The bard’s fingers hover over the ledger, ink pooling beneath the quill’s nib at the end of the day, when cognac makes thoughts grow deeper than the waters where the flamingos unfurl their wings, touching the rhythm we call life between syllable and shadows in the body… we call insomnia, what others might call ghosts or insanity—hearing whispers: “Polly, want a cracker.”

Tallying his mañana, he scrawled debits between fingers soft as a moth’s wing, like shadows sticking to the wall in old, yellowed photographs. The ink smelled of crushed beetles and something else—gunpowder, maybe, or the bitter tang of a woman’s wrist after she’s dabbed perfume there but before the alcohol evaporates. He blinked. His eyelids felt like sandpaper against his corneas, dry from the cognac and the smoke curling up from the guttering candle. The whisper came again —but when he turned his head, it was nothing but a pinion curled up in the cage. His fingers twitched toward the ledger again, like counting tadpoles in a rain barrel. The parrot was dead. Had been for years.

Outside, the city exhaled. Horseshoes clattered on cobblestones, a knife-grinder eating his rusty song, and somewhere, a drunk sang out of tune with a hurdy-gurdy’s whine. A slow drip from his mind’s machine, ink forming Rorschach stains on the ledger like a metronome ticking stray dogs in a jar. Chasing cars like a mouse on a carousel, barking at hubcaps and wheels, rattling the cracked panes of insomnia’s breath crawling through his naval on a rope ladder of widdershins when drama was king—but now, all he hears is the soft clink of spectacles whispering, “Polly, want a cracker.”