“You know what’s really crazy?” B and I got on the phone after I had read for a few hours. “This bird came into my bookshop once…”

“Mhm.” My eyes wandered around my apartment and I was half engaged with the story. The bird reminded me that I used to breed zebra finches and those little bastards had a bunch of babies before the daddy bird kicked the bucket. So, I ended up with so many birds that my parents eventually sold them all off.

“So, it just flew in one day and was trapped in the display window,” B continued, “There was an empty box in the display window, right? The bird hid under there so it looked like it was crushed. Which it wasn’t.”

“And?” I was tuned in because a bird who pretended to be crushed under a box sounded interesting.

“I had to close the store and called animal service. They wanted me to buy fruit. FRUIT! To lure it out. I tried everything. I tried a broom, tried a thing that played bird noises on my phone, everything… Then I had no choice but to run out and get a mango, only to find that I didn’t have anything to cut it with!”

“Mhm!” At this point, I was excited. What could be better than a case of a trapped bird involving a broom, a mango, and idiots at animal service who conjured up such a ridiculous solution?

“Luckily, my boss had this habit of leaving all his shit around so I found a butter knife under the counter. They had CCTV footage of me cutting up fruit pieces! When that was happening, people lined up at the counter to tell me there was a bird in the window. I was annoyed so I laid out a whole trail of fruit but it didn’t take the bait!”

“And how did it get out in the end?” I leaned closer to the phone.

“It just flew out eventually and my boss was literally downstairs the entire time! I told him: ‘hey, there was a bird in the window and it took me two hours to drive it out!’ and all he cared about was that I did all the shelving on time…”

“It wasn’t like he could do anything about it,” I said, “A bird was trapped in the display window, for word’s sake.”

“I don’t know? At least he could show me that he appreciated all that work I did? And yeah. It was a bird, for word’s sake.” B sighed.