He wanted to scare off the birds. Not that they stole from him, or attacked him, or caused him damage. But whenever he was doing something, there was at least one of those feathery critters looking at him. Or, to be more precise, staring at him. His only moments of respite were the nights, which he spent with his house so hermetically, tightly closed that no ray of moonlight could go in.

He knew that the birds were on to something. When he woke up, he could hear them chirping or crowing or singing or balbutinazing or doing whatever ugly sounds birds do, the happy din made even more irritating by the total darkness of his house. When he opened the windows, letting the sun in, silence fell immediately. But there was always one little fluffy brown thing, or a big shiny blue-black one, ogling him with its lifeless round eyes from a nearby branch. Clapping his hands, shouting insults or physical threats swept by, unnoticed. Worse, they attracted other birds, and soon dozens of them were keeping watch. After a while, some took flight, to do whatever bored birds do, to be replaced by others, and his whole day was spent this way.

He had tried the usual tricks. First the cat-looking device with glass eyes that you hang on a tree. The birds seemed curious about it at first - a least that was a diversion - but resumed their man-watching after a couple of days. He then tried a real cat. It became apparent that the cat just pretended to have some interest in the birds. The feline chased them only when his master was watching and didn't bother to put up a convincing show. The man became convinced that there was some secret pact between the birds and the cat, returned her to the pet shop and asked unsuccessfully for a refund. Multiple visions of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" didn't provide any good solution. He bought a rifle and more or less learnt to use it. Shooting the birds proved to be impractical, as they always landed on something that would have been damaged by the shot. Firing guns in a family-oriented neighborhood wasn't perceived as a good idea either, as evidenced by the complaints that were soon filed against him. The judge forced him to undergo a therapy. On the psychiatrist's window ledge, the two sparrows who faced him during his therapy sessions looked thoroughly more interested in his problems than the doctor. He eventually declared that he wasn't seeing birds anymore, to everyone's relief.

He went on vacation, only to find that his foes were following him. A cloud of birds seemed to gather above his head wherever he went, the cloud being more brightly coloured and bigger as the climate became more tropical. Treks in the deserts were the worse. He'd have twice many vultures on his trail than anybody else in the caravan.

He went back home. He considered gorging himself to death with fried chicken. On his way to KFC, he gave up. He couldn't spend the rest of the eternity under a slab of granite that pigeons would use for