Little Puff Big Puff

In the great black pupil, I could see my reflection and Bee's, fastened with our belts to the back seat of the stranger's car. The pupil was ringed by a brilliant red iris, and beyond that a soft white skin, and I longed to reach out and stroke the layers of fluffy, perfect feathers that surrounded it, to see how soft they were now that they were big. But I knew if I did that my arm would be gone in a snap, quite literally, and I held perfectly still, not daring to breathe Puff's name.

Bee sighed in his sleep and the pupil disappeared. The gigantic black beak slammed into the roof of the car, puncturing the metal, and I screamed. It formed a jagged reef between Bee and I, and I knew I could touch the hard ebony of the beak's end if I dared. Instead, I clung for dear life to my seatbelt as our hiding place was lifted high into the air. We began to shake in a rhythmic, lilting pattern, and foliage rushed past our windows.

Bee cried out and I reached my hand around the beak and found his. "Hang on tight. He's taking us to his nest."

"Will we become food for his babies?" he hiccuped.

"We'll see," I said. "It depends on if he remembers us."

That wasn't much of a hope.

Puff used to be our pet. Before the volcano blew and all the Carbon dioxide got trapped under the atmosphere, people had lots of pets. Dad thought it was a trick of the government plotted at the same time, and my best friend's mum thought it was an attempt by scientists to save life on the planet, that triggered plants and animals to grow so quickly. It hadn't taken many years for the quick-breeding animals to become giants. Bugs, then birds, then who knew what was coming next.

Puff started out small and helpless, and Dad let us keep him for a bit, but he grew so fast that by the next week he wouldn't fit inside the house. Dad was afraid he'd mistake us for bugs--the smaller kinds, so we let him out with the rest of nature gone wild, and then we did our best to hide.

I wasn't sure what I believed out of all of it, but it didn't really matter anyway, especially after Dad disappeared while trying to find us food.

Bee and I went out to search for him the next week because we were hungry. We snuck car to car in the dark, hoping a bat or rat wouldn't swoop down and grab us. But daytime was more dangerous, even, which is why we were sleeping inside the hot, bright vehicle. I was glad I'd made us buckle.

Not much longer, our car was dropped and I whuffed as the seat belt caught at my chest with full gravity. Bee whimpered and I hoped he was all right. When nothing more happened, I quietly unclipped the seatbelt and clambered around the metal rift to unclip Bee's. There was a chance, if we were quick, that we could escape before Puff came back.

"Let's go," I whispered to Bee. "Out this window. Let's see if we can hide."

White-faced, he nodded and followed me over the glass shards into the shadow of a very large rock, and then we held our breath, waiting. I wrapped my arm around Bee, who tucked his face into my shirt.

A voice swept all of our caution to the wind. "Dandy! Bee!" it called.

"Dad!" I screamed, and raced around the rock into his arms.

"Oh Dandy, Bee. I was so scared for you. Are you two all right?"

I nodded and after he checked us all over to be sure, he said, "Come into the cave. I can't believe it. Puff found you."

"He seemed to have," I said, shivering as we pulled into the shadowy crevice. I wrinkled my nose at the bug legs strewn across the ground.

"Watch your step. After they dry, I'm going to take those and weave them into a barrier for the front door," Dad said. "Puff snapped up the apple I was harvesting from and brought me here. I tried to sneak off four times but he found me each time and brought me back. Finally, I yelled at him and told him I was trying to find you. And then he did," he smiled. "He recognizes us, my loves."

"And now," he said, "I believe we're his pets."

___

This story was inspired both by Suzanne Warr's prompt "the car-trip of a lifetime" and by my own birds. I have four of them, two sun conures and two caiques, and their fluffy, know-better attitudes inspire all sorts of soap operas. Just to show you what they're like, here are pics. The first one is Ari, our white belly caique. The second is Phoenix, a male sun conure. And the last has Storm, our black-headed caique up on my head, Phoenix again on the right, and Angel, our female sun peering at him. No, we're not encouraging babies, and they live for a very long time, at least thirty years!

If the tides were turned, what pet would you pick to take care of you?