In the rainforest, parrots preen black and puce and green. High in their trees, they have the best view. Rich humans in cities are covetous. One-upmanship is their game, perks their trophies. They dress in bright colors and buy tickets for space travel. As they circumnavigate the Earth, they gaze at the flicker of our revolving planet, behold spume sparkling on the seas, lacework of lights on land. Glitter on an inky bruise. “Oh, look,” they say to one another, “There’s my factory.” Or “That jigsawed country? Mine.”
***
But maybe you serve a rich man. Maybe you’re wretched poor and earthbound. Maybe you thaw when you spot the fox trotting past, then darting back into the woods. The flash of his fur. Or, when you kneel on the ground, eye a spider spinning, behold as it drops down from a thread toward its prey.
***
The maid in black and white parrots every whisper that the old man, in his final phase, spits and dribbles from the dull ache of his mind. She mocks the gray of his accumulations, pecks at his grizzled, brittle body. Pulls the sheets tighter around his thickened, yellowed toenails, the callus of his feet. Yanks and screeches. He shudders at the turbulence. Where is he? Something unspools in his head: the flight crew’s buckling him in. The pierce of a parrot rattling his brain. The blur of a fox sprinting to its lair. A spider, wrapping.
Mikki Aronoff lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025 and Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025. She is a co-author of the book, Neverafters. More at https://www.facebook.com/mikki.aronoff.