Blog #4: Robert Olen Butler "Jealous Husband Returns In Form of Parrot"

For this blog, we were told to read a story from our text that has not yet been assigned for us to read and then make a post about it. I chose to read and blog about the 'story beginning' of  Robert Olen Butler's "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot". Below is an excerpt from the beginning of the story.

      I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I say, and I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really thinking is Holy shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at my wife.

      "Hello," she says, and she comes over to me and I can't believe how beautiful she is. Those great brown eyes, almost as dark as the center of mine. And her nose--I don't remember her for her nose but its beauty is clear to me now. Her nose is a little too long, but it's redeemed by the faint hook to it.

      She scratches the back of my neck.

      Her touch makes my tail flare. I feel the stretch and rustle of me back there. I bend my head to her and she whispers, "Pretty bird."

      For a moment I think she knows it's me. But she doesn't, of course. I say "Hello" again and I will eventually pick up "pretty bird." I can tell that as soon as she says it, but for now I can only give her another hello. Her fingertips move through my feathers and she seems to know about birds. She knows that to pet a bird you don't smooth his feathers down, you ruffle them.

      But of course she did that in my human life, as well. It's all the same for her. Not that I was complaining, even to myself, at that moment in the pet shop when she found me like I presume she was supposed to. She said it again, "Pretty bird," and this brain that works like it does now could feel that tiny little voice of mine ready to shape itself around these sounds. But before I could get them out of my beak there was this guy at my wife's shoulder and all my feathers went slick flat like to make me small enough not to be seen and I backed away. The pupils of my eyes pinned and dilated and pinned again.

      He circled around her. A guy that looked like a meat packer, big in the chest and thick with hair, the kind of guy that I always sensed her eyes moving to when I was alive. I had a bare chest and I'd look for little black hairs on the sheets when I'd come home on a day with the whiff of somebody else in the air. She was still in the same goddam rut.

      A “hello” wouldn't do and I'd recently learned “good night” but it was the wrong suggestion altogether, so I said nothing and the guy circled her and he was looking at me with a smug little smile and I fluffed up all my feathers, made myself about twice as big, so big he'd see he couldn't mess with me. I waited for him to draw close enough for me to take off the tip of his finger.

      But she intervened. Those nut-brown eyes were before me and she said, "I want him."

This demonstrates a good story beginning. It automatically brings up the conflict in the first paragraph of the story. This is a man who has done something in his life worthy of him being turned into a parrot and now his wife is about to buy him in a pet store. It has conversation (technically) between the husband-parrot and the wife. It has characterization. It even has a little humor. I know that after reading the first page and a half of this story I understood the main character, I understood the conflict he feels, and I was dying to read more. I mean, who wouldn't want to read a story about a dead guy who was turned into a parrot? I think that is honestly one of the best concepts in literature I've seen in our entire text! Not to mention Butler finds a way to give us what the overall conflict would be within these few paragraphs. It's seamlessly written so that, through this parrots choppy thought and incomplete speech, we can see that he is still just as jealous and mistrusting and possessive as he was in his past life. This leads my mind too so many places for where this story could lead! (And between you and me, I've read the ending and it's amazing! I never saw it coming. If you'd like to read it too here's a link to the full text.) Overall, this story beginning is well developed, well written, and fully pulls in and prepares the reader for what is going to happen in later pages. You should all check it out!