Kiki the parrot could repeat anything. Every rumor that flew through the jungle, every dare, every "come on, everyone's doing it" — Kiki heard it and squawked it right back. She had a thousand voices tucked inside her, all of them borrowed from someone else.
But there was one voice Kiki had never once listened to: her own.
"Everyone says the misty path is the fun way!" chirped the monkeys one afternoon. "Everyone's taking it! Come on, Kiki, don't be a scaredy-bird!"
"Everyone's taking it! Don't be a scaredy-bird!" Kiki repeated, exactly as she'd heard it, and fluttered along after the group toward the misty path at the jungle's edge.
But as they reached the start of the path — where the mist hung low and thick and the ground disappeared into gray — something happened that had never happened to Kiki before.
Something inside her fluttered. Quiet. Wordless. A small, soft signal, deep in her chest, that seemed to say, without any noise at all: *don't.*
It wasn't loud. It didn't shout or explain itself. It didn't come from the monkeys or the rumors or the "everyone's doing it." It came from somewhere quieter and deeper — somewhere that was only hers.
Kiki hesitated at the edge of the misty path. "I... I don't think I'll go," she said slowly. The words felt strange in her beak — because for once, they weren't borrowed. They were her own.
"Scaredy-bird!" the monkeys laughed, and one by one they hopped onto the misty path and vanished into the gray.
Kiki stayed behind, her heart still fluttering that quiet, wordless *don't*. She didn't fully understand it. But it was hers, and for the first time in her life, she decided to trust it.
A few minutes later, there came a great commotion from the mist — yelps and scrambling and the monkeys came tumbling back out, muddy and shaken. Beyond the mist, it turned out, the path dropped away into a deep, hidden bog. The monkeys had gotten stuck to their knees in the muck and barely pulled themselves free.
"How did you know not to come?" they asked Kiki, wide-eyed, wiping mud from their fur. "Did someone tell you?"
Kiki thought about it. "No," she said slowly. "Nobody told me. For the first time, I didn't repeat what everyone said. I listened to something quieter. Something inside me. It just... fluttered. And I trusted it."
The monkeys had no clever reply to that.
From that day on, Kiki still loved to chatter and repeat and join in — she was a parrot, after all. But she'd learned that among her thousand borrowed voices, there was one that mattered most: the quiet one, deep in her chest, that was hers and hers alone.
And whenever it fluttered — soft, wordless, sure — Kiki stopped repeating everyone else, and listened.
