The finch seemed to have nothing to do except infuriate the man. A man reminiscent of an old oil painting, sitting at his desk. His hair was long and matted, his coffee black, and his cigarette rested between his index and middle fingers. Spirals of smoke drifted up and tangled in his dusky black hair and floated back down to the hardwood floor. How long had it been since he had left the chair? Hours? Perhaps even an entire day? The room was silent except for the occasional vocality of his grey finch from the corner of the room. Its voice was hoarse and weary. He fed it well, but it seemed to always want more. 
           “Chirp.”  
Flinching at the sound, his fingers jumped from his keyboard. He had an idea; one he knew would get him on the cover of every magazine to ever exist. Yet, he could not express it on paper. He envisioned it as fresh, white, and hot off the press, with thousands and thousands of little black letters that would show the world exactly what he was capable of. He imagined the response, the cheering, raving crowds that broke down guard rails and shrieked his name at the top of their lungs. Dogs that were kept on long leashes by armed police, barking and barking at the wild fans so he could simply walk into a building. But he could not imagine his story. He had no extremely interesting life stories to tell. He had been raised in the most mundane family. Mother, father, younger sister, dog. The whole nuclear family blueprint that had been etched so deeply into the American mind. A row house, with a large backyard to fit all the children’s toys. A public school, with a good reputation. As normal as can be.  His mother was a doctor, and his father an office worker, they were neither absent nor overbearing, just the right amount of controlling. He wondered how he ended up where he was, exhausted and penniless in front of the fluorescent glow of his computer, the sole light in his pitch-black room.  
“Chirp.” 
He repositioned his legs, hoping to prevent them from falling asleep due to the lack of blood flow. He probed his mind, looking for any sentence, any word, any phrase. He tilted his head back, imagining his school days. Days filled with a sort of “almost” popularity. His friends loved him, everyone thought his ideas were revolutionary and innovative. New in the way that the morning sun is when you awake early enough to see it rise. It is always going to be there, always has been there, but you never see it again the way you do when it rises anew. He reviewed scenes in his head like a movie projector, the first day of school, ludicrous, immaterial events and programs that meant nothing in the long run, prom, graduation. Everything had mashed together into one big slop of memories.  
“Chirp.” 
His eyes clenched and his hand twitched at the sound. He forgot what he had been thinking about due to the bird’s interruption. He felt now as if there was nothing left in the world except for him and his desk. They had merged and become one, he was mahogany, and the desk was flesh and blood. He picked at the calluses on his fingers and palms, wondering what could possibly be beneath them other than a lack of creativity and his ears had begun to ring from the silence in the room. He had nothing but the quiet shuffle and chirping of his bird to fill the air. His senses were on high alert, perhaps due to the silence, maybe it was driving him to madness. Like a person in solitary, the walls begin to look the same, everything merged into one. He was left with nothing but his thoughts. Mrs. Nadel would say this was because of a lack of inspiration, a lack of life. That was what she said to him whenever his creative writing assignments were subpar or “lacking ideation” as she would say. He had no inclination for writing then, just a natural talent for it that Mrs. Nadel seemed to notice when he first submitted a paper. It was his paper on “Why Literature Helps Those in Need”. She said it was “exemplar” and “horrifically terrific”. Horrifically terrific. Was that not an oxymoron? He never understood her words or why she saw so much potential in him. Did he resent her for sending him down the path he was currently on? Possibly. Did he know deep down it was no fault other than his own? Of course. It was the fault of his mind for not releasing the ideas it did in his youth. His promise- 
“Chirp.” 
Again. The bird was never quiet. He had a vision of it circling his head like a cartoon devil, whispering threats in his ear. He looked over at it, finally acknowledging its existence. Its black beady eyes stared through him like an x-ray. He had a feeling that it knew something he didn’t want it to know. But what? What had he done? He wasn’t sure. He held the arm of his chair tightly, digging his nails into the fabric. Every time he came close to an idea, anywhere near just grasping the edge of a concept of any sort- 
“Chirp.” 
He tensed once again, took a deep breath, and laid his fingers on the keyboard… nothing. There seemed to be a block in his mind, a roadblock preventing him from driving into the perfect idea that was in his brain under lock and key. A comically large lock, like the ones they use on buildings in television shows. There seemed to be nothing in his head but an odd amount of TV static. Fuzzy, grey, and inconclusive. He imagined himself climbing all over his brain, exploring it, discovering how it worked. Understanding why he did what he did. Understanding why he quit his job to start writing full-time when he knew full well it wasn’t sustainable. It could be if he could type out a single word. His fingers became wooden, staid, and stuck in place like a reverse Pinocchio. He watched them carefully, making sure they wouldn’t fall off or make a run for it.  
“Chirp.” 
At that point he had become accustomed to the bird, he simply closed his eyes and tried to remember what he was thinking of. The tree outside his window was too distracting, and while he tried to decide what to write the tree began to shake. Or perhaps it had been shaking before and he just hadn’t noticed. He grabbed a leaf through the window, examined it, looked at the winding vein-like roads all over the leaf. It was from a maple tree, three-pronged and just slightly red. He ripped it to shreds on top of his keyboard, watching the red and orange from the leaf and the black and white of the keys dance together in front of him. He tilted his head ever so slightly, inspiration? No. It wasn’t enough. He needed a new experience, a fresh set of eyes in order to write. He needed to feel. But he knew if he got up, he would never write again. He would be back to work at the diner, back to friends who meant nothing to him other than the fact that they made him feel less alone. They would talk behind his back, calling themselves intellectuals and calling him washed up. Sometimes he agreed with them. Their God complexes came from the fact that they went to college, and he didn’t. Maybe he should of. Maybe it would have made him a history teacher for the rest of his life. He loathed history.  
“Chirp.” 
Again. Damn that bird. He reconsidered writing about his family. But what was there to write about? His father was the most stereotypical American dad. Tough on the son, protective of the daughter. Played football in high school, church every Sunday morning. Perhaps his father was unavailable, but that didn’t bother him much. He preferred when people stayed out of his life. It was his life was it not? No one needed to psychoanalyze him over a cup of coffee or tell him why he acted the way he did over a steak dinner. He wanted to discuss anything but himself, it felt self-centered to do so. But was it? Was it truly self-centered to want to know why one is a certain way? Or to explain one’s problems in hopes of solving them? No… but it felt that way to him. Which was also most likely something someone could psychoanalyze about him. Fit him into a box. The destitute, skin-and-bones writer with a cigarette in one hand and a pen in the other. The college drop-out that was the product of gentrification, a suburban lifestyle, and the casual fight between his parents. He was a cliché. A semi-functional creation made up of public-school education and the casual, under-the-rug, mental problems of the upper class. A scarred smorgasbord of a man.  
“Chirp.” 
Perhaps he would sell the bird, make a quick buck and be able to afford real meals instead of coffee for the next week without having to go back to the soul-crushing job that he had so recently quit. A full eight hours of scanning items and dealing with customers who didn’t understand the fact that visibly used items could not be returned. They seemed to like to take it out on him. It was a constant cycle of capitalism that seemed to eat away at the working class more and more and more every day. He had fallen from the upper class gated community to the blue-collar working class of New York. The other worker could always tell he was ingenuine. He began to pick at the skin on his fingertips, leaving the pen on the desk and holding the cigarette far enough away so as to not burn himself. His father always hated that he could never hold a job, he always said writing was no career at all. His sister was younger, by a little over two years, but she was in nursing school with a job and an apartment and a dunce of a fiancé. He was studying to become a neurosurgeon. Of course, she was the favorite. Around when he was ten and his sister had just turned eight, she had filled up her first trophy case. It was meant to be for both of them, but he never won any trophies or medals. It was filled with taunting, gleaming gold trophies for perfect attendance, winning the soccer tournament, coming first in her solo dance competition, etc., etc. There seemed to be nothing she couldn’t do. So, he picked up his baseball bat from the garage, the one covered in scratches and rust around the handle. The bat he couldn’t win a single game with on his little league team. He closed the garage door with reckless abandon, slamming it behind him and stomping up the stairs in his livid daze. He smashed the bat into the glass case in the hallway sending little shards in all directions including his. One of the shards sliced open his left arm as it flew through the air, leaving his arm dripping with blood. His parent rushed into the hall, beside themselves with anger. They tended to his sister, who was crying from the doorway of her room. He stood there, blood dripping, ears ringing, and raised the bat to swing once more. 
“Chirp.” 
The bird seemed to be getting more volatile, it pecked at the cage a couple of times before shuffling around a bit and going quiet. The man turned to face his computer, staring it down as if it was some sort of Western stand-off. It was either him or the computer. His hands hovered over the keyboard, an empty mind once again. He let his ring finger fall on a single key, he didn’t see which one it was, and it produced a long string of some blurry letters on the screen. He watched it out of the corner of his eye, semi-interested, as he stared off into the darkness of his room. The room was still, aside from the hum of his air conditioner that was working overtime. It was pushed so hard to the max on some of the hottest days that he thought it might just fall right out of the window and onto some poor soul below. He loathed New York City summers. Everything was so suffocating and muggy as if the air was thicker than usual. The tar on the road melted when it got hot enough, and the smell made it even harder to breathe. It felt some days as if his windpipe was collapsing in on itself as he drowned in a pool of sweat and melted ice pops.  
“Chirp.” 
He could feel sleep tugging at the corners of his bind. It let his face droop and his head fall into the palm of his hand. His cigarette slid from the tight grip of his fingers and onto the table, leaving little bits of grey ash on the wooden table. His eyes fluttered until suddenly his body jerked itself awake. He subconsciously remembered the lit cigarette, forcing his conscious to remember it as well. He lifted it off the table, clearing the ash with his already-stained sleeve. The grey ash was striking on the deep black fabric, smeared and chalky. As he shook his head in an attempt to wake himself completely, the smell of the city slowly floated up through his cracked open window. At that moment, for a reason he could not understand, he suddenly longed to be at his grandparents’ house up in Maine. It always smelled like freshly cut grass and his grandmother’s favorite strawberry ice cream he could never get enough of. The property, before they sold it, was covered almost fully in trees aside from the little spot where the house sat and the dock down the hill. Towering evergreen trees that seemed to strain and reach toward the heavens. Sometimes they would sell them as Christmas trees in the wintertime. However, he preferred the summers he and his sister spent there. It was chillier than where they lived in Georgia, so the summers were more survivable. He would spend his idle afternoons on the dock with a can of pop in hand. He let his leg dangle over the splintery wood, dipping his toes in the cool water. The local kids would come down from town to swim almost every day. “Fresh meat” they called him and his sister. His grandparents would sit inside or on the porch, supervising just enough so that no one drowned or started beating someone. Perhaps he was longing for his youth, not his grandparents. He longed for bubble baths and summer days and cans of pop dripping condensation onto the sidewalk and playing until sunset and sleeping in on weekends instead of working and enjoying school and enjoying his friends. Enjoying life. 
“Chirp.” 
He had been trying and trying for so long, hoping writing would just come naturally like it used to. In the past, he had been able to write page upon page of prose and poetry and even essays for school if he was in the right mood. Gifted, talented, and oh so worn out. He felt as if he had wasted all of his creative energy during his years of schooling. He had planned to be famous by then as a child, but he was nowhere close. He had a couple things scattered around in some small literary magazines, but he was not a published author writing for the masses like he yearned to be. He wanted to change someone’s life with his writing, he wanted to hear someone say they were a different person after reading his work. But first, he had to actually write something. Something new, something revitalizing. It was so difficult to come up with new ideas, it felt like everything had already been written. He dreamt of writing, all he spoke of was writing, and his entire life was based around writing. Yet he barely ever wrote. He slept more than he wrote.  
“Chirp.” 
He had begun to enjoy the novelty of the finch. It broke up his paragraphed thoughts into short stanzas with its voice and made them easier to comprehend. Every time he began to get lost within the depths of his own mind; it spoke. It spoke as if it knew he needed it to. It spoke when even he did not know he needed it to. The little finch seemed to know more about his life than he did. It knew the entirety of the world and its meaning. All this knowledge in such a little body. No wonder it tried to express itself constantly. It had a burning desire to be understood and to be free. He slowly turned to face the finch. The iron bars of its rounded cage seemed to shine unnaturally, almost robotically, in the light of his computer. Or maybe it was the light of the moon leaking in from the window. Its dark, unblinking eyes stared into him, through him, into the essence of his being. Into his writing bones and his still-beating heart and his constantly running brain. The finch was dripping with inspiration and competence, and he was jealous of it. Within its shadow on the wall, he could see every individual feather he believed, the hundreds and hundreds of grey feathers that composed the whole. The ones that had been torn in injury still composed the whole. The entirety. 
“Chirp.” 
They locked eyes as it spoke, neither the bird nor the man blinking. He turned back to his desk, putting out his now nub of a cigarette in the ashtray. He took a long sip of his coffee. It was lukewarm by then. He laid his fingers on the keyboard, resting them there for a minute, it was comforting in a way. The coldish embrace of the keys kept him awake. He typed out a single letter, then a word, and then a sentence. A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he looked at the text on the screen. 
“The finch seemed to have nothing to do except infuriate the man. A man reminiscent of an old oil painting, sitting at his desk. His hair long and matted, his coffee black, and his cigarette rested his hand.”