Mockingbird

I sat at the café last Saturday afternoon.

At the next table: Men in expensive weekend suits. Curled moustaches. Loud certainty.

One spoke about a rare bird he bought for his wife.

He knew nothing about birds. Still, he lectured the table on its origin. Behaviour. Song.

Then casually mentioned how the gift earned him excellent sex.

The others nodded with grave admiration.

He checked a diamond-studded pocket watch. Fake.

None of them noticed.

—

He said every morning the bird sang beautifully from its cage beside the window.

Another man frowned.

“I never understood how a caged bird could sing.”

The table fell thoughtful.

I chuckled. Quietly.

Still, loud enough.

—

The loudest one turned toward me.

“You seem amused.”

“Oh,” I said. “Are you gentlemen all in the same profession?”

“We are brokers.”

Of course they were.

“How wonderful for you,” I said, and returned to my book.

That offended him more than the chuckle.

He stood. Came to my table. Sat opposite me.

“You mocked us,” he said.

“I didn’t,” I replied calmly. “I only found the observation troubling.”

His moustache twitched.

“What observation?”

I closed my book.

“You wondered how a caged bird could sing.”

“Yes.”

“I know why.”

—

When I was eighteen, I was sentenced for a crime I did not commit.

Forty years. A rich friend set me up.

The police believed him. Not me.

—

The first night in prison, I was stabbed with a sharpened toothbrush.

But I learned to survive.

In prison I shared a cell with a man serving life.

He was set up, too. Wrong place. Wrong time.

Every morning he whistled. Afternoons, hummed. Nights, sang.

Jazz solos under his breath. He was in perfect tune.

One day I asked him how. How he could still sing in a cage.

He told me: “As long as I know who I am, they haven’t taken everything.”

He was stabbed to death the next afternoon.

They said he hummed St. James Infirmary till his last breath.

—

That is why the caged bird sings.

Not because she is free. She is not.

But she still hopes to be.

-ck