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Misty has never really thought much about pets. She hadn’t had them growing up. As a little kid, she’d wanted a puppy or a kitten the way all little kids wants puppies or kittens, but her parents had said no, and she ultimately hadn’t cared enough to beg and plead and hope. Now at age twenty-nine, she has a bathrobe patterned with kitty paw prints and a little porcelain dog figurine on a shelf in her living room, but she’s never seriously considered getting herself the genuine article. She thinks it’s kind of gross that cats go to the bathroom inside, and she doesn’t exactly relish picking up after a dog, either. The idea of having to walk in circles around the block, three times a day like clockwork, is not in the least bit appetizing. And yes, dogs are loyal; yes, cats meow specifically to broadcast their helplessness and need for attention (Misty read an article about that in Science magazine once: meowing is a kitten noise, a call from a baby to its mother, and only cats who spend their lives being cared for by humans keep it up into adulthood). But dogs will wag their tails at any old Joe Schmoe they come across, and cats will headbutt their scent onto anyone and anything. Misty can’t really see herself attaching to a creature so willing to declare loyalty to total strangers, or so indiscriminate about what they mark out as their territory. Sure, they’re cute, and she’ll dutifully give out pats to those that cross her path. But emotionally, to her, they’re unfathomable.
So, the only reason Misty ever goes to Pet-O-Rama on Munsee Street is to buy wild bird seed for her outdoor garden feeder. Today like any other day, she walks past the cage finches and budgies and cockatiels without a second glance, heading straight for aisle eight, when she hears a weird noise. It sounds like a cross between a caw and a squeak, a crow on helium, and it’s not a sound she’s ever heard before, in this store or anywhere else.
“Russ,” says the bored twenty-something at the register, without looking up from her laptop. “The little guy wants food.” The pimply-faced teenager half an aisle down from where Misty’s heading looks up from the pallet of suet he’s shelving, blinking dumbly.
“Uh, I don’t think it can have any yet.”
“Sure it can, it’s been like... how long has it been?”
“Like six hours, I think.” Russ scratches the back of his head. “But doesn’t it have to go eight between feedings?”
“I swear to fucking god, you need to start fucking listening at staff meetings. It has to go eight hours between feedings overnight so that its throat pouch thing can empty, but it has to eat every five hours during the day. Or maybe it’s six now, shit; how old is it?”
Frowning, Misty leaves aisle eight and backtracks, returning to wall of bird cages. Down towards the end, sandwiched between a cage of canaries and a cage of parakeets, is a fluffy gray thing that is probably a bird but honestly looks more like a small pile of laundry lint. When it spots her coming, it cracks open its beak and makes the squeaky noise again, longer and louder this time. Its eyes are entirely black, and it stares fixedly at her — not friendly like a dog or calming like a cat, but shrewd and penetrating and singularly intent.
“Oh, my god,” she hears the woman at the register say. “Russ, please just feed it and shut it up.”
It’s the kind of thing that Misty can’t imagine a pet store worker ever saying about a puppy or kitten.
Leaning in closer to the cage, Misty reads the frayed, chewed-on info card that’s pinned to the bars. Hello! it says. My name is Einstien and I’m a 5-week-old male African Grey parrot! I’m not eating solid foods yet, so right now I need to live here, but I’ll be ready to go to my forever home at 8 weeks. Like my namesake, I’m very smart and long-lived (I might outlive you!), and I’m going to require a lot of 1-on-1 attention and emotional care. Because of this, I should only go home with experienced bird owners.
“Five weeks,” Misty says, and both employees turn to look at her.
“He’s five weeks old,” she repeats, tapping the sign. “So, which is it? How often is he supposed to eat at five weeks, every five hours or every six?”
The woman rolls her eyes, kneading tiredly at her forehead as she turns back to the cash register. “Russ, just go look at the bird info section in the handbook, okay?” Her attention has already moved elsewhere, the way people’s attentions often do when Misty talks to them. Adults are generally more tactful than kids, so it’s relatively rare for people to openly mock or make fun of her these days, but she still gets this a lot: the initial quick look, followed by the just-as-quick look away, as whoever Misty is talking to decides that she probably doesn’t have anything to say that’s worth listening to. When she was younger, in college and in her early twenties, she’d thought that it might get better as she got older — that people might start to see her as wise, or even as, if they were younger themselves, a potential mentor figure. Instead, she’s found the opposite to be true.
“Also, whoever wrote this spelled Einstein wrong,” Misty says to the woman’s back. The woman doesn’t bother to respond.
That night, Misty stays up late and sits online for hours, reading about African Greys. She learns all about how intense they are, and how much care they need. About how common it is for them to be neglected by people who purchase them without being aware of the level of dedication they require, and how many of them are passed from home to home over the course of their long, long lives. She learns that parrots aren’t nearly as domesticated as dogs and cats are, and that most people don’t consider their emotions and body language to be easy to read, leading them to be seen as unfamiliar and alien. Creepy. Both unloving and unloveable. She thinks it sounds terribly unfair that such a creature would be so neglected and misunderstood —doomed to have its great needs go underserved, or to be dismissed as cold and unaffectionate just because of its beady reptilian eyes and the strength of its bite.
Over the course of the next week, she continues to read: about optimal cage dimensions (the one at the pet store, she comes to learn, is just a little too small), about diet, about toys and other enrichment items. She reads through eight different multi-page forum arguments debating the merits of wing-clipping versus letting flight feathers grow out. She learns how important proper hand-feeding technique is, and she comes to the conclusion that, if that display at the pet store had been any indication, little “Einstien’s” schedule is almost certainly not being handled as carefully as it should be.
A week and a half after her last Pet-O-Rama visit, she feels ready. She marches back into the store, grabs a cart, and starts filling it up with supplies: a starter cage, a water bottle, toys that hang on metal chains, a few spare syringes for the hand-feeding formula she’d ordered online. When she finally makes her way to the front counter, Russ is behind the register.
“Hi,” Misty says in her friendliest tone. “I’m also going to be buying the baby African Grey.”
“It’s not for sale yet,” Russ says, his gaze bouncing off her. “Come back in—”
Misty smiles in a way that she’s spent the last several years practicing and honing. Her mouth makes the exact right shape, easy and smooth with no visible cracks — but if Russ bothered to look at her, he’d see a very different emotion behind her eyes.
“Oh, it’s totally fine,” she chirps. “I’m a very experienced bird owner. I have all the hand-feeding stuff, there’s a great avian vet in Hoboken, and I’m going to take some time off work to get him settled in. Would you like to see pictures of my bird room? I have five other birds, and I’d love to—”
“Nah, I’m good. I mean, we’re actually really busy right now, so I can’t..." Russ looks around the near-empty store. “Sure, since you’re experienced, I guess we can make an exception. I’ll box it up for you.”
Misty thinks of a story she’d read on the Avian Avenue forums, about someone whose newly-purchased pet store parrot had chewed through the flimsy cardboard carrying container and gotten loose in the car. “No need,” she says, her smile widening as she hands him the hard plastic travel carrier she’d picked out. “This should work just fine.”
After ringing up the rest of her purchases, Russ dutifully lines the carrier with a few sheets of paper towels, then takes it back to the bird section. Misty follows. When the baby parrot sees them coming, it lifts its wings away from its body and waddles up to the door, giving a little hop at the end. “Their eyes are so creepy,” Russ comments, in the sort of tone that people use when they’re talking more to themselves than to anyone else.
The baby parrot’s gaze is unblinking and unyielding. Misty looks directly at it, doing her best not to blink either. Russ opens the cage, but before he has a chance to lift the bird out, Misty moves smoothly forward and does it herself, cupping both hands around the little fluffball and quickly transferring him to the carrier.
“So when was he last fed?” she asks, as she snaps the lid shut.
“Like three hours ago, I think,” says Russ. “Thank you for shopping at Pet-O-Rama. Have a nice day.”
The ride home is smooth and uneventful. Misty keeps up a steady stream of reassuring chatter, wanting the bird to get used to the sound of her voice. Mostly, she talks about name options, because while it’s not like there’s anything wrong with Albert Einstein, he’s sort of an obvious, unimaginative namesake. This baby bird should (as she explains to him out loud) be prized for more than just his smarts, because everyone thinks they want a smart bird, but few people are prepared to deal with the full scope of what that means. She tells him about all the horror stories she’d read online about people who are delighted by their new parrots at first, but who end up neglecting, abusing, or abandoning them once they realize that they can’t be treated like intelligent little tape recorders, existing only to be trotted out for performances and then shoved back into a closet. She tells him that she wants a name for him that recognizes — no, that celebrates — his complexity, especially the parts of him that others might find undesirable or unnerving. She tells him that just like those abandoned birds, she too understands what it’s like to be admired and appreciated and then cast aside, and that people don’t like what they see when they look at her eyes, either.
The whole time she’s talking, he watches her through the clear plastic lid of the carrier cage. He never looks away, and he never blinks.
At home, she leaves him in his carrier as she puts together his cage; he’s too small and vulnerable to have the run of the house just yet. She positions his set-up in the corner of the living room, centrally located so that she can easily keep a close eye on him and attend to his needs. Carefully, she screws in the main door, wiggling it once she’s done to make sure that it’s secure and won’t fall open on its own.
“Okay,” she tells him once she’s done. “Your new home is ready.”
When she opens the carrier lid and reaches in to lift him out, cradling him gently in her palms, she stops for a moment to just look a him and marvel. His clawed feet lightly scratch at her skin, and his beak bumps against her thumb as he lifts his head, looking up at her as she looks down. His eyes are flinty and intense, but they’re also familiar — she sees them every day, when she looks in the mirror. He’s strange. He’s kind of ugly. He’s perfect. He’s a whole little life, held entirely in her hands.