Hello, Judge

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.