Animal Fables: Robin
Once upon a time, there lived a pugnacious robin called Reginald.
Why was Reginald pugnacious? Well, because it was in his genes, in his upbringing. It was how male robins were supposed to be. That’s why, in the weeks approaching Christmas, Reginald simply hated being fawned over by passing humans clad in long winter coats, wrapped in even longer winter scarves, and carrying shiny, shiny gifts through the snow.
“Look!” the well-meaning birdspotters would coo, excitedly. “There’s a robin redbreast! It must be nearly Christmas! Oh, let’s take a picture! Let’s take a picture! We could make a lovely Christmas card out of the photo and send it to dear old auntie Vera!”
Reginald would growl under his beak - though sadly, because of his bird-like build, this would merely emerge as a charming, warbling song, which only succeeded in making our feathered friend even more endearing to the large two-legged creatures admiring him from the pavement below.
If only the poor unfortunate humans had been able to speak fluent Robinese, they would have clearly heard Reginald seething.
“I do not have a redbreast! It’s merely chafed nipples! I am not cute and charming and all those other vomit-inducing things, either. I am a robin. Hear me roar. Well, tweet. But I’m fierce. I’m ferocious. Grrr. And I absolutely do not want to be the pretty picture adorning the front of the sodding Christmas card to that decrepit old aunt of yours. She not only smells of cough linctus and spearmint indigestion tablets, but she has sagging skin too. I’ll show you. I’ll show you all. I will, I will. Oh yes, I damn well will!”
Reginald’s irate responses didn’t work, of course. They never worked. The humans just stood there longer, despite the bitter chill in the air, and became still more entranced by the robin’s seasonal colouring and melodious tones.
So Reginald the robin hatched a plan. Recruiting the services of his friend Rodney, who happened to be a whizz with those tiny disposable cameras that the two-legged people left lying around, Reginald embarked upon a typical young male robin’s night out on the town. This consisted of booze, belching and birds. Mainly birds, for obvious reasons. In fact, all that was missing was a greasy kebab at the end of the evening.
Displaying the aggressive territorial behaviour so typical of male robins, but which belies their gentle public image, Reginald set about loudly warning the other redbreasts to leave his patch forthwith. He let loose with foul-beaked and disgracefully nasty tweets of “Get off my branch, git-face!” and “Outta my tree, arse-wipe!” And like all the best nights out, Reginald finished it off with a few fights at chucking-out time. Picking on the smaller birds, he ripped at their feathers, poked their eyes out and, in a couple of cases, left them bruised, bloody and beakless on the frozen ground. Meanwhile, Rodney’s camera never stopped clicking and flashing for even a moment, as the evening’s activities were captured for posterity.
On 24 December, the letterboxes up and down the street that Reginald called home resounded to the rattling of Christmas cards falling through the slots. Excited humans rushed to their doormats and ripped open the envelopes, eager to see which close friend or distant relative had sent seasonal felicitations.
But instead of cries of joy, all that could be heard from behind the street’s net curtains was the sound of jaws thudding to the floor, as each householder was suddenly confronted with a gloriously colourful picture of Reginald, snarling his beak and flexing his muscular wings. There he stood, with one delicate foot proudly pressed onto the chest of a dead bird whose throat had quite evidently been torn out in a particularly brutal manner. The greeting below the photograph read “Peace, love and goodwill at Christmas”.
Inside, written in a scarily jagged scrawl that was clearly the work of someone recovering from an orgy of violent bloodlust, the card carried the following message.
“Not so cute now, am I? Wishing you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year from your local neighbourhood robin.”
The End.
See also: the original Animal Fables series.