Guffy, the vampire parrot

Prompt from DailyPrompt.com

Beatrice is reading a book. Looking at her framed in the lamplight I sometimes get confused and think she’s her mother. The sitting room hasn’t changed much in fifty years after all. The wallpaper has faded. The couches were reupholstered in a subtly different shade of green.

And Madeline is dead. The photos of her have been moved to the display cabinet where the grief can be kept enclosed and distantly adored.

I scratch my chin with one foot.

Age is like the display cabinet. When Charlie died I was bereft. I mourned each of his siblings. Each of their children.

I think. I think I mourned all of the children. I don’t think I was numb yet. It was the generation after. Wasn’t it?

I turn my head upside-down and stare at myself in the mirror. It’s nice that modern mirrors don’t use silver. They had to give me brass ones for a while and I hated the yellow tint.

Geoffrey - it was Geoffrey, wasn’t it? He made me a steel one. It’s hanging in the corner. I won’t let them get rid of it, even though it’s dull and ugly. It has sentimental value. They don’t understand, of course; he died long before any of them were born.

His photos have been crowded out of the display cabinet. Left to languish in boxes. The only trace of him is in the family formal shot in the library and it isn’t flattering at all.

Very few photos are flattering when you’re fourteen.

I prefer to remember him as a grown man. Tinkering about making me toys just like his children. He doted on us equally.

Their toys are kept in glass cabinets in the nursery. Mine are long dead. Just like the children.

I bite one of my ropes and dance, my head rocking and the fangs lining my beak plucking at the fibres and my feet tap-tapping at the perch.

Beatrice looks up at the noise, and the fond smile that crinkles her cheeks makes her look like herself because it has more Johnathan than Madeline.

“What’s the matter, Guffy?”

While I know hundreds of words by now, none of them echo the aching numbness of being trapped in time while the world morphs and erodes around me.

Beatrice is sweet. I am fond of her. But she’s going to die. That fact squats between us.

I fluff up my feathers and say the one thing which comes close: “Want cuddle.”

With a tinkling laugh that fills the room with echoes of Madeline she comes to offer me a hand. The family never used to let me out of my cage but a few generations ago they realised I don’t bite. Not people.

Not anything which might end up cursed like I am.

I hop along to her shoulder and snuggle close. She is warm. Her pulse gently pats my face.

You’re going to die, Beatrice. And in a hundred years I alone will truly mourn you.

Prompt was “Write a story from the perspective of an immortal pet as it is passed down through a family's generations.”

[For the micro format I decided a retrospective was better than a flowing present narrative. But this would make for an interesting longer work in that format.]