The History of Soul 2065 by Barbara Krasnoff

Author:Barbara Krasnoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Published: 2019-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

Time and the Parakeet

A story of Eileen Stein Bowman, Sophia’s granddaughter

2016

“Hey, Eileen,” the parakeet said. “It’s been a while.”

Eileen jumped up from the couch, turned and stared. Perched on the curtain rod over the living room window, looking serenely down at her, was a little green and yellow parakeet. It scratched its head with a tiny claw, picked for a moment at the nubby beige curtain and then stared back at her, its black eyes calm and unblinking.

Her first thought was that somebody’s pet had become lost and had found its way into her apartment. Her second was: Wait, what did it say?

“You have a tear in the window screen in your bedroom. You ought to fix that.”

Eileen came closer. Yes, there was the slightly off-color beak and the small lump at the top of the head that she had not seen since she was, what? Twelve?

“You’re…”

“You called me ParaClete. That wasn’t really my name, of course, but there was no way at the time I could tell you what my true name was—and no way that you could pronounce it, anyway. But yeah, that’s who I am.”

For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. She’d lost it. Finally and forever lost it.

It didn’t surprise her. Eileen had been feeling like shit for the last few months, ever since she hit the dreadful age of 60. On the downward slope to retirement and death.

Six decades of living, and what did she have to show for it? An ex-husband who had lived the cliché and gone off with a younger woman. A grown daughter who remembered to call her mother perhaps once a month. A small apartment, a few casual friends…That was it. A life wasted.

And to cap it all off, today was the anniversary of her mother’s death, a mother who, in her last years, had turned quiet, sad and distant. So Eileen knew it was going to be a bad night. She stopped off on her way home from work (as a paralegal in a stable but boring real-estate law firm) for a slice of take-out pizza and a bottle of bourbon, intending to become good and drunk.

But she hadn’t even opened the bourbon yet, so she couldn’t blame alcohol on this sudden visitation by an intelligent talking parakeet.

“What are you?” she demanded of the bird. “An hallucination? A brain tumor? An early sign of dementia? Oh, please don’t do that!”

The parakeet, ignoring her, lifted its tail and dropped a small green-and-white package that landed on a fold of her curtain.

“You never minded when I did this to your mother’s curtains,” it said thoughtfully.

“I was 12,” Eileen said. “You don’t mind those things when you’re 12.”

“And now you’re 60,” said the bird.

Eileen took a breath, turned, and marched into her kitchen. She opened a cabinet and took out a juice glass. Then she returned to the living room, sat back down on the couch, opened the bourbon and poured a generous helping into the glass. She swallowed half of it, waited for the warmth to hit her stomach, and then finally looked back up at the curtain rod.

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