One day, after about three years of working with Krim, the owner came to me to ask me if I’d participate in a television show. The owner asking my opinion had become increasingly frequent as it turned out I would actually agree to his ideas now, but this time was different. He looked at me for a long time before he finished pitching what I would be doing.

“This show is live. If there was an issue, we would have no way to fix it and I would be liable for any damages. I’m going to accept it, it’s a lot of money and it’s not anything too hard for you. You don’t even have to sing, just talk about how nice it is to live with me and how you love performing for our shows. I’ll send one of the guys who knows about poisonbirds with you so that they can help if anything goes wrong. It’s in about a month from now.”

“I can do it,” I said with a shrug, “It wouldn’t be much different from a live stage show, right? But I have a request. Send Krim with me and not just one of the other guys.”

The owner looked surprised, “Of course! I didn’t realise you’d taken a liking to Krim! Perfect. I’ll arrange for it and get you some practice questions that I’m sure Krim will help you with. You don’t have many performances scheduled soon either!”

A better person, err, poisonbird, would have felt guilty for lying to elicit such an excited reaction, even under the circumstances, but I was not a better poisonbird and I now knew how to prove it.

The next month was admittedly less busy than it had been up to then, but that was still way too busy.. He still had me lined up for two major performances during the month, so a decent amount of my time still went into learning new lyrics and melodies, but that’s besides the consistent smaller shows on the daily as well as time set aside for the me-petting zoo. Besides that, it seemed like the only thing that should have arisen was Krim showing up with my practice questions for the live show. He did, once, but after that he never brought up the questions again. If I tried to ask him about them, he would get mad, and I had learned very early on to keep Krim happy if at all possible. So what kept me really busy wasn’t so work-related. Someone sent me fanmail. Krim brought it to me one day, unopened, and made me read it out loud in front of him. I struggled with it, both in terms of opening and holding it, and in terms of my reading skills, as reading was never something I really had access to to learn. I at least knew the basics and struggled my way through. The letter was seemingly sent by a man by the name of john Jones. It mostly complimented my voice, so I assumed John was someone who had recently seen one of my performances for the first time, and it was likely the only poisonbird performance he’d seen at all. It went on to talk about my feather colors and physical appearance, to the point that it would have been creepy if I were considered human, and then my free spirit. Krim laughed when I read that part out loud. When I was done reading it, Krim took it back from me and read it over again for himself. Suddenly he frowned and looked at me.

“Dumb bird, can’t ya’ even tell that yer not even reading the real message here?”

I was honestly perplexed, as I hadn’t realised that there was a “real” message at all.

“It’s the letters. Yer supposed to read the smudged letters. That’s why it’s handwritten rather than printed, too. Who’s Kairen? He’s asking ya’ if yer still okay and if ya’ need help. I’d like to know yer answers too, eh?”

“I’m still okay. I don’t need help,” I answered quietly, somewhat ashamed at not recognising the message from Kairen.

All of the sudden, Krim started laughing again, “I’m just messing with ya’. I heard the stories about Kairen feeding ya’ human foods recently and thought maybe I’d pull yer leg a bit. This is just a really weird honest piece of fan mail. Not worth yer time,” he said, crumpling the paper into a ball and shoving it into a pocket. And then Krim left. Without any training, without mocking me again, without… anything that made sense of the him I knew.