He drowsed through the night with dreams which bothered him. In the echo of one dream he remembered a warm crush of other bodies. He couldn't visualise them, but just remembered a sense of peace in being surrounded by other warm-blooded creatures. And there were feathers everywhere. Warm, soft, comforting feathers on which he lay and which cocooned him in safety. Eventually he heard her moving around in the kitchen. He needed some water but couldn't be bothered to rouse himself to ask for it. Sometimes she ignored him anyway. Why did she do that? Sometimes she just ignored him, and it was often when he most needed something. Some small service.

It wasn't his fault that he was like this, unable to do anything for himself. In a way she had made him dependent. Now she was in control, had it all her way. He hated her - but needed her. His dependence nauseated him: It made him mad. He drooped: He barely responded.

He hated it most when her friends came round, gawping at him with their ugly little eyes and smooching at him with limpid, chemically-caked lips, saying the most stupid things. Why would they say these things? They wouldn't talk like that normally, would they? They wouldn't go up to someone in the street, stick their face up to them and say the things they said to him. Sometimes he wanted to lash out and hurt them, but most of the times he was just too damned depressed to react. He just watched them, smelled their vile, cheap perfume, saw them stuffing another bit of foul-flavoured cake into their slack mouths and wash it down with brown rivers of hot liquid. And the noises they made! It was worse than being in the jungle. Their cries made no sense to him. Sometimes it was as though he saw them through a waterfall. He was safe and dry, but trapped, behind the waterfall. They were on the other side of another universe, a different species.

If only he could fly - fly through that open window, soar over the East London rooftops. Surely there would be cool, green places, with high trees and - he hardly dared to think it - birds, plants and other living creatures? Why didn't she take him out any more? He had just become an ornament, a jou-jou. A living jewel for her visual pleasure. She had forgotten what he was.

She was coming over. He braced himself; felt his nails digging into his palms.

"Oh, Polly" she said, sadly, sticking one finger over one of the rusty wires of his cage and trying to tickle his red breast feathers, "You have to go to a new home today. I can't look after you any longer. "

She handed him, in his cage, to the strangest creature he have ever seen. His plumage was completely drab.

"Monopoly" by Sharyn Own