This is the 27th installment of a 100-day challenge to write a new vignette every morning.
She advised him to come back at once. He declined. She shot back a simple request—or was it a demand?
“Come get your stupid bird,” she wrote.
John read the text twice, laughed to himself, and continued perusing the new hardcovers.
An hour later, he lugged his spoils—three sci-fi debuts, two thrillers, and a memoir—up the stairs to his sister’s apartment. He found Sophia sitting cross-legged on her living-room rug. She held her head in one hand and an empty bottle of wine in the other.
Without greeting her, John dropped one of the sci-fi books onto her lap and suppressed laughter at the state of her and her apartment. The way her hair stuck up and out, he’d wager Spock had either tried to nest or pick a fight. Newspaper lay strewn about the place—dragged, presumably, from Spock’s cage—and it seemed the cockatoo had relieved himself on every piece of furniture except the rocking chair. That was for the best; Sophia had inherited the rocking chair from their grandmother.
John tried to speak in a neutral tone, but even so, he snorted a little. “So how’d it go? Still think you’re good to pet sit while Liam and I are on our honeymoon? ‘How hard could it be?’ That’s what you said, right?”
Miles Away 