Off the Mark by Mark Parisi for August 12, 2013

We have an African Grey who has about a 200 word vocabulary. I can teach her to say anything. She often makes up her own sentences and can imitate sounds and voices perfectly. She’ll eat anything I eat as long as I poison test it first and she bites like the firey serpents in the Wilderness of Sin. When strangers come to the house she’ll sit coyly and go, “73, 73, 73, 73—-” They go up to her and and coo as they stick their hand out, “Oh, what a cute bird!” As they shriek and snatch their hand back she goes, “74, 74, 74, 74!”