“Because I wanted to see them die! That’s why not. I wanted to see them splattered against the Colonial wallpaper and the embroidered curtains. I wanted to see their little feathers fluttering around through the dusty air of the Old Dominion.”

“That’s horrible!” she says. “You’d just shoot them?”

“Yes. I’d get drunk on red wine and lie in bed with that .410 across my lap and smoke Camels and I’d wait for them.”

“Innocent baby birds?” She gives me some kind of Greenpeace stare, as though she can’t believe she could have so misjudged me.

“Yeah. I’d lie there sometimes for hours, waiting and drinking Italian red wine, and I’d hear them making this god-awful tweetering sound up in the chimney, which meant their stupid mother had come to feed them. They’d get all frantic and shrieking like. And then finally one of them would fall down in the fireplace, thrashing around in the ashes.”

“That’s terrible,” she says. “And you’d just lie there watching the poor little thing? And you wouldn’t even try to help it?”

“Help it? I was there to kill it! Why would I want to help it?”

“Because— Because that’s what people— That’s what human beings are supposed to—” She gets so flustered she can’t go on.

“I’d watch it whipping its naked wings around, trying to fly in circles through the ashes until it finally flopped out onto the rug. It’d lie there dazed for a while, gasping for air and looking all around with its ugly little yellow eye, wondering where in the hell it had fallen and what had happened to its cozy nest with all its little brothers and sisters, and then, finally, it would have rested enough to prop itself up on its wobbly chicken-looking legs and fly straight up and come crashing straight down again.”

“That’s just awful! You’re making this up,” she says, and sets the .410 down on top of the washing machine and turns as though to go back to the party upstairs, but I’m blocking her way now.

“It would keep making these disastrous test flights like that, flying straight up and straight down until—”

“I don’t really want to hear any more about this,” she says, and tries to push past me.

“Until finally it would make one big explosive effort and hit the ceiling, then start thrashing, looking for something to hang on to, something to break its fall—and usually that was one of our curtains.”

“Our?” she says. “Oh, so you were living with someone then? You weren’t alone?” She seems almost relieved at the idea.

“I was alone,” I say. “I was drinking Italian red wine and I was very much alone!”