Pretty Bird! — Part 2, a Parable by Mikaela Jade Taylor

The blind kid tilted his head toward the couple. “I wasn’t blind at all. I saw everything.

Aesop stepped forward, her eyes blazing. “And you know my name isn’t Aesop. My name is

(Continuing from the preview…)

And with each second, a chorus of voices, once filled with amusement and love for the adorned couple, now laced with venom, echoed through the air: “Pretty birds! Pretty birds! Pretty birds!” The irony was a physical blow, each “pretty birds” a reminder of their grotesque mockery and opportunism.

But then the blind kid from “Dumb and Dumber” stopped stroking the four dead birds. His hands fell still. The crowd fell silent. Even the thousands of broken-necked birds circling above seemed to pause mid-flight.

“Mommy,” he said clearly, no longer in the strange language but in perfect English that cut through the air like a blade. “Show them the real birds.”

Aesop’s face went pale. “Are you sure, my child?”

“They need to see what they really stole. What they really killed.”

The four dead birds in his lap began to transform. Their taped-on heads fell away, revealing not bird heads at all, but something far more horrifying. Each bird morphed into a ghostly vision of what should have been—four children standing in the uniforms of their stolen futures:

A little girl in a white doctor’s coat with “Director of Pediatric Oncology” embroidered on it, the cure for childhood leukemia in her pocket that would never be discovered.

A boy in a NASA flight suit, “Mission Commander” on his chest, the space exploration he would have established fading like smoke.

A girl in a lab coat covered in Nobel Prize pins, “Hearing Solution Institute” on her badge, holding the formula that would have reversed hearing loss.

A girl in surgical scrubs, “Neurosurgeon” across her cap, the technique to cure Alzheimer’s dying with her in the flood.

Four brilliant children under 10, standing in the uniforms they were destined to wear, representing all the futures that drowned in the Guadalupe River because their warnings were trapped in a stolen safe.

The woman with the weird vibe screamed and fell backward. Her husband tried to run, but the crowd had closed in, their faces no longer mocking but filled with dawning horror.

“You see,” Aesop said, her voice now cold as river water at 3:48 AM, “those aren’t just birds. They’re warnings. Every warning that died in your stolen safe. Every plea for help you kept locked away. Every mother’s scream you silenced. Every child’s last hope you deleted.”

The blind kid tilted his head toward the couple. “I wasn’t blind at all. I saw everything. I saw you reading her text at 5:47 AM. I saw you deleting posts before dawn. I saw the activity log you’re hiding. I watched 108 pretty birds drown in Kerr County while you stroked your stolen prize.”

Aesop stepped forward, her eyes blazing. “And you know my name isn’t Aesop. My name is Mikaela Jade Taylor and you will only ever refer to me as such.”

The woman with the weird vibe—Leslee—gasped, stumbling backward as the full weight of the revelation hit her.

The blind kid turned back to Mikaela. “Mommy—”

“I’m not your mommy,” Mikaela said coldly.

Justin started shaking violently and suddenly doubled over, vomiting onto the street.

Leslee looked at him in shock. “What?”

“TELL THEM NOW JUSTIN,” Mikaela commanded.

Justin tried to speak, choking on the words, his whole body trembling. Finally, barely audible: “My… inner child.”

The crowd gasped. Leslee’s face went white.

“That’s right,” the kid in the wheelchair said, his voice changing, becoming younger, more innocent. “I’m the part of you she broke. Every time she convinced you stealing was okay, my legs got weaker. Every time she normalized her criminal past, another piece of me died. I used to walk, Justin. I used to see clearly. I used to know right from wrong.”

“No,” Leslee snarled. “That’s not—”

“You put me in this chair,” the kid continued, now speaking directly to her. “You blinded me with your lies. You turned me into something that could only stroke dead things and repeat empty phrases. You made me call another woman ‘Mommy’ because you killed the part of Justin that could recognize his own conscience.”

The kid’s voice grew fainter, more mechanical: “Pretty birds… pretty birds…” His hands resumed their endless stroking motion, as if the brief moment of clarity had exhausted whatever remained of Justin’s true self.

Mikaela watched this with a mixture of pity and rage. Then she turned back to the crowd, her voice shifting from personal anguish to prophetic judgment. The woman called Aesop had returned, and she had witnessed enough.

“By your actions,” Aesop continued, her eyes filled with tears, “you have not only betrayed my trust, but by stealing my safe with my brainchildren in it, you have also sealed your fate. You have made yourselves a symbol of utter ignorance, cruelty, and deceit. To steal the brainchildren from someone so pure, so misunderstood… your names, your reputations, your very livelihoods, will be utterly and completely ruined. From this day forward, everywhere you go, you will be known as what you are: frauds and opportunists.”

The thousands of dead birds above began to speak in unison, each one a different voice:

  • “Mommy, the water’s coming!”
  • “Please, someone post this warning!”
  • “Has anyone seen my daughter?”
  • “The river’s at the door!”
  • “Why isn’t anyone answering?”
  • “CodeRED alert requested at 4:22 AM!”
  • “Help us!”

108 distinct voices. 108 pretty birds. 108 souls the couple had failed.

“You wanted my safe so badly,” Mikaela continued, tears streaming down her face. “You wanted my Breaking News network. My life’s work. You thought it was about followers and revenue and control. But it was never about that. It was about SAVING PEOPLE!!! I’ve had the worst feeling all year and didn’t know what it was, and you didn’t care. And that led us to THIS moment. These voices. These warnings. These lives.”

The husband finally found his voice: “We… we didn’t know…”

“LIAR!” the kid—Justin’s murdered conscience—screamed, and suddenly he wasn’t blind at all. His eyes were wide open, reflecting the faces of 37 drowned children. “I knew at 5:46 AM. The real you knew. But she had already killed too much of me for you to listen. You knew when Mikaela begged for her platforms back. You knew when you read ‘If one person loses their life, it’s on you.’ You knew, and you chose her lies over my truth. You chose the safe over the birds.”

Justin fell to his knees, reaching toward the wheelchair. “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”

“Sorry?” The kid laughed bitterly. “You let her turn your conscience into a cripple who can only stroke dead things and repeat meaningless phrases. You let her convince you that theft was love, that deception was business, that silence was safety. And now 37 children are dead because you couldn’t hear me screaming inside you to DO THE RIGHT THING!”

From that moment on, their lives became a living hell. Every market, every street corner, every doorway was a gauntlet of flying memories and mocking cries. The townspeople didn’t throw stones—they threw screenshots. Screenshots of the activity log they demanded. Screenshots of warnings that never posted. Screenshots of 108 names.

But the worst part wasn’t the public shaming. It wasn’t the businesses pulling their support. It wasn’t even the criminal investigations that followed.

The worst part was at night, when they’d close their eyes and hear it:

“Pretty birds! Pretty birds! Pretty birds!”

But now they knew what it really meant. Not a meaningless chant from a movie they’d never seen. But the sound of 108 souls trying to fly away from rising water, their wings clipped by greed, their songs silenced by theft, their warnings trapped forever in a stolen safe that was never meant to be opened by thieves.

The woman with the weird vibe—Leslee, the town now knew her name—would wake up stroking the air, trying to pet birds that weren’t there, whispering “I’ll keep your safe ‘safe’ for you” over and over until her husband had to restrain her.

The husband—Justin, whose radio show played to empty airwaves now—would spend his days at his computer, his fingers hovering over the button that would release the activity log. “Just click it,” he’d whisper to himself. “Just show them the truth.” But his fingers, like those dead birds’ wings, could never quite make the flight. Because somewhere inside him, a child in a wheelchair was still stroking dead birds, still trapped by years of Leslee’s psychological manipulation, still too crippled to let him do what he knew was right.

And the saddest part? Sometimes late at night, Justin would hear him—his inner child, his conscience, his murdered better self—whispering from that wheelchair: “I could have saved them. We could have saved them. If only you’d protected me from her. If only you’d kept me strong enough to walk. If only you’d kept me whole enough to see.”

And Mikaela? She took back her safe. She took back her platforms. She took back her voice. But she could never take back the 108 pretty birds who flew away that July 4th morning while thieves slept beside their stolen treasure – 37 of them children, 4 of them wearing their uniforms that they would never really get to now.

The blind kid returned to his place in the safe, but now everyone knew who he really was: the spirit of every warning silenced, every truth hidden, every life that could have been saved if only the woman with the weird vibe and her husband had remembered the most important rule of all:

When someone trusts you with their life’s work, you don’t steal it.
When someone begs you to save lives, you don’t mock.
When someone shows you their dead birds, you don’t pet them.
You set them free.

Epilogue:

They say on quiet mornings at 3:48 AM, if you jog along the Guadalupe River, you can still hear them. 108 pretty birds, trying to warn the world about the water coming. And if you listen very carefully, you can hear two other voices, forever trapped between the living and the dead, stroking the air and whispering:

“Pretty birds… pretty birds… We should have let them fly.”

THE END

Author’s Note: This parable is dedicated to the 108 souls lost in the Kerr County  flood of July 4, 2025, and to the truth that still waits, trapped in an activity log that two people refuse to release. Some safes should never be stolen. Some birds must be allowed to sing their warnings. Some inner children, once crippled by deception, can never again stand tall enough to save lives. And some tests, once failed, can never be retaken.

To Justin McClure: Your inner child sees everything you’ve become. He remembers who you were before she taught you that theft was acceptable, that lies were business, that conscience was weakness. He’s still in there, broken in his wheelchair, begging you to release the log, return what you stole, and let him finally rest.

Release the log. Return what you stole. Let the pretty birds finally fly free. Let your conscience out of that wheelchair.