Mechanical Parrot

Moe the Boy padded his way towards his balcony holding a hot coffee mug in one hand and feeling the cold tile against his feet. The sun was cracking over the crooked and slanted backdrop of the city, moving his small kitchen's spectrum into an off amber. Brisk air snuck through crack in the French doors separating his apartment from the disappearing fall. Josephine's message still played in the background; his errant answering machine behaving ever so much like a crazed mechanical parrot with a beeping problem.


It would soon be cold in the city. Cold in his apartment. Snow on the ground, even. Moses could never sleep well in the cold, but mostly he could not sleep with the voice of his soon to be ex-wife yelling at him repeatedly in perfect digital clarity. She wasn't yelling at him about anything particular, or certainly not terribly new or interesting. He had missed another meeting with the lawyers last night and her revenge was to wait until three in the morning to muster the courage to shout obscenities over the phone. He wasn't sure if this out of pure spite, a desire to avoid conflict or if somewhere along the path of their divorce Jo had either figured out the machine's plight or intentionally sabotaged it with some kind of witchcraft. Regardless, her forty two second rant was preserved with only slight loss from compression for all eternity - punctuated by a droll monotone male voice announcing that there were four messages, one new message, that the new message was forty two seconds long and that it was from Josephine DuBois.

I'll have the word count widget up and running soon.