW stops.

Not for long. He starts his repertoire of pleadings. The insistent mememe's!, the call he uses when he sits on top of fridge when I am cooking and my head is about to split from the noise. Then there is his upward glissandoing whooooeeep! whoooeeeeep! Then, the three-noted wree--eee-op!

I let him out. He drags his beak along the kitchen table in tight circles, repeatedly, churruping with each cycle. He hisses as he cleans his feet, as he reaches back to groom his wings and back. He moves his lower jaw up and down, mimicking me chewing gum.

He has a slight limp, a subtle shwawush when he walks across the table. For two days he has been holding his left foot up when he sits, but he can use it to grasp a piece of food, climb on his cage, or grip my shirt. He misgauged a landing two nights ago in the dark hallway, taking the corner. He might've torqued his foot in the missed calculation. I squeeze his toes and lets me, only bites, I think, out of frustration, not pain. Is his foot swollen or warm, is he not gripping my hand as readily as with his other foot? I cannot tell. He is a parrot of fragility, made of air, his voice excluded. I give him minute, regular, aliquots of oral pain meds to little improvement.

He is trying to open my mouth with his beak, rubbing his face against my lips. He bobs his head as he regurgitates. I love you, too, I say.

He is quiet on my shoulder, and I can think. If even for a moment. His feathers rustle as he maneuvers around my shirt collar, and he utters a few, soft staccato chup-chups.

I get him to step off my shoulder onto his rope perch and he begins his subdued Donald Duck routine, if DD's speech was blurred and unintelligible, muttering to himself.

I put a few cheerios in a box and he purrs, his food-happy acknowledgment. He hold a piece in his left, bad foot, and trills as he eats, spilling a fine silt onto the kitchen counter.

The dogs are silent, laying on the floor of the kitchen. Lulu is looking out the window, TK watching the bird make crumbs she cannot reach. I should feed the four mammals, and fill the bird feeder outside--the house finches and house sparrows fighting over the dregs of spilled sunflower seeds on the ground.

SSW is shuffling across the counter, looking for other things to nibble now that the cereal is gone. The rim of a glass, the edge of a tupperware container, the zipper on the lunch bag. He cocks his head at the knife block, at me, at the dogs. He flies to his cage and climbs to the door to sit and stare at me, bite the fabric that lines the cage top.

He then flies to the top of the fridge to commence the shredding in a box, and the Donald Duck impression begins again. I know right now he is happy, churring to himself, despite the fact it is Sunday evening and most of the world is on edge, the week about to tumble upon us.