The Bird Who Told The Truth

Before the divorce, the family lived in a normal-sized house in the middle of New Jersey. A standard three-bedroom, whatever-bath suburban placeholder. Pets were never allowed; Edele claimed allergies to anything alive. And yet, on one strange and unexplainable day, the family returned home with two cockatiels. “Lovie” and “Freddy.”

Even the names revealed the household’s quiet fault lines. Lovie belonged to the younger daughter, the one her father called “Lovie” long before the bird existed. She was a fluffy, chunky little thing…soft gray with a wash of baby yellow. Freddy, the sister’s bird, was everything Lovie wasn’t: lean, bright, bold, a little spark of presence in a house that needed any presence it could get.

The birds folded themselves into the family’s broken rhythm. Lovie stayed mostly in her cage, timid and unsure. Freddy roamed freely, a tiny feathered companion who climbed pant legs during dinner and perched proudly on shoulders while the girls ate cereal. His squawks cut into the quiet in ways that felt almost like relief. Joy came in small, winged bursts. They took what they could get.

Describing the house itself was harder. Any single attempt risked flattening it into something ordinary, something that could be mistaken for a regular childhood. It wasn’t. The place was a kaleidoscope of sharp-edged moments.

One morning before school, Freddy wandered the way he always did, trusting the space that never deserved him. And then he was gone.

Edele stepped on him.

There was no chaos, no shouting match to soften the moment with noise. Just the pressure, the finality, and the aftermath. The younger daughter screamed his name. The older one froze. The house held its breath in the way haunted places do.

No pause. No explanation. No grief allowed to breathe.

The tiny bird who brought life into the house disappeared the same way so many things did there. Under a heel, under silence, under the demand to move on.

She killed what they loved and sent them to school.

He wasn’t mentioned much after that.