The Lovebird Read Online Free PDF

with earth-friendly detergent. I scanned the gleaming nooks and corners for traces of Simon and Annette—a stray sock or a slip-on shoe, a fallen flaxen hair, an old newspaper—but there were none. All the incidental signs of their lives were swept into oblivion by a maid who appeared thrice weekly. “I think you’ll be comfortable here,” Simon said.
    He bought me bolts of fabric so I could sew as many sundresses with straps that came easily untied as I wished. He paid for my yellow bicycle to have a tune-up. He stared at me with interest even when I was engaged in the most prosaic of activities, such as cleaning the crannies of my ears with a cotton swab or tugging a comb through my uncooperative curls. He listened when I recited the poems I loved best from my Intro to JapanesePoetry class. And he talked to me. He asked me all the questions he had wanted to ask when I had been nothing but a strange schoolgirl, when he had watched me just before class every day (yes, it had been every day) as I walked my bike across the quad while he sat on his stone bench surrounded by birds.
    “Do you have any friends?”
    This time I answered him. “No.”
    “Do you have a family?”
    “Not really.”
    “Do you have a boyfriend?”
    “Only you.”
    “Do you know how absolutely lovely, winsome, and precious you are?” he said, bundling me in his arms, the way a person holds a baby, after my shower.
    And it was only then that Simon set about enriching my education. He was impressed with my overall intelligence, and did not care to drill me further in Latin (despite the fact that my grasp of it faltered further with each successive chapter in
Wheelock’s
). Instead, Simon educated me about animals and their plight. He picked up where he had left off with the Gandhi quote he had recited in his office, handing me, one after another, all of the books whose titles I had read that day, followed by dozens more with a similar slant.
    To feel seen was such a pleasure, and I supposed that if I let Simon make me into what pleased him most he would never stop looking. So I was Simon’s girl for the shaping, and I read the books he recommended. But even Simon, incisive though he may have been, couldn’t have predicted the depth of my response to all he showed me.
    Dad had sometimes told me if I looked closely enough I could see that there was always a bit of heaven on earth. I knew he was right: I saw it easily in the orange blossoms, and in the sweet moments that sometimes flashed between us. But I had neverconsidered that there was a bit of hell on earth, too, until I read about factory farms.
    Those places, which produced most of the pork, beef, and poultry that I had long regarded as everyday sustenance, were home to practices so brutally inhumane I could hardly believe they existed in the twenty-first century. Personable pigs, gentle cows, and sensitive, sharp-witted birds who later became mere pieces of meat led, with far too few exceptions, completely confined lives full of emotional misery and physical torture.
    I could no longer bear to eat the flesh of creatures who had known so much fear and anguish, who weren’t free to feel the sunshine, flap their wings, or even so much as take a step, whose bodies were cut up in countless ways—their beaks, ears, teeth, tails, and more all sliced off while they were still alive, without painkillers—who screamed and cried out to no avail, who were separated from their young or else forced to nurse without ceasing, and made to dwell in the dirtiest of environments, sometimes among the dead bodies of their fellows.
    “The meat available at the market today is not anything like it was one hundred years ago before the advent of factory farms. These animals have a completely different quality of life—they have
no
quality of life,” Simon said. “Not that an animal’s good or happy life is any justification for eating it,” he added. “It isn’t. Ever. They aren’t ours to eat. The