“I’m here for those flappy boys,” the cop said.

I didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know how to react. “M-my birds?” I asked, incredulously.

I’d just bought them. Parakeets, two of them, annoying little buggers – but I thought that was all. Little did I know.

First night I had them, it was Bedlam. It was two women, turns out, females. They squawked all night and threw food.

Next morning, while cleaning up, it happened. Greenie and Blue escaped. They flew off to God knows where. I waited by the sliding glass door, opened onto the balcony. Their cage was on the balcony, empty. I could have cried my eyes out.

Yet there was the present. The now. The cop – the pig – my birds. He wanted them. He wore mirrored sunglasses, his big iron shone large, menacing, and metallic handled on his hip. He was chewing on an unlit match. It wobbled between his lips when he said, “Hand over the birds.” He looked like Himmler. My birds, I’d heard them during the night. When Greenie wasn’t throwing her food, she spoke. To Blue. I’m not sure what she, or Blue said in response, but I’ll bet it was important. It sounded like alien talk, to be truthful – and I suspected them from the get-go.

Oh, they communicated all night. But it was not bird talk. Not that I know what birds say, but these two sure didn’t talk about seeds and stuff. Not in that language. Even though they are from the equator.

I knew it last night. I’d just purchased them, been with the flappy things only a short time, but hearing them during the night I was certain. The cop at the door cinched the deal. These birds were alien. The language they spoke – tweeted – unearthly. I’d no experience with birds as pets, only mallards fleeing the bark of my shotgun. With no alien birds had I previously tweeted.

“I hardly knew them,” I stammered. “But they were quite flappy,” I said, remembering the wing flap air rushing sound.  And how annoying it was following the flung nutria-grain balls.

“They have the codes,” the cop – err, pig – said.

“What codes?” I asked him.

“The DNA codes,” he said, “for the big strand.”

“Whoa,” was all I could say, knowing these two most important parakeets, Greenie and Blue, had flapped most historically, and most importantly, into and out of my life.

They remain looking for them to this day. The two with the answer. The answer to life and death.

And every time I see two feather darts, small green and blue, streaking across the sky, I kick back, look forward to death, and thank the Lord Greenie and Blue have never been found or caught. ‘Cuz nobody wants to know when, or how. No, just like those short duration two flappy feathered females of mine, they just wanna fly high as Skynyrd-style free birds to have fun. To live.