Pretty Girl
by Lucinda Kempe
The pet store was a tableau macabre. Bushy-tailed jirds scuttling in their enclosures, goldfish pressing their mouths up against the aquarium glass, and a dozen, multi-colored parakeets chirruping hysterically in the aviary, all bathed in ghastly florescent light. Off to the side, a yellow and orange parrot sat alone on its perch, its eyes shut, its cage entombed behind a Plexiglass divider.
She’d come to the pet store for distraction, even dressed up for the occasion. She tapped the glass. The parrot shimmied to the grating floor, then turned around and flashed her.
“Wow,” said the clerk, “He likes you!”
“He? Oh,” she said, pleased. “Must be the orange.”
She’d dressed in orange to offset her indigo mood.
“What is it?”
“A sun conure. High maintenance. They need a lot of attention and make a great deal of noise, but I love them.”
Her friends called her “high maintenance.” Really, she was a difficult person, who had trouble keeping friends because she always said too much.
“How much does he cost?”
“$700.00.”
“I’ll take him,” she said, buying another extravagance to make herself feel better.
The clerk boxed the parrot. They drove home and when they arrived, she offered her hand, the way the clerk had shown her.
“Pertyper. Pertyper,” he tootled, making a sound like bebop.
With her new companion on her finger, she went to the terrace overlooking Narraganset Bay. The lights on the suspension bridge glimmered like a diadem.
“I saw dolphins surfacing below once. That is my favorite place.”
This was and wasn’t true. She’d seen the dolphins one summer evening when she’d driven to the bridge, got out of her car, and stood looking down, contemplating vaulting off. Her father hanged himself when she was fifteen. She thought about her choice that night, and how seeing the graceful mammals playing in the water nudged her towards life. As if sensing her thoughts, the parrot tightened his grip on her finger. The sensation reminded of what the clerk had said. Most conures were bred in captivity and very few were left in the wild. She also thought about her father and his terrible bid for freedom, freedom from madness.
Her hand, with its bird bauble, protracted over the ledge.
The parrot loosened its hold and flew off.
She tried to keep him in her sights. That night she dreamt of birds—flapping their wings, their honks, and cries—the pterodactyl descendants, birds she’d never seen before, flying in formation, and swooping on the acrobatic wind. The following dusk she stood at the terrace. She envisioned sun conures, their orange heads and yellow bellies patterning the sky like a sun set, and, in the eye of her mind, she heard her father calling her, “Pretty girl. My pretty girl.”
Lightened and unencumbered, she never felt so alive.
Lucinda Kempe’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Menacing Hedge, New South, New World Writing, Midway Journal, Matter Press, Bending Genres, The Southampton Review, and the Summerset Review. Wigleaf long listed her micro fiction in 2018, 2019 and 2020. An excerpt from her memoir was short listed for the Fish Memoir Prize in April 2021. She lives on Long Island where she exorcises with words.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Pretty Girl”? I can’t remember when I first wrote Pretty Girl although it always had this title. I struggled with this 473-word story for ages. It is a disguised fictional me. As soon as I added the line about the narrator’s father’s suicide the story began to jell. I go into pet stores a lot. I have cats. The birds, the parrots particularly, always make me sad. Birds are meant to be free not trapped in cages for our amusements. So, this bird quickly became a metaphor for the narrator’s father and for the narrator herself who is struggling to be free from her sadness/depression. I suffer from depression periodically. Embracing its deepest causes (my father’s death) and writing about it have helped me. In a very early draft, I had the narrator follow the bird to her death, but that was wrong because I am alive. That very last line gave me the biggest trouble until I decided that when the narrator frees the parrot, she can hear her father and in hearing him echoing the bird’s pertypur she frees herself. We had a rescue cockatiel who flew into our yard. He lived with us for three years. He used to tweet “Pertypur” all time, which means pretty girl. Like the narrator, one day I opened his cage door and held the storm door open. He flew away and never returned. His name was Oscar Wild. I still miss him.
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