The problem with my plan was that it relied on them not adapting, despite the fact that the owner was already aware that he needed to adapt now that he had to feed me stronger poisons to keep me alive. I would have to be complacent. I would have to willingly give myself up to them to make them think I could be trusted. I would have to sing. I would have to betray my kind in order to survive. And now that I couldn’t die, my only choice was to survive.

I played out a fantasy in my head in which the new trainer arrived and he was kind and fun to talk to and he didn’t even bother flinching when I messed with him because he knew I wouldn’t poison him. I imagined that he would never consider hurting me, that his new more effective motivational method would be strawberry-hotdog flavored poisons and that he understood why I made the choices I did.

Next, I played out the other scenario, the uglier one, the one that was more likely. I imagined that he refused to even try to talk to me, but was perfectly fine to everyone else. I imagined that when he did talk to me it was to put me down or laugh at me. I imagined he was in a constant state of alert around the dangerous creature I am in his head. I imagined that not only did he hurt me to motivate me, but he hurt me for pleasure. I imagined that all the pain that I had gone through, losing my family, being beaten and whipped, having feathers torn out, almost dying, I imagined that it was all nothing next to the physical and emotional pain that he would inflict. I imagined that he would bring me a hotdog and a strawberry, but only so he could laugh as he ate them himself, or wasted them entirely by rendering them inedible. I imagined that even after all the time he would end up spending with me, he would never see me as anything close to human and he would never even try to see through my eyes.

The evening crawled by as slowly as I thought possible as I waited for my visitor. The imaginary clock in my head continued to tick along, but every second felt like a minute and every minute felt like an hour. Still recovering from everything I’d been through, I was repeatedly being hit by waves of tiredness, and somehow eventually managed to fall asleep. I still wish that what came after was just a bad dream.
***

After the first night of pure fear and terror, I made sure that all my daytime actions were complacent. The first few nights I found it impossible to sleep, but I quickly got over it due to how tired I became. I was a perfectly behaved poisonbird, although that didn’t stop my new trainer from training me. My unhappy imaginings were all almost perfectly accurate, although I hadn’t predicted that the owner would relocate all his old trainers to new jobs in order to hire this new one. My new trainer, whose name I did learn to be Krim, though not from asking him like I asked Kairen, hated me, or at least loved to torture me. The owner was right, even if I hadn’t decided to play the good little bird act, there was no way I could have resisted Krim’s motivation the way I resisted everyone else’s. Krim could have only made visits one day of the week and I still would have performed every day after that for at least the full week for fear of him finding out.

As time went on, I had to adjust to much more frequent performances, much stricter and intensive training, and less sleep. It was clear that it was no lie that I was the last poisonbird. The crowds to coming to watch me grew and grew, but so did the stage I performed on and the number of seats in the audience. Even so, the owner frequently boasted about raising prices and still selling more tickets to each performance. The owner began to do more to secure his monopoly, buying out companies that had sold audio recordings from poisonbirds and ceasing all further distribution. Although a recording did no justice to hearing a poisonbird’s voice in person, they were still far better than a human voice. However, the amount of tourist money he made from people traveling to see me was greater than the profits he would’ve made from selling the recordings, so he made sure to keep me in tiptop shape and constantly ran shows at his newly constructed amusement park. Still, I wouldn’t have known about any of this if Krim and the owner hadn’t arrogantly ridiculed me with it.

Through all of it, I was still never asked to fly during the shows. The stage was outdoors, and making sure I never flied was a much more efficient way to make sure I couldn’t escape than trying to make sure I couldn’t escape even if I did fly. About a year after my suicide attempt, the owner thought of a new idea— opening a part of the building used for a much smaller group at much higher prices. In this new room I had to grow accustomed to, the 5 or so people allowed in at a time would purchase overpriced gloves and pay a ridiculous entry price, and in exchange, they would be allowed to touch my wings. First, of course, they had to sign a waiver, but then they’d be taken to a room where I would be chained up so I couldn’t move, and they’d have a half hour to ogle and touch my wings. These times were the hardest to stay complacent for. I knew I needed to tolerate it to gain trust from the owner and Krim, but the violations of my personal space, the patronizing comments that I couldn’t even respond to, and the physical strain from the chains was almost impossible to take. But all I could do was wait for an opportunity.