Apr 06

Animal Cruelty

I wouldn’t say I so much ‘woke up.’ It was like I was in a half-dream state still. Everything was blurry, and I felt like I was being carried by a wave floating for seconds before being slammed to the ocean floor and pummeled atop the head. I knew I must have been on some type of drugs, but I couldn’t remember taking anything. And then that loud banging against my skull which I at first thought was a migraine until I felt my skin open and turned my head left. As my vision cleared into focus momentarily I saw one of those heavy-duty carjacks before I felt a sudden stop and I, slave to Newton’s laws of motion, felt a slam before I don’t remember anything again.

The next thing I do remember was a sudden sharp burn on my wrists and ankles. As I opened my eyes, I saw the black bottom of the trunk of a car. As I felt more movement, it occurred to me that I was hogtied and could only see mammoth legs crunching on the gravel as it seemed I was being carried like a duffel bag. Surely I must be dreaming I thought. This kind of stuff only happens in the movies.

The last thing I remember before the short scene in the trunk was being at our office party the night before, possibly longer, I was still pretty groggy. I had brought my ferret Willie over to Sheila’s house where we were doing Friday night cocktails this week. He had sort of become our mascot after drinks at my place a couple weeks previous when he was out of the cage and knocked over someone’s glass of Merlot. After a few sips, the normally hyper constantly bouncing ferret wobbled around slowly before laying down next to Randy and curling up under his leg while Randy petted him. It was quite cute. If you’ve never owned a ferret, then you don’t realize just how hard it is to get them to stay still for even a minute. We’d repeated this routine for a couple of weeks now just giving him a few sips to watch the gentle almost-rodent get all cuddly.

Thinking of Willie, I was suddenly not so concerned about where I was being carried to and more distraught over where my pet might be. That is until a door opened, and I was slung onto a piece of concrete slab like freshly removed tennis shoes. As I hit the ground, I heard a crack like I must have been hard-soled and then felt the most brutal pain in my ribs before I passed out again.

When I came to again, I had my arms and legs tied to a chair, and my eyes were being duct taped open by fucking Stacy, the crazy mail-room clerk who we never invited because of the constant comments on all the meat products we were eating. As she moved out of the way, I saw a flat screen television looping through scenes of animal torture. I felt like Alex from A Clockwork Orange as I watched cows being clubbed to death at factories, dogs being struck by their owners, cats being dissected in laboratories, and then a scene of one of our office parties of me feeding my ferret sips of a gin and tonic. I don’t know how she got the footage, but I knew I was fucked. She was being assisted by some dude who looked like he should be in one of those World’s Strongest Man competitions. And he was holding a steel sledge hammer. Could this guy be a vegan like her? How did he get the necessary protein? And then I saw Willie out of my periphery in the corner of the room, and as I saw him lift the hammer over my knee-caps, I hoped the torture wouldn’t last long as I yelled out, “Self-righteous fucks!”

I’d seen it on TV. You try to piss them off so they kill you faster rather than make the brutality continue on slowly. God, to think vegans would be the end of me. I was disgusted, but at least I knew Willie would be OK as my knee-cap cracked like ice coming out of a snow-machine, and it was that shock that let me know for certain I wasn’t dreaming anymore.