Challenge #01705-D244: Hope You Guess My Name

You can have what you want, But you also have Everything that goes with it. – @knitnan

He’d heard it all. Money, fame, power. They all inverted on themselves once they got it. Money came with taxes, of course, but it was also a form of power that corrupted. Those with the kindest and most generous hearts, once they had money, got to watch any offspring they had turn into egotistical, self-centred, heartless jerks. Those with fame never had a private moment to themselves again. Those with power… well. They had to use it and not abuse it. Those people ended up walking on eggshells through sheer responsibility.

Lucifer smiled as the next suspect edged into the interview seat. Op shop clothing. Glasses thirty years out of style. A general air of ennui that could easily find itself on the top of a tall building, or staring, speculatively, into a bottle of pills. This was exactly the downtrodden sort who he could easily imagine snapping after the final straw and killing a man like Victor Norman. Who, before his demise, had been one of Lucifer’s favourite types of people.

So he asked his one question, “What do you want?” and put his special Spin on it.

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5 more years off Purgatory…

I did a genuine good deed, tonight. The cat bought in a bird and, being a cat, demanded acknowledgement of her great feline feat.

Mayhem spotted it, I discouraged the cat from holding the poor creature, and together we bought the poor thing to the relative safety of the front room.

It was a small olive-green honeysucker, judging by the proboscis-like beak and its long tongue. I held it in my hands for quite some time, and kept Mayhem from patting the poor creature and scaring it the rest of the way to its little birdie grave.

Hubbie, at my badgering, looked up care and maintenance of cat-struck birds. Instructions that said to place the bird in a shoe box and stay with it until it began walking around.

Well, by the time Mayhem returned with a shoe box, the bird decided it had had enough of these giant noisy pink things and tried to take of on its own. Cue Benny Hill theme as my good self, Mayhem, a chair and a small cardboard box attempted to round up and free to the outside world a small bird about the same size as a mouse.

The good news is that the little olive honeysucker was last seen speeding into the night, hell for leather, little birdie brain determined to find a place of safety and freedom.

The bad news is that the cat was last seen sauntering determinedly after it.

The whole point is, even though I’m dreading hearing a feline’s triumphant meows of a victorious capture, I helped rescue a bird. I held in my hands a little miracle and aided in its survival. That’s one hell of a natural antidepressant. Without the side-effects of numbing the entire heart to the point where nothing can be felt at all.

I feel marvellous. After weeks of hating myself for various reasons, I feel over the moon. It’s wonderful therapy to do something tangibly good. Remember that, it might come in handy.