by Gene Stone
“Think,” she said aloud.
She scanned the room. She thought about the awareness. What was the first thing she had become aware of? She looked down. Her hooves. Yes. Those hard hooves, harder than the rest of her, seemingly made of bone.
She took her two front hooves and, like a stallion, reared up on on her hind legs and then crashed forward into the copper piping.
It gave a little. Not enough. But a little. She knew. She knew. She reared back and did it again. And again. Each time, the copper gave way. Now the final attack. Yes. She had punctured the copper, she could hear air seeping through. The pressure in the pipes was decreasing then, wasn’t it? Yes. Decreasing, decreasing until...whoosh...the locks switched open. The pigs were free.
But they didn’t move.
“Open your doors,” 323 shouted. She ran through the aisle between the cages. “The doors aren’t locked. Open your doors and run out! Run!”
But the pigs just looked at her.
Finally, one of them spoke. “I haven’t used my legs in years.”
“I’ve never used my legs,” another said.
“Tonight you will. Just push the door open with your snout, and come.”
323 raced around the confines, urging the entrapped pigs to rise.
At first the pigs refused to budge. And perhaps, if the fire hadn’t been encroaching, they never would have. But finally, the threat of the fire was enough. The pigs struggled. Their legs were weak and their bodies too big. Still, they found a way to stand. Their back lifted the metal lids. The fat of their sides leaked out of the slats. Their short legs churned. As the flames began to lick the barn, as the walls became flint for the impending inferno, the pigs, escaping from sheaths of metal, inched their way through the front door. 323 shouted at them, she encouraged them. And they made it out. All of them found a way out.
The ferret appeared, running. “No keys,” he shouted, but then he saw the pigs outside, safe. Soon many of the pigs from the pen, awoken by the explosion and the fire, had joined them. Here were their mothers, they learned, and they nudged each other, and talked, and sniffed, and wondered who belonged to whom, and why that suddenly seemed to matter. They moved away from the burning building to the safety of a close-by meadow, sultry from the fire’s heat but also cooled by the evening temperature.
323 stayed by the birthing pigs throughout the night. They watched the fire burn down to nothing. They spoke of their next round of piglets, how they’d be born into something different than any of the rest of them. Some were fearful. Most were hopeful. They thanked 323, over and over. She thanked them back. The other pigs asked her how she did it, how she was able to free the birthing pigs.
“I used my mind,” she said. “My body. And my hooves.” They all looked at their own bodies and hooves, and wondered what they would have done. Then they asked her to tell the story again and again. She might never have the kind of family she dreamed of in the house, but she felt she was getting something like it out here in the meadow.
Soon, the birthing pigs felt the fresh morning air for the first time. 323 watched as they tested themselves against the new elements, using their legs to walk for the first time, eating the food that the other pigs brought them, sniffing the ground, smelling the grass, coming to life. Currents of dust and debris swirled in the ashen air, rising up from somewhere unseen, waiting as the smoky dawn approached.
Dog
Why is my name Cooper?
They’d been waiting. For another noise, a scream, a car revving. Anything that would give them a sense that life was continuing outside. But they heard nothing. They sat quietly, each sinking deeper into his or her own thoughts.
Cooper. He had never thought about what it meant to have a name. Why Cooper? He rested his face on his paws, his eyes fluttering open when the others sighed or spoke. With Larry and Mary Lee gone, the tension that had charged the basement diffused, and Cooper could at least pretend it was a stable environment, a place where he could rest. But he couldn’t stop thinking.
He thought of his name, silently repeating the word. Cooper. The sound seemed as inexorable a part of him as his fur, or his love of the chase, his need to be praised. But maybe it was nothing more than a random group of syllables that labeled him? He understood now that humans gave names to everything—to their babies, their pets.
He opened, then raised an eye. Carol was shifting uncomfortably. Cooper. He was beginning to resent it—the name that Jessie squealed when he licked her face into submission, the name that branded his tags and jingled each time he moved. Could he be both a mammal going off to war and a pet named Cooper?
“Cooper, what are you thinking?” Jessie asked.
“Nothing.”
Jessie didn’t press him. She knew him, though; she probably knew he was lying.
“Why did you name me Cooper?” he finally asked.
Jessie shook her head. “What a strange question. Cooper was the name of the first boy I had a crush on. Years ago. In elementary school. I always liked the name. I guess you reminded me of him somehow.”
“You named me after a school girl crush?”
Jessie shrugged. “So? It’s a good name. It suits you. It always did.”
His name—that sound that seemed so crucial to his identity—was nothing but a nostalgic whim.
They think only of themselves. He sighed. The room had calmed, but this was no sanctuary; he couldn’t sit here and feign rest. He walked without wagging his tail. He kept his eyes down. He thought about the times when Jessie locked him in the apartment when she went outside, the times she forgot to feed him, the moments he needed love and she wasn’t there, too busy with the comings and goings of her job and her boyfriends and Peter. Baths. Flea collars. The severe slaps when he had an “accident.”
He felt angry. The anger flowed both from and into the revolution. They were all angry. He sat back down, wrapping his tail around his legs. For one brief moment, he let himself imagine it. Taste a human. Tear into it. Isn’t that what the rats had urged? Rip it from the bone and tendon, gnaw at the sinews and dig until the marrow bursts forth. He found himself rising, walking slowly toward Carol, who was fiddling with the dead radio. If he just took one bite, other bites would follow, each would be easier than the first, each would satisfy this new hunger—a hunger that was more powerful and primal than the name of some third-grade tow-headed boy, this hunger that belonged only to him.
How terrible it was to be tame! He took another step. Then one more. And this is how the bites would go, one and then another, and then another.
He walked around and around the basement, an animal chasing his own thoughts.
He sat again, and, for a while, there was quiet. He’d wait. He’d think.
Then the door at the top of the stairs jerked open, hitting the wall with a loud thud.
The bats, he thought, but he was wrong.
An animal stood in the entrance. He was grey and black, with pointed ears and a long snout. His delicate nose twitched as it tried to find something familiar in the squalid air.
“Wolf,” Cooper whispered.
Carol scudded back toward the wall. Jessie stared, motionless. The wolf lifted his head and beamed his yellow gaze at the room below. The iridescent eyes, the matted fur, the clotted blood along his neck, the mud that ringed his large, flat paws all were signs of a powerful war-torn being. The wolf let out a tremendous yowl. Carol trembled. Jessie took a few steps back. Cooper wanted to run toward the ancient animal and run away from it at once. For a moment he was sure the wolf’s roar was meant solely for him, a trumpet to action, a reminder of his true identity.
The wolf took a step. Then he leapt from the top of the stairs to the bottom in two beautiful bounds. Cooper could smell the scent of death on him. It was sharp, it made Cooper’s mouth water. Take Carol,” Cooper said to himself. Take Carol. He tried to push the wolf towards her, but the wolf didn’t have any interest in hunting the weak and wounded. He silently stalked the room. Jessie,
Carol, and Cooper might as well have grown roots in the cement floor.
The wolf snorted, then bared his teeth and yowled again. Carol shrieked, her body collapsing in fear. Jessie ran to her.
These sudden movements stoked the wolf to attack. Cooper watched the animal retract onto his back feet, then thrust his body forward, cutting through the air with an acrobat’s ease.
Cooper couldn’t stop himself. He lunged at the wolf, meeting him in midair, striking. The wolf was focused on Jessie’s gullet, and Cooper had no trouble making contact with a crimson wound along the wolf’s neck. Cooper bit into it with all of his strength until his body and the wolf’s were tangled into one.
He could taste foreign blood, maybe Larry’s, maybe another person’s, and then the blood of the wolf. It was salty, vital, repulsive. The wolf yelped. He fell to the floor, writhing. Cooper rolled on top of him, then jumped up. The wolf, whimpering, stayed down.
“Kill it, Cooper!” Carol yelled.
Jessie narrowed her eyes at the grounded wolf.
“Kill it!” Carol screamed again.
It was the only thing to do. Cooper gnashed his teeth. He would do it, finish it, finish this.
But hadn’t he told himself the same thing earlier?
Would this ever be over?
He looked at Jessie. She looked at him.
The wolf was losing blood. It flowed from his neck, a small red river with a pulsing current. He was too weak to fight now; for a wolf, not fighting was tantamount to death. He closed his yellow eyes with an impotent flutter of his lids. Still, Cooper couldn’t take the final breath from the grey animal, his ancestor. He stood, staring at the beast who lay sprawled before him, muddled and scarred from battle.
“I can’t,” Cooper said. “I can’t kill him.”
The wolf attempted to rise. Cooper steadied himself, instinctively readying himself to attack. He couldn’t kill the wolf, but he couldn’t allow Jessie to be killed either. The wolf struggled up, zigzagging across the room like an old wind-up toy running down. Cooper followed. When it became clear the wolf was just wobbling around the basement on the fumes of pride and honor, Cooper guided him into the third room. He needed to segregate the two beings that were fighting for his loyalty, the two species who seemed most like his family—wolf and human.
The dazed animal circled the little room, searching for a nest, an enemy, a purpose—something.
Cooper needed to kill him. It wasn’t fair to let him die this way, slowly, painfully, an evaporating shadow.
The wolf collapsed onto a dusty knit rug.
A simple tear of the jugular and the wolf would be dead. Cooper walked up to him, his head lowered in reverence, and sniffed the wound he’d helped to open.
“I just can’t kill you,” Cooper whispered.
“I can,” said a soft, knowing voice from above.
Clio perched on a high shelf. She dropped gracefully to the ground and, with a quick, feral pounce, she was on the wolf, gnawing on his neck, ending his life.
The wolf didn’t fight.
Cooper looked away. He would sooner look at anything other than a domestic cat opening the arteries and destroying the essence of a wolf. A poster on the wall showed a large-breasted woman in sunglasses opening a beer bottle. On the poster next to it a shortstop froze midair, mid-throw. Clio walked right under Cooper’s nose so that he could smell the remnants of the wolf on her breath, in her whiskers.
“We have to leave now,” she said. “Someone will know the wolf is missing. Perhaps they’ll guess we did it. And even if they don’t know, we do.”
Cooper hated this room. He took a few heavy steps back, stumbling on the bodies of two rats, freshly dead, fang marks in their necks.
Cooper looked at Clio.
Clio looked down at the ground. “Dogs aren’t the only animals who know how to love,” she said quietly, and then walked to the room where Carol and Jessie sat, still in shock after the wolf attack. Cooper followed.
“Clio,” Jessie cried, grabbing the cat and holding her close, nearly smothering her. “Oh, Clio,” she murmured. “My darling Clio.” Cooper remembered when Jessie brought Clio home from the shelter. The tiny kitten was nervous, she hid in the corners and looked out at the world through glinting, suspicious eyes. Her short life had been punctuated by alley fights and pigeon wars, and already she’d possessed a defiant if grave personality. Cooper wished he could enjoy the sight of her now, relaxed and purring in Jessie’s arms, but he could still feel the presence of the dead wolf, the dead rats, in the other room. His head ached.
Clio wriggled out of Jessie’s grasp.
“It’s time we left,” she said.
“But you just got here, Clio,” Jessie argued.
“I’ve been here the whole time,” Clio stated calmly. She didn’t tell Jessie what Cooper now realized: The cat had hidden herself away because she knew that she’d have fallen into the dog’s predicament: the inability to chose sides.
“But I have so much I want to ask you, so much I need to ask you...”
“You were wonderful,” Clio cut Jessie off. “That’s all you need to know. We have to go.”
“No,” Jessie said.
“Clio’s right,” Cooper said. “It’s not safe here. Not for Clio. Not for me. And it’s not safe for you if we stay here.”
“So you will fight,” Jessie said tentatively.
“Yes,” Clio said.
“We’re enemies now, aren’t we,” Jessie murmured, the words stepping from her mouth with slow precision.
“No,” Cooper said. He would go off his way, Jessie hers—that didn’t make them enemies. He and Clio began to walk up the stairs. Jessie stifled a cry, but Cooper didn’t turn. He and Clio were on their way.
But then the door flung open once again. This time no bat or wolf confronted them. This time it was a wounded, bloodied, raving man, with curled fingers gripping a woodman’s axe.
“She’s dead and I was left for dead,” Larry said. He swung the axe at Cooper, who ducked, avoiding the metal edge.
“Larry, no!” Jessie screamed. But Larry swung again. This time Cooper was ready. This time he didn’t have to stop himself from attacking, didn’t have to worry if he was attacking friend or foe; that switch in his brain that had been oscillating between right and wrong, human and mammal, pet and slave, didn’t apply to Larry.
His jaw found the sweet spot in Larry’s hand, his teeth snapping around the phalanges. The axe dropped to the floor. Cooper attacked Larry’s face, working over the human’s senses with a series of vicious scratches.
Larry fell to the floor. He gasped for breath. He reached out and pointed a finger at Jessie. Cooper bore into him relentlessly until the finger lay in repose, pointing at nothing except the stifling air.
Cooper panted. He could hear things he hadn’t before. A buzz of bees, the subtle fervor of rustling wind, the faint purr of a prideful house cat. With Larry dead, with the taste of that victory leading him, he left the human carcass, stepping over the hardening waste, rubbing his paws into the fleshy recesses between the ribs.
Jessie was crying. Cooper had forgotten how easily humans wept. He watched her. He had wondered what it was like to be human at the onset of the awareness and now he understood at least one nuance of the human condition. To spare a weaker entity seemed to him to be the highest form of awareness.
Jessie drew back as he approached her. With his eyes and his demeanor he let her know that she wouldn’t be harmed. She quickly realized this and drew toward him, holding her face in his fur, letting the tears drip on his body. He looked over at Carol, who was holding a knife she must have discovered somewhere in the toolbox under the table. It looked like her, rusty and tough and used.
Where did he belong? He looked up the stairs, where Clio was waiting. Then he turned to Jessie. He had made up his mind. But once again he was interrupted.
“Any and all humans, make your way out of your houses,” a metallic voice boomed from outside. “We hav
e an armed bus to take you to shelter. You must come out now. You must board the bus. You must join us.”
“Praise God,” Carol moaned, crossing herself.
“Come with me, Jessie. They’re here. Run.”
She darted up the stairs, surprising everyone with her sudden energy, the energy of boundless relief.
“Mom!” Jessie ran after her. Cooper and Clio followed. Soon they were all outside, on the front porch, in the quiet twilight of a summer evening.
A man emerged from a large yellow bus with flashing red lights. He looked like any number of men Cooper had seen delivering food, picking up garbage cans, dropping off packages, except that his body was covered in thick, protective clothing and he wore a strange helmet. He yelled something to Carol and Jessie, something that Cooper couldn’t hear.
“What?” Jessie yelled
The man started waving at the two women frantically, then pulled something from the back of his pants, something that shone in the bland light of a sun just set.
“There are two beasts behind you,” the man screamed. “Get out of the way!” Then he aimed the shining object—a gun, Cooper could see now that it was a gun—at Cooper, the more deadly of the two beasts.
Cooper cocked his head. Jessie was screaming at the man, waving her arms at him.
Above, Cooper could hear the faint conversation of two plovers perched on a juniper branch.
The gun flashed in the man’s hand. Cooper needed to run, but he was frozen by the artistry and the power of that glinting object. All the indecision of the day, the sense of being pulled back and forth, drifted away, the tension in his mind and his heart relaxing. Let it be, he thought. Let it be.
The gun fired. He felt nothing. But he heard a gasp, and then a moan. He opened his eyes and saw blood spilling from a body. For a second he was confused—Jessie?
It was Carol. She had leaned between Cooper and the bullet; she had shielded him with her body, saved his life just as he had saved hers. The bullet had slammed into her chest.