Enslaved by Ducks

Enslaved by Ducks by Bob Tarte

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Authors: Bob Tarte
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his cage. Fortunately this turned out to be true with the blue-and-yellow Farley, whom Linda named after the Canadian nature writer Farley Mowat. On the sole occasion that Linda urgedour parakeet out, he flapped around the dining room in such a state of disorientation, we consequently left him contentedly behind bars.
    Caring for Farley was easy indeed. But I hadn’t figured on the companionship aspect.
    “He misses Lilly,” Linda told me. “Lilly was the mate who died. He needs a little friend.”
    “You’re fairly little,” I pointed out.
    “Oh, look how sad he is. It’s not right that he should spend the rest of his days all by himself.”
    “I don’t know. I sort of envy him.” But I had a feeling this discussion would recur until I finally gave in.
    T HE GREEN-AND-YELLOW budgie Linda picked out was so tame, she sat on Linda’s shoulder on the car ride home from Betsy’s Beasts. I illogically named her Rossy after a pop group from Madagascar. Within a couple of days, Farley’s personality did a 180-degree flip-flop. The old guy went back to the happy chattering of his peak parakeet years, and like an elderly bachelor who marries a young thing, he died a month later of sheer bliss.
    “Rossy isn’t used to being by herself,” Linda reported a day after Farley’s demise.
    “She can look at Stanley Sue,” I countered uselessly. “Or she can latch on to Ollie. Ollie’s her size, and he’s just a cage away. They can forge a strong platonic bond.”
    “She needs a little friend.”
    Powerless, I gave in to a chipper blue-and-white male Linda named Reggie, because she liked the way the name went with Rossy. But those two didn’t go together at all, avoiding one another in the cage with the steely deliberateness of Stanley Sue ignoring a new perch. A third parakeet, the yellow Sophie, added balance to the batch with her retiring personality. Before I had a quasi-say in the matter,these most unobtrusive of all possible pets were flying around the dining room and kitchen, chewing on the upper-level woodwork, and sampling morsels from our plates. I worried that Ollie would make mincemeat of the effervescent budgies, but they were fast enough to tease him and steal food from his dish, too. Ollie and I could only watch and squawk. Rossy, who continued to spurn Reggie’s affections, followed my suggestion of developing a crush on Ollie. She enjoyed sharing his cage top at mealtime just out of reach of his beak.
    “We can’t take in any more of these hard-luck cases,” I groused during a particularly beleaguering dinner. Stanley was refusing one food after another via the fling method. Ollie was exercising his vocal tract. Penny, our usually well-mannered cat, kept sneaking into the dining room to get within pouncing range of the parakeets, who buzzed my head like deerflies. Bertha had somehow wormed her way into the inner springs of a small couch and was dulling her teeth on the wooden frame. “It would be one thing if there was a limit to them, but every single person you work for has an animal they’re thrilled to foist on us.”
    It’s difficult explaining why I hadn’t mustered more resistance to the new arrivals, much less to any of the animals. If Linda had put the question to me, “Sweetie, should we get a rabbit, canary, cat, two parrots, and three parakeets?” and my answer would have had a meaningful effect on the consequences, I can’t imagine replying yes, and I would never have taken the initiative to acquire any of these pets on my own—with the possible exception of a cat. I was essentially just going along for the ride, as I had with most everything in my life.
    Back in my early college years, I’d been abstractly enthusiastic about saltwater aquarium fish, because my girlfriend, Mary, enthusiastically bought them for me. I loved the bright colors and fluidity of the clownfish and other reef fish, the strangeness of the anemones and other invertebrates, and the exclusivity of a

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