The Animals Are Done Watching

 Monday, November 18, 2024

                                                           

For now, I’ll call him Horace. That’s not his real name, but when they find the body – and they will  find it - I don’t want them making the connection. You know, that I had anything to do with what happened. I’m just gonna be the dog that went missing.

After it happens, that is. Right now Horace is still very much alive. He looks scared though, stretched out and tied down on top of that steel table like that. Gagged with that red scarf pulled tight in his mouth. Can’t say as I blame him, and in a way I feel bad about this. After all, Horace was always pretty good to me in a master-to-pet kinda way. It’s what he and his group did with those other animals - on that same steel table - that I couldn’t stomach anymore. Not anymore.

 So no way he could have been expecting this, right? Being woken up in the middle of the night by his loyal German Shepherd (he named me Fletch, which I hate) and then ordered to follow me to the basement. The basement where he and his fellow religious nuts did all those terrible things. They called it sacrifice, making contact to some other higher power, but we say it’s murder. Plain and simple. Anyway, I think the shock of me speaking to Horace in plain English like that after nine years of barking, panting and whining was what made him not bother to resist. Poor guy probably figured he was having a bad dream.

He wasn’t. He knows that now.

More importantly, we were careful to make sure no other humans would be expecting anything like this either. Because Horace was the first, but he wasn’t going to be the last. As animals from the neighborhood (not just dogs and cats but a variety of birds, squirrels, even a couple of pet monkeys who assisted with the binding and gagging part), we were fed up with the whole thing, so we figured it was time for us to make a statement. We had to let them know just how unacceptable this was. Some of us took longer to come around, like myself, just because how ridiculously loyal we animals tend to be, but there does come a breaking point. Freedom of religion is fine, but not when it means one of us has to get ‘sacrificed’ so one of them can get in touch with his or her spirit world. That part just doesn’t work for us.

Which is why it wasn’t a hard decision to tie Horace up like we did, or for me to volunteer him as the first message. To be honest, we should have come together on this a long time ago. I mean if we had just made our move last week we could have saved Barney. What a great feline he was, and handsome too. British Shorthair. Gray. Kinda arrogant, but then he was a cat. I’d see him perched there in the window several houses down whenever Horace took me out for a walk. Then, next thing I know, I see Horace and the neighbor coming through the door with Barney in a cage. That night I heard the last sound Barney ever made, and that was the night I volunteered Horace.

As the saying goes, never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Or tonight.

Horace doesn’t look good at all.