Congratulations Lonely Parakeet Owner!

It’s a big, scary world and people have all sorts of ways of dealing with that. Some folk, they try to make art. Some people try to find someone to hold on to and they just cling to that person with all they’ve got. Some people try to get as much stuff as possible, nice stuff if they can manage it. And then there’s you.

You’ve been collecting pets.

It’s kind of rational: most animals that end up as pets can’t take care of themselves, and you’re kind of doing good in the world by finding them, giving them a good home and making them feel loved. But there’s a problem: pets can’t talk to you, and there’s only so much love you can extract from the constant nuzzling of cats against your body.

Which is why you’ve been researching a formula to make an animal super smart, so smart it’ll be able to figure out how to love you back and talk to you about your day. And today is testing day. But you’re worried.

You’ve seen enough science fiction movies to know that this could go all sorts of wrong if you let it, so you don’t want to imbue an animal that could do a lot of harm to you with superior intelligence. So even though you really want to make a cat so smart it can talk, you know better than to try that right off the bat: what if making an animal super smart makes it evil too? So you’ll test your formula on one of the most innocuous animals in your coiterie: the humble parakeet.

You’ll inject half a dose of your super intelligence serum into the parakeet right under its wing in what you hope is the least painful place for parakeets to have things injected into them. Then you’ll wait to see what happens.

You’ll sit there for forty minutes while the parakeet moves around erratically, as if it is for the first time understanding that it has a body, a body capable of flight contained within a cage. At minute forty-one the parakeet’s head will perk up and it will open its beak and craw.

“Holy shit.”

You’ll leap up from your chair.

“Hi!” you’ll shout at it

“Oh thank god,” the bird will chirp. “What’s going on? Why am I in a cage filled with my own shit?”

You’ll be so excited that you’ll throw all caution to the wind and open the parakeet’s cage door.

“Sorry about that, until this morning you were too stupid to live in this apartment without killing yourself.” You’ll regret saying it as soon as the words are out of your mouth. The bird will sit inside of its cage and cock its head at you to the side.

“Well, that’s a hell of a thing to say,” the bird will chirp at you as it hops out of its cage, thus beginning a new era in your life and a new relationship with your tiniest roommate ever.

Congratulations Lonely Parakeet Owner!