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The Papaya Bird

Every time I enter my garden hoping to find a ripe papaya on at least one of the seven Papaya trees that grow there, I find instead, what looks like half eaten kidneys barely qualified to be called fruits, riddled with holes and shaped like disappointment. I love papayas, they're my favorite fruit, so naturally I planted a few papaya trees in my garden, next to the carnations, hoping to eat some when they ripen. But I'm never able to. It's all because of that bird, that damn Papaya bird!

On the day the papayas ripen, it eats all my papayas and disappears without a trace, like ice in a glass of lemonade on a hot summer afternoon. I tried removing the papayas from the trees a few days before they were supposed to ripen, but those never ripened at all and ultimately got spoilt. I've never had the privilege of getting a good look at the bird, but from the few glimpses I managed to catch, it looked like a black songbird with thin green dots all over it. It makes a very peculiar noise that sounds like the humm of an electric generator with a faint trace of a bird call towards the end, as if to remind me that it's a bird making that noise. Every time I hear it, my papayas are as good as eaten. I never really understood that queer bird. Why did it do that? Why did it eat all the papayas? Why all of them? How much can a single bird eat? I'm assuming it's just one bird because I haven't seen any other bird like it, ever. Why does it prevent me from eating my favorite fruit? Even if a flock of birds decided to show up and treat themselves to some papayas, there should at least be five left for me under normal circumstances. There's something about the papaya bird that makes me feel like it's antagonizing me intentionally. What did I ever do to it? Is it a vengeful spirit taking it's revenge on me for a forest I burnt in a previous life by eating all my papayas? It couldn't be with the bird it loves so it's keeping me away from the fruit I love? I don't mind birds or animals eating stuff from my garden, in fact I welcome it, but this bird goes beyond just eating my stuff, it's almost as if it's trying to make sure that I don't get to eat them.

Over a period of time, I grew to hate that bird. I wanted to tie it to a chair kept in a dark room with the only source of light piercing it's eyes like daggers, the way the feds would interrogate a terrorist. That bird knew how to annoy me. It didn't just get on my nerves, it knew exactly which of my nerves to get on, if that made any sense. There's nothing I know that annoyed me more. Sure, there are things I hate more, but when it came to pure annoyance, nothing even came close. Not even biting a kitkat like you would an ordinary candy bar instead of eating each of it's fingers seperately. I was really mad at it. It was rather unnatural for me to feel that way towards a bird, though I've felt that way against humans before, albeit not with the same intensity. There was something more about the bird that irked me even beyond it's papaya eating habits. It was always on my mind and was often responsible for ruining my mood. It was almost as if when the papaya bird wasn't eating my papayas, it was in my head, eating the little happiness I have left in me, completely ruining my mood.

So this time when the papayas would ripen, I decided to catch this bird. I was thinking of staying awake all night. Based on careful study of the Papaya trees ripening pattern, I knew that the papaya would ripen the next day and the papaya bird would be there to celebrate my misery by eating my favorite fruit. I had slept in the afternoon in preparation for the next day. After waking up from the preparatory nap, I drank a lot of coffee and listened to extremely loud music after I was done watching Die Hard. I searched google for the loudest death metal songs and began to listen to them one by one. I found a playlist with 'Master of Puppets', 'Louder Than Hell', 'Paranoid' and many other loud songs that my neighbors would judge me for listening to.  Despite that, after the clock struck 4:17 am, I began to feel sleepy. I went out and checked for the bird, it hadn't arrived.

I found another death metal playlist, this time on Spotify. I played it at full volume on my bluetooth speaker. A few of the songs from earlier were repeated but it was mostly different ones. The speaker's battery was low for the second time that night. I went to the study and peeked out of the window next to the cupboard from which I could see the garden clearly. No sign of the papaya bird. I could feel my eyelids getting heavy, so I washed my face with ice-cold water and jumped around like a baboon for a while, listening to a few loud rock songs by AC/DC this time on my phone, mouthing the lyrics as the songs played. These I actually liked. I went out and checked for the Papaya Bird, it hadn't arrived.