Parrotastrophe At The Train Station

• Senugi Dissanayake, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2016

Once there was a young woman, who was travelling to her family’s house in France with her parrot by train. The parrot was obviously kept in the pet carriage on the train along with the other pets. When the young woman arrived in France, she didn't receive her parrot back with the other luggage and was tremendously concerned about it.
"I want my parrot back because then I would have travelled here for nothing. I’m going to report this to the police if you don’t find her!" The station workers hurried off quickly to find her parrot frightened of what she’d do to their station if she didn’t get her parrot back.
The baggage department was in a chaos and were wondering where the parrot went! Fortunately, they found the parrot in its cage but to their horror, the parrot was dead! The baggage authorities were already feeling ashamed of making their valued passenger disappointed and were tremendously afraid to tell her of this catastrophe. One intelligent worker came up with a simple solution, though.
"She will get angry at the train station officers if she finds out her parrot is dead," a station worker exclaimed to the other. Therefore, they decided to replace the dead parrot with a living one that looked identical, making sure she didn’t realise it is a different parrot. So some of the workers rushed to the pet store to get a similar looking parrot while the other workers told the young lady to wait as patiently as she could, trying to comfort her. Eventually, they managed to get a live parrot that looked exactly like her dead parrot and gave it to the woman. “This isn’t my parrot, she was dead! That’s why I travelled here in the first place, to bury her with my family, you blockheads!” The young woman yelled in a high-pitched voice. She grabbed the new parrot anyways and stormed off.