Whenever I invite Jan and Gabrielle over for one of my dinner parties (or just an afternoon spritzer), our favorite activity is when I bring out my little sweetlings to feed on almonds and gossip. Of course I am talking about my Cockatoos three: Samson, Herr Henrich, and Dear Uncle Claudius. And they are princes, every one!
Each of them has the most splendid of personalities. Samson is most gallant and his proud crest feathers show that he is quite the haughty young man. He spends hours a day gazing into the mirror and bouncing his pectoral muscles.
Herr Henrich is much more timorous. Both of his parents were eaten by the cat before his very eyes. But he is both tender and sensitive, preferring to nuzzle the crook of your neck and nibble upon the lobes of your ears. Oh stop, Herr Henrich! That tickles!
Lastly, Dear Uncle Claudius is a down right cad! He has learned to unhook the latch on my bedroom door, if you can believe it. After one of his many daring escapes, he routinely sneaks into my reading room and shreds the pages of my books and sprays shit onto the lampshade.
Yes, my feathered beloveds are true royalty and deserve to be treated as such. No cages in my house, you understand? Just the thought of my little babies being restricted by bars is enough to send me into full-blown panic attacks and Jan will have to contact my mom at the nursing home and have her telephone Dr. Lipschwitz. No, each of my blue bloods adorn a corner of my bedside when it’s time to rest, and not a night goes by that I don’t kiss them on their prominent crests and tell them that not even death can keep us apart and that even if the worst were to happen, we would dine on each other’s corpses so that we will all be together in the afterlife.
We’ll rise as one like a giant phoenix, only with a curved bill and more beautiful plumage, and we will fly through eternity, stopping only to graze on sunflower seeds and spray shit on everyone who comments negatively on our TikTok videos.