A GILDED CAGE by Charles Brashear

        Sallie brushed the crumbs into a little pile with her left hand, then swept them off the table into her other palm.  She sat there, holding the crumbs and watching Hiram eat the coconut creme pie she had made.  “We ought to have a bird,” she said.
         “What?” he blurted, shifting the pie to a fat cheek.  “Whatcha say?”
        “It wouldn’t eat much,” she went on.  “We make enough crumbs to feed one.  We wouldn’t have to buy anything extra.”
        “A bird?  You want a flippin’ bird?  One that’ll poop all over the house?”
        “They say they sing so nice.  Early in the morning …”  She still held the crumbs in her hand.
         “Twitter, twitter?  You want a flippin’ bird to wake us up?  We got an alarm clock!”
        “You put newspaper in the bottoms of their cages, so it’s easier to clean up.”
        “So I’ve heard.  But you know as well as me that it don’t work very well.  Look at your mother’s bird in Wichita Falls.  Little bugger throws seed hulls all over anyway.”  He put his fork on his plate and shoved it toward the middle of the red-checkered table cloth.  She noticed he hadn’t gotten all the grease from under his fingernails.
        “You want some more?” she asked, making as if she would reach for the plate.
         “Naa.  I’ve had enough.  And I’ve just about had enough of this cra– poop you put on me all the time.”
        She looked down, saying nothing.
        He could see that she was not looking at the table cloth, but through it.  Her shoulders looked thin.  “Well, do what you want,” he said.  “I won’t have anything to do with it.”
        “You put a hood over the cage at night, to keep them from singing.  They don’t sing when they think it’s night.”
        “Fu– flig it!  Get a bird, leave a bird.  I don’t care!”
        She looked down again, beginning to cry.
         “Shish!  Get a bird.  You want a bird, go get a bird.”
        Still, she said nothing.  She pushed the crumbs into a little pile in her palm.
        “It might be kind of nice,” he said, leaning back and knitting his fingers across his belly.  “Little chirp-chirp now ‘n then could be kind of pleasant.  Yeah.  Go ahead ‘n get a bird.  Go down to the pet store and pick one out.”
         “Well, if you want one, okay,” she said.  “But you know it’ll be me that has to listen to him twitter all day, while you’re at work.  And it’ll be me that has to clean up after him.  You’ll have to promise that you’ll clean his cage … sometimes.”
         “That’ll be the day!” he scoffed.
        She dumped the crumbs into his empty plate, picked it up, and walked toward the sink, smiling already at the image she had in her mind of Hiram cleaning a bird cage.

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