One of Illumination-Curated’s “Outstanding Stories” for 2021

Dressed Left

The bird said, What color are my eyes. The cock said, It doesn’t matter. The bird said, Fooey, tied on an attractive bonnet, and flew in search of a cage. The cage she found was lined with heretical thoughts. She could spend years here, but her parents were pulling the worms. They agreed to pull for four years. And, they insisted, their birdy would live in a big, safe, cage with lots of tweety birds. The bird said, Fooey, bought a Jackie O. hat, and flew to The Sorbonne, where she met a French fox. He shat prose poems. He introduced her to rooms full of radiant parrots and glamorous flamingos. How wren-like she felt, amidst their artistic intellectualism, their sexual politicization. Mais non, cherie, they cooed. It was polymorphous non-perversity. It was the end of rectilinear thought. The French Fox said, I prefer merely to fuck. Defying stereotype, he stayed faithful — aside from that one time at Burning Man that he begged her to help him win the Beaver Eating Contest. The bird thought, “We need a little more normal around here.” As you see, she re-instated the use of quotation marks and flew to South Korea, where she quickly found a cage in which to teach English. It was boring but well-paid — and teaching English in Japan was soooo 1980s.