As usual, I woke up with my arm lovingly wrapped around my wife, but after a moment I noticed that my wife was much larger this morning – as in, she was now the size of a double-decker bus – and it soon became clear that my arm wasn’t an arm, but a wing. At this point I was compelled to look at myself.

“Oh, dammit,” I said.

“Hm?” asked my wife, now awake. She turned and looked at me, and said, “Well dammit.”

“Dammit,” I agreed.

“You’re a sparrow now.”

“That’s how it seems.”

“That’s going to affect our sex life,”she said.

“Yep.”

“In quite a few ways,” she added.

“Yep.” We both sat in awkward silence for a while.

Then, with a sigh, I flew off the bed to get ready for work. My morning was already going badly, but a man can’t shirk his duties every time he gets birdified, so I shaved my beak, put on a tie taken from one of my daughter’s Ken dolls, had my wife loop a little bag around my neck so I could carry stuff, and flew to my job at the Homestead Corporation, where I’ve worked for seven years and I still don’t know what we do exactly.

“Sorry I’m late,” I chirped, hopping up onto the conference table and dropping the bag from my neck. “There was a strong breeze.”

My colleagues stared at me in shock. You’d think I had been magically transformed into a moose or something.

“Yes, well,” said my boss. “Good to have you here in any case, Enselman. We’re doing our presentations right now, so …”

“Of course. I have mine ready to go. Shall I?”

The others nodded, still mystified. I took my cue and flapped over to a laptop hooked up to a projector. After forty-five seconds of scratching at the mouse, Bill Hinkle came up and opened my presentation for me.

“Thanks, Bill. Now. As you can see from this graph, profit margins increased substantially in the middle of the last fiscal year before plummeting. We need to find out what was different in the May-August months to have caused that.”

“Yes, I agree,” said Foley, with his never-ceasing sneer. Foley was my arch-rival; we were competing for the same assistant manager position. “May through August was definitely when profits reached their beak for the year. You’ve clearly done your research, glad to know you’re not just winging it.”

I ignored these jabs and went on with my presentation. “My own theory is that the interns we hired over the summer were all bright, exceptional workers, who brought with them an air of freshness that the work environment sorely needed. Perhaps if we could rehire them permanently in a salaried position …”

“Of course,” said Foley. “Those interns certainly were talon-ted.”

I glared at him. He glared back. He seemed to be doing some strenuous thinking.

Then he said, simply, “Feathers.”

Crossing my wings, I said, “Are you making fun of me?”

“Of course not. Insulting another employee? That kind of thing wouldn’t fly here.”

I don’t really remember what happened next, but there was a lot of screaming and flapping, and suddenly I found myself trapped under a punch bowl and being yelled at by Foley, who was scratched-up and bleeding for some reason.

The boss ushered my co-workers out of the room. Then he lifted the bowl and said he was sending me home for the day. He said I was clearly dealing with some issues best kept private. I grumbled and flew out the open window.

On the way home I remembered that my wife wanted me to pick some things up from the grocery store. I went into the store with the intention of buying a package of hot dogs, a gallon of milk, two loaves of wheat bread, various cans of vegetables, and a new electric can opener. But in the end all I managed to carry was a grape.

“Well, this is fantastic,” she said when I got home. “A grape. Oh, what a lovely dinner, this grape.”

“Get off my back,” I said. “I slave and I slave all day, and this is the thanks I get when I come home? And for your information, that grape is the size of a turkey to me.”

“You’re a turkey.”

I glared. “You take that back.”

“Never,” she said, crossing her arms. “Turkey.”

Not wanting a repeat of the Foley fiasco, I scratched her up only mildly before flying out the open window and to the nearby park. Here I vented my frustration by pecking at some birdseed, which is strangely delicious when you’re a bird (who knew?) and a gray female pigeon landed right beside me.

This is going to sound strange if you aren’t currently, or never have been, a bird, but she remains to this day one of the hottest women I’ve ever seen in my life. The way she wore her tail feathers left very little to the imagination, and the green ring around her neck stopped very suggestively at the top of her breast, which was, in a word, copious. This girl knew exactly what she was doing.

She demurely hopped in my direction. She gave me a sultry side-glance. My heart raced.

I’m not proud of what happened next. Before I knew it, I went full-force into my cockiest strut, walking around like I owned the whole damn place. I ruffled my crest, turned my back toward her and stretched out my wings and flapped twice.

“You like that?” I asked, over my shoulder. “Trick question. I know you do.” This went on for several minutes.

And then, as abruptly as I had started this display of macho courtship, I stopped. This felt wrong. Turning toward the pigeon I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t do this. You’re beautiful, but I’m not what I appear to be. I’m… well, I’m a married man. Married for ten years now.” I sighed. “And here I am, out flirting. I should be ashamed of myself.”

The pigeon cocked her head in a way that said, “She would never find out. Come, my love. Let’s go find a place to build a nest and mate for life. You know you want to.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I made a promise, and I’m going to commit to it. Goodbye. I wish you happiness for the rest of your life.”

As I flew away I took one last look at her. She was pecking at a beetle in a way that certainly meant, “I will never love again.”

When I returned home that evening, I discovered via email that Foley had been promoted to assistant manager. Another email informed me that, as a sparrow, I shouldn’t require the same salary my human form had been receiving, and so from now I on I would be paid solely in worms and twigs. Also, my 401k was to be forfeited and used to pay for those stupid interns to come work for us full-time.

Then I found a note on the refrigerator from my wife, which she told me she was having a “night out with the girls,” although the name “David” was written and crossed out quite a few times throughout the note for some reason.

To get my mind off of my bad day, I jumped up and down on the TV remote for twenty minutes until the power turned on, but what popped up onto the screen was a documentary on cats and I was forced to hide behind the sofa for half an hour.

Being a sparrow is not all it’s cracked up to be, I thought.

I had to put a stop to this. I had to change myself back. Once the cat show was over, I stuffed some cash into my neck-bag, ate half of my grape and saved the other half for my wife, stared at and occasionally attacked my reflection in the mirror for three hours, and, finally, flew out of the house.

***

The tent was purple with black stripes, and there was a hand-painted sign out front that advertised “Madame Spindoli’s Dimensional Stasis Field,” with another sign beside it that listed: “Prophecies—Five Dollars. Miracles—Ten Dollars. Tadpoles—Fifty Cents Each.” I flew up to the entrance, landed on my feet, and hopped inside.

“Hello?” I called out. I flew up onto the table in the middle of the room. “Spindoli!”

Madame Spindoli, a gap-toothed, bedraggled tortoise of a woman, appeared from behind a bead curtain. “Yes?” she said. “Who’s there?” Her lazy left eye was even more disconcerting when it was the size of my head.

“Remember me?” I asked. “I was here yesterday, if you recall.”

“Okay.”

“By the way, I’m a sparrow now.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I came in here yesterday and gave you ten dollars and told you to remove the ugly mole on my nose, and you said it would be gone when I woke up. I woke up this morning, and I was a sparrow.”

“Okay,” she said. “Is the mole gone from your nose?”

“Yeah, but now I don’t have a nose.”

“Ten dollars please.”

“No, look, first of all, I paid the ten dollars yesterday. Second, I did it under the impression that you ran a legitimate business and would perform your service as advertised. This is not what I wanted.”

“What did you want?”

“I wanted nothing to change except for my mole would be gone. I still wanted to be human.”

“Okay. You weren’t very specific.”

“Well, I thought it would be implied.”

“Ten dollars please.”

I threw up my wings and squawked in exasperation. This seemed to startle Madame Spindoli out of the idiot trance she had apparently been cast under long enough to say, “Calm yourself. I will reverse the effects. When you wake up, you will no longer be a sparrow.”

“Thank you.”

“But it will cost you another ten dollars.”

When I left, I ate a few of her tadpoles for retribution.

The next morning, I woke up and felt the fingers at the ends of my arms. I had fingers! I had arms! I kicked off the sheets with great impetus and hopped out of bed and noticed that I was blind.

“Honey?” I said to my wife, who grunted. “I’m blind.”

She audibly shifted to her side to get a good look at me.

“You’re a mole,” she said, sighing.

“Like the animal?”

“Yup.”

“Dammit!”

“Yeah,” she said. “Hey, I’ve decided I’m hanging out with David, I mean, David, I mean the girls again tonight. You’ll have to fix supper for yourself. There should be some, like, grubs or whatever in the yard. I’ll keep the door cracked.”

I ran headfirst into a bedpost. Getting back to Spindoli’s tent in this condition would be a problem.