Waking hour in the morning. Your demands amplify exponentially by the minute. 

 

Your screams riotously ricochet through the walls because I have not attended to my royal duties to serve Your Highness soon enough. (As if we don’t have the same routine almost every morning.)

 

I clean your drinking bowl, add fresh apple peel to your food clip, re-hang the bell toy you chucked to the ground for fun last night. I feed the goldfish. I unhook the main gate and open up the rooftop terrace of your palace that’s really your cage, but it’s so large and elaborate we call it your palace.

 

The main gate of your mansion creaks ajar. You have muted, perched on your cuttlebone when you see I have opened your cage.

 

“Okay, Pingu!” I say, in that cheery, piped-up voice that gets you excited. “Playtime, Pingu!”

 

You flick your head to the left.

 

So that your one dark, beady eyeball eyeballs me with stinky offence.

 

You have not eaten full breakfast. I have not served you a complete breakfast. You always start the day stuffing your tummy with millet and sunflower seeds before you do anything in the day that might be more taxing.

 

What Your Highness doesn’t understand is that I’m travelling to South Korea and Japan in less than three weeks, and I’m training you to leave and return to your cage on your own (because Mum definitely won’t do it for you, and sometimes you dislike Dad). Seed is the main motivator for you to puzzle through which side of your huge palace is the right side to go back home and how on earth does your bao-sized self fit through the gaping door that’s vaster than a microwave? We chat with each other about a lot of things but unfortunately this topic is too complex for me to get you to understand.

 

Five minutes. You eventually realise that the best time to fly out and shred the cardboard atop the dining cabinet would probably be while the cage door is ajar. Your beak chimes against the metal as you clamber your way out from your mansion. But you stop and sit yourself atop the large door.

 

You inflate your pastel yellow, speckled feathers. Your Elvis Presley crest flares upwards (I wish I could slurp each strand like stir-fried noodles). You seem unconvinced this is the acceptable routine for the morning.

 

I’ve brewed myself chamomile tea this morning. I walk over to the palace, dislodge the drinking bowl and take it back to the kitchen bench. I tip a shot of chamomile tea into the bird water.

 

A flurry of helicopter propellers slices the air. Your wings ambush me and your claws seize my chest.