Laugh Your Beak Off by Jennifer Lewis

We didn’t know how fragile she was when we downloaded the SepTimus app. We thought it would be like the whoopee cushion. Pffffffffffft. Fun for the whole family! Google had inserted microchips in all the Bay Area birds, and with SepTimus (only $3.99), you could give each bird a voice. We wanted to surprise her. We knew if the birds talked, she’d be onto our shenanigans. So, we started with Level 1: Laugh Your Beak Off.

For the hummingbirds, we used Julia Roberts’s laugh in Pretty Woman—the deranged one she lets out when Richard Gere snaps her glove. The crows got Jack Nicholson’s psychotic cackle from The Shining. For the blue jays, Jim Carrey’s side-mouthed snicker from Ace Ventura, which we knew she’d like better than SpongeBob’s screech.

We hadn’t really watched those movies—just bits and pieces. Stuff Mom left on when Dad was gone. The actors looked about her age. We figured she’d recognize their voices. Once, we heard her say she missed adult conversations, that her brain was rotting. We were considerate pranksters, after all.

We tested SepTimus in the backyard while she was inside, whisper-fighting on the phone. We laughed so hard she muted the call and barked, “What’s so funny out there?!”

“Nothing!” we replied.

Since we got the puppy, Mom spent more time in the backyard. She paced beneath the drooping yellow flowers, her thumbs tapping out messages we weren’t supposed to see. We called them banana bells. Google said angel trumpets. She said the puppy might eat one and die—that’s why she stayed out there so long, looping under the yellow bells. Sometimes we watched her press her face into the petals. Google said if you smelled them, you might get high. If you ate one, you might not wake up.

When she refilled the birdseed in the birdhouse, we knew it was SepTimus time. We raced to the upstairs windows and eased them open. Julia cackled. Jack roared. Jim Carrey snickered. Shoulders shaking, we clapped our little hands over our mouths—but she didn’t turn her head or yell up at us. She just smiled at the birds on the telephone wire and slid her hands into her cardigan pockets.

We ran downstairs, expecting something. When we asked if she’d noticed anything different, she kept staring at her phone. Then she looked at us—blankly. Half-listening, half somewhere else. Her eyes didn’t settle.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” she said.

We ran to our rooms, wondering what else she’d already decided we didn’t need to know.

Jennifer Lewis is a writer, editor, and publisher of Red Light Lit. Her debut short story collection, The New Low (Black Lawrence Press), was an SPD Bestseller. She is the winner of the Nomadic Press Bindle Award and The Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Cosmonauts Avenue, Midnight Breakfast, The Los Angeles Press, and CRAFT, among others. Additionally, her most recent nonfiction work has been featured in The Rumpus, The Creative Independent, and Alta Journal, where her piece “The High Desert’s Funkiest Art Gallery” won the Los Angeles Press Club’s 17th annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. She received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Jennifer teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco.

6 November 2026