Ink

Ink

In the beginning, she was a wild thing - nothing more than a plumage of silvery gray with a brilliant red tail. Every day, she preened her downy feathers into place, like Fibonacci spirals, from breast to wingtip. Like her ancestors, the bird’s black, watchful eyes were woven into the fabric of the Dark Continent’s cliffside crevices, where flocks of African Greys had thrived for centuries. Back then, the jungle did not belong to memory, but to teeth and heat, and the endless struggle to survive.

Yet it was a place of extraordinary beauty, with the kind of mystery that draws men who cannot sit still with themselves, prisoners of their own thoughts. One American in particular breathed adventure the way other mortals draw air, deep and without fear, until the jungle tried twice to kill him. But even back-to-back plane crashes failed to rid the world of the man.

He discovered the baby parrot after a tropical storm. She was frightened and alone, hiding beneath the foliage near the man’s safari camp. In her silent vulnerability, he understood this helpless creature better than he understood himself. With the obvious loss of her mother, the man took the chick under his wing, protecting and nurturing her as he did his own family - and the others who gathered around him over the years. He named the parrot Jig.

By the time she forgot the jungle, Jig had become a Cuban national. Both the parrot and the diminutive Caribbean country were an ironic panacea for a man who never wanted to fly again. Together they lived in a small fishing village near Havana, where the man was known simply as Papa.

The island changed Jig the way tides alter a shoreline, grain by grain, until it gently changed shape. Her beak remained sharp as a scorpion’s tail but was etched by weather and age. Her once-glossy feathers were still stunning, though tempered by rivers of dark rum, fiery orange sunsets diving headfirst into the sea, and skies bruised purple beneath blood moons. Smoke from cheap cigars settled into her plumage. Royal Deluxe ink infused the air, sharp and metallic, clinging to everything the way salt and brine clung to Papa.

All these gifts Papa gave Jig. All these, and one more.

Words.

They came most often in the small hours, while she listened. When the bottle was finally shelved, just before daybreak, sleep made its clumsy attempt to erase everything, but so much lingered with her, even after daylight made things ordinary again.

Papa spoke in those wee hours, sometimes sober, often not. Concise. Slurred. It didn’t matter. Jig swallowed every utterance the way she once drank raindrops from upturned leaves, taking them in without judgment, soaking them up over ten thousand nights.

Outside, the nights were never quiet. Waves hummed with a palpable breath. From time to time, the richest music known to man drifted across the water from a bar known only to a few, notes bending and swaying as if they, too, had been imbibing too long. Beyond the thin walls of the houseboat, reefs murmured secrets long buried, coupled with the low grumblings of dissonance yet to rise.

After a while, Jig’s cage was left open.

During the day, she had free rein. There was a window that never closed. Sea air came in thick and welcome, lifting papers, rattling bottles, and turning sheer curtains into apparitions. Through it all, Jig never tired. She thrived.

By then, Papa’s stories had tethered her with something stronger than instinct, mightier than fear -like invisible steel links forged syllable by syllable. No matter where she flew during the day, Jig always returned at night to her open cage, where she waited for fresh phrases, new characters, and Papa’s rare, tobacco-stained grin. She understood, without knowing why, that his smile meant home.

The parrot could not process the idea of love. She only knew she never wanted to be anywhere else but with Papa. She was exactly where she should be.

Sometimes his words came in code. Clacked out on a typewriter, long before such things became modernized. The keys struck like rain on a tin roof. Click-clack. Click-clack. The rhythm reminded Jig of storms long ago, of water drumming on leaves broad enough to catch more than her beak could hold. Sometimes the sound lulled the bird to sleep, and she dreamt bird-dreams of ghost jungles -spaces stripped of danger and time, preserved only in echoes.

The Old Man and the Sea layered the bottom of her cage. Locutions were spoken aloud, crossed out, retyped, then told again -sharp, spare, unforgiving. Jig remembered. Not all of it. Not everything. But enough. Papa had a way of choosing words that stayed, while others fell away like loose feathers.

Before that came tales of men skirting the law and the ocean itself, boats slipping between faraway atolls and cays, hunger gnawing louder than conscience. Those conversations tasted of seawater and risk, of men who tried to have and have not, and learned the cost of both. Jig listened as those narratives were born, clean and sharp as a blade.

Later still came longer currents of recollection, braided together by loss and endurance, by sons and fathers, and the quiet damage men do to themselves and each other over time. Those declarations were heavier. Jig felt them settle deeper, as if she were storing something fragile and irreplaceable.

And closer to the end, Jig learned For Whom the Bell Tolls. First, in a rainstorm of click-clacks, then spoken aloud in Papa’s deep, weary, sawdusty voice. Her pupils pinned and unpinned as the language landed. It lodged. And as it did, the bird changed again.

Often, the parrot spoke in full sentences - sometimes entire paragraphs - to Papa’s delight. He would laugh, and his feathered companion would perfectly mimic his guffaw, the sound looping back on itself until both were breathless. Afterward, she would perch on his shoulder and fall asleep, head tucked beneath a wing, one leg folded away as if it had never existed at all.

Then one day, Papa left.

He did not come back.

Idaho was not the sort of conclusion Papa would have chosen to write for himself. But tragic epilogues were a genetic defect in his family, and he could not be faulted for this one.

The parrot knew nothing of endings. She only knew Papa had left. He had disappeared before -but always returned.

Not this time.

Jig had missed the bookends of Papa’s life: his first breath and his final shot. But she had been there in the middle, when it mattered most.

***

One day, a brown man came and took the bird. He kept the cage closed, believing it was necessary to keep her safe. Jig’s once-bright eyes dulled into vacant black pearls, no longer pinning with the excitement of knowledge. She did not speak anymore, but the man did not know any different.

The man was kind. He offered crackers, nuts, and fresh water. He spoke in an ordinary, worn-out voice using soft, practical terms that passed straight through Jig without lodging. She accepted the food and attention, but something inside her remained unoccupied, like a book no one opened anymore.

The man's house had a small table but no typewriter. No bottles of rum, full or empty. No smoke. No stacks of paper breeding in corners. No click-clack of keys. No music worth remembering. Only a radio playing songs already robbed of life.

A long time passed.

One night, the brown man sat at his desk listening to something that was not music. Jig -forever Papa’s parrot -plucked a loose tail feather free. It was red as blood. She held it delicately in her claw. The man stared, curious. The bird did not drop it. Not this time.

“Eighty-four days now without a fish.”

The words startled the man, but only because he had never heard the bird speak. He did not understand the meaning of the sentence. It didn’t matter. It would not linger.

Jig tried again. This time, she turned the feather, point-end down, and made careful, familiar motions in the air, as if remembering something her body had never done before. Then, she hopped to the right near the cage door and waited before speaking again.

Just one word.

“Ink.”

The word came out small. Almost pleading. Forlorn.

It was the last word Papa’s parrot would ever utter.

When the brown man grew old, with only his vague memories to keep him company, he sometimes recalled listening to the World Series on his transistor radio all those years ago - the same night he heard the bird speak her very first sentence and her very last word. Though the idea seemed absurd, he almost convinced himself…

Was that final word a request?

But the thought never stuck, slipping away as quickly as the one before it and the one that followed.