Summary
In a sun-splintered, cigar-stained courtroom that reeks of varnish and stale justice, Lee—an everyman whose face seems sketched by disappointment—stands accused of throttling, trussing, and silencing the tyrannical matriarch who has colonized his marriage. The air is thick with histrionics: jurors weep operatically, spectators clutch handkerchiefs like relics, and even the bailiff swallows a sob when testimony turns to the vanished parrot Clementina, whose gaudy plumage once festooned the domestic cage now emptied of song. Twenty-five years of rock-splitting penance are pronounced; Lee, radiant with perverse gratitude, osculates the robed arbiter and pumps the prosecutor’s arm as though they’ve just gifted him a lottery ticket. Yet the narrative pivots on an exhalation of suppressed grievance: Lee unspools a baroque litany of domestic tortures—savage tongue-lashings, surveillance by beady avian eyes, the squawking surveillance state of feathered Gestapo—until the bench, swayed by this inverted odyssey of suffering, nullifies the verdict and exiles the mother-in-law and her technicolor familiar. The parrot, complicit witness, swoops beneath the star-spangled bunting, seeking asylum from the human circus it once tormented.
Synopsis
Lee is being tried for his cruel treatment of his mother-in-law. He is supposed to have choked, bound and gagged her and done away with her parrot Clementina. Even the jury shed tears at the sad tale. Lee is sentenced to twenty-five years hard labor, and he is so happy he kisses the judge and shakes hands with the prosecuting attorney. Then he tells the judge how his mother-in-law abused him, and how the parrot followed him day and night. When Lee gets through with his story, the Judge lets him go and forces the mother-in-law to abdicate with her parrot which flies into the courtroom and hides behind the flag for protection.
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