Flash by Didem Arslanoglu
PANDEMONIUM

Outside my bedroom window, a flock of wild parrots strafes the sky in a greenish blink, squawky pandemonium at 6:00 a.m., and me with my human brain that knows how early that is. They’re flying en masse from Pasadena, probably, coming from the hardware store off State Street, or Urth Cafe on Colorado. They’ve been doing this for the ten years I’ve been here and will do it for ten hundred more, and I want to speak parrot just to say please shut the fuck up in a language that means something to them, but also, what if they’re already saying that to me?

Have they really even appreciated the gifts of Los Angeles, loquats and jacarandas and sweetgum and roadkill and basically zero predators? Do you know how nice that is, I want to ask them, to live without fear of an unprecedented, painful-as-shit death? I think about hawks. What does your kind of freedom feel like, I want to ask, to not worry about jaguars or snakes swallowing your mothers and fathers whole for, like, most of the time? 

They’ve woken me up forever. I draw the curtains to see branches sprinkled with dancing cherry-red foreheads and lime-green feathers and yellow fuzzies. They’re gathered in my neighbor’s sycamore tree, chatting laboriously within their mycelial gossip networks. I wonder what parrots worry about if they worry about nothing. I sit on the toilet and scroll and because I’m still thinking about it, I look up “Do parrots chat without purpose?”

Yes, Google says, parrots remix elements of learned calls, like taking syllable A from a flock contact call, combining it with syllable C from a mating call, then dropping syllable B entirely to make A-A-C, or C-A, instead of A-B-C. There’s no functional payoff, it says, just variation, just because. I heat yesterday’s drip coffee in the microwave, just because, and while it spins in ten pointless circles, I wonder if the yabbering outside my bedroom window is a chorus of remixes, or something more utilitarian. The coffee burns my tongue a little. “What are the parrots talking about, generally?” Contact calls, it says, while they forage and fly, help establish they’re still there. Like, “everything’s normal.” Do the wild parrots here still need to be reminded that everything’s normal?

I look at images of occupied tree hollows, because apparently most parrots don’t build their own nests. I scroll past four Amazon ads for fake parrot nests made of plastic coconut shells and off-colored twigs. I scroll more and find sponsored ads for chainsaws and loppers. The sun is coming and about to eat the sky, and maybe the parrots can feel it, because some of them fly toward a fat guano-spattered chimney and disappear in its mouth. They pierce the morning air repeatedly, Everything’s normal. Everything’s normal. Everything’s normal. I think anyone would like to still be reminded that everything’s normal. I press not interested on the ads for chainsaws and loppers.

I get dressed for the day and while I struggle to get my jeans over my calves, I wonder if the wild parrots feel like they truly belong in Los Angeles. I’m not sure I do. I slide a piece of white bread into the toaster and look up “How many parrot species in LA?” There’s red-crowned parrots from Mexico (endangered), lilac-crowned parrots from the Pacific slopes of Mexico (endangered), yellow-headed parrots from Southern Mexico down to Honduras (endangered), red-lored parrots from the Caribbean Coast down to Nicaragua, and about eight more. Have there always been this many? I peek out my window to study the colored patches on their heads and shoulders. Do they know they’re endangered, would they still believe that everything’s normal? I burn the toast when realizing I’ve been angry at birds for ten years. I learn that a flock of parrots is called a pandemonium.

Didem Arslanoglu is a Turkish-American writer from the Chicago metropolitan area. She holds a BA in English Literature from Temple University and is currently at work on her first novel. Her fiction appears in Astrolabe, New World Writing Quarterly, The Ana, Weird Lit, and elsewhere. Find her at didemarslanoglu.com

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #54.

Submit to Cleaver!