The Bird...

"HELP!!!!"


Every time I go to the little corner- supermarket by our house, I am captivated by the pile of the "Trentonian" sitting right by the register. I always get a kick out of looking at the front page - mostly because there is always a murder, rape or break in right in my hood, and I keep feeling more and more lucky to still be alive. The other day though (and I don't know why I didn't write about it THAT day), a headline on that very front page grabbed my attention and made me open this somewhat questionable newspaper to read the details about it on page three.
Allegedly a woman heard screams for help coming from the neighboring house, and when it wouldn't let up, she finally called the cops. They (miraculously) showed up at the location, heard the desperate screams for themselves, surrounded the house, created this big scene....... just to find the screams came from a parrot.
HAHAHA...everybody was laughing and happy that there was no emergency, and the bird had a moment of fame and glory.
First of all... this is not a story for the front page of ANY newspaper.
But my immediate thoughts went a bit further.
Don't parrots generally imitate and repeat words they hear over and over again? They don't just come up with their own vocabulary; I know that, because my sister had a talking bird once who wouldn't shut up, and because it is pretty much common knowledge - or so I thought. Call me "Miss Marple", but if I was at that scene with the bird, I would have asked a few questions about how this feathery thing came to scream "Help!!! Help!!!" in the first place. I couldn't believe the cops were just like...:"Ohhh; that was cute. ok... bye!" I can't get the image out of my head that the poor lady living with the bird was a hostage or victim of domestic violence whose only hope was the bird who heard her screams many times, and who could now scream "for her" in order to rescue her. She was chained in the basement for years now, waiting for this very moment when the police would be alarmed by the pet's screams. Finally the day comes; the cops show up. She is hopeful and certain that trained police men would realize that there was fowl play. I mean - come on... everybody knows how birds learn to speak. Surely they would see the red flags.
Well... not those cops.
In disbelief the lady watches the police drive off through the little basement window after some second rate reporter took a snapshot of "Fluffy" - or whatever the hell he was called - for the front page of the Trentonian. The lady is living in the basement sadly ever after, Fluffy probably died later that day of "heart failure" or some other ominous cause and was never to be heard again, and another Trenton criminal got away with it all.
Maybe my imagination is just off the hook, but I do think the story didn't quite end where it ended according to the paper... that's all I'm saying. But if authorities can't even follow simple and clear clues like this one, of course they look at two guys on the street exchanging money for envelopes going :"He must be paying rent...!?"