Peter stepped back and spent a minute pondering just how unpredictable his life had become. He moved to the next window to the right of the front door, through which there was a clear view of the stairs, the dining room, and the entrance to the kitchen. Inside, everything looked as it should. Boxes, some still packed, were spread out around, and on, their gigantic, new mahogany dining room table(a table that was the fourth or fifth most expensive thing he’d ever owned). The room was, as of yet, mostly bare of personal furnishings. Such things would take time. The wallpaper was peeled back, just like in the real world, revealing the old, waist-high mural. Nothing seemed out of place to Peter. And nothing looked plastic. He could see down into one of the cardboard boxes. The flaps were wide open and he could see the contents quite clearly. Everything was perfectly normal, whatever normal is.
Peter raised the spade like he was going to drive it into a vampire’s chest. He lunged. The blade struck at the center of the window and he jumped back with his eyes closed. The window was cracked, with dozens of little zig-zagging trails crazing out from the point of contact. An army of little Peters stared out at him, each imprisoned in its little shard and mimicking his baffled expression. Apparently, the window was a mirror.
He could no longer see into the house. What happened to all of the things inside? Had they been real? Did the house have an inside, at all? There had to be, that’s what he was here for. Douglas Windward was not a person that could be completely fooled like that. Of that, Peter was certain.
Peter chopped at the broken mirror, chipping away at the shards and sweeping them off. This revealed bars of colors underneath. Another mural? That’s what it looked like. A bit more work and, although he’d only uncovered about a square foot, he could see one leg of a pair of brown trousers that looked suspiciously like the very pair that he was currently wearing. He started to swipe away the shards vigorously and was soon flinging the litter away, slashing bits into the air and sending them all over. He had uncovered, when he was done, what was, with only a shade of doubt, a new mural of him painted in the mostly bright, basic colors of Sparkle-Wacko. At least, he thought it was a mural of him. The little shade of doubt was due to only the bottom half of the picture showing anything that could be reasonably recognizable as him. His hands, were they his, were clutching the spade. The top half of his body, if it were him, was being consumed in the hostile, crocodile jaws of a gigantic cat.
The picture was rough, lacking in details, the hues far too simple to really convey the violence it depicted. The cat’s(more like panther’s)enormous, rapier teeth were sunk deep into Peter’s torso, bisecting him like a gingerbread man bitten in half on Christmas morning. Half a second later this picture would be very different, covered in bright red blood erupting from the creature’s jaws. Its eyes were squeezed tight in the kind of ecstasy one takes from tasting only the most delightful of delicacies. This gave Peter the shivers, because there was no misinterpreting the message the picture was relating. I’m going to be Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for monsters. Maybe it would be made with red vines, just to rhyme with Bunyine. Redyines. Wow, that would be friggin’ awful ice cream.
It was inevitable for a man who watched as many films as Peter has to imagine this moment in time played out in a theatrical fashion. That the Bunyine was standing directly behind him as he was examining its depiction directly in front of him. He wondered if right this very moment the movie camera was turning on its axis, finalizing its journey in a perfectly boxed shot of the creature overlooking him, his back turned and his attention elsewhere. And what creature feature trope would alert him? Would it growl, cuing him to freeze, gain a wide-eyed, terrorized expression and slowly turn around to face his imminent demise? Perhaps he would be standing there, none the wiser, only alerted to the demon’s presence when a puff of its breath blew up a tuft of hair on his head. The monster wouldn’t even have done it on purpose, either. It would just be standing there, patiently waiting on its prey, like any confident predator, when a mote of dust or pollen blew into its nostrils. Peter smiled. That would be pretty funny. Unless that was what's happening right now. It would ruin the joke if it was me.
When Peter turned around, however, he faced a complete vacancy. There was nothing there but the front porch. Peter swung the spade up onto his shoulder as if it were a rifle. He wished it was. Okay, so if I’m not going to be eaten in this scene, what do I do? What do you do when the monster in your monster movie fails to show up?
While Peter had been lost in a ponderance of monsters, something started to happen underneath him. An erratic tension had begun to grow underfoot, little vibrations connecting with his ankles and running up his legs like faint electric currents. Soon enough, he started to feel it increase in intensity. The boards started to hum. The hum quickly became a rumble. By then, it was getting almost too hard to keep on his feet. Pretty soon, they were bouncing like a herd of elephants pounding by, the boards kicking up at the bottoms of his feet, making him hop. In some animated cuteness, the nails started hopping out of the holes into which they’d been nailed, then sucked snugly back into them. The planks started flipping out of their slots, then falling back into place. He would have run from the porch except for the fact that it felt like the house was compelling him to do that.
He was hit with what felt like a sudden bout of crippling nausea coming on. Like his stomach was flipping over inside of him, his head filling up with hot, sour blood that threatened to explode. The whole earth seemed to lurch, and gravity turned to chaos. The world began to fly in several directions. Land and hills spun away. The sun fired further skyward. He grabbed the porch rail just as his legs swung out from under him, pointing off the porch, perpendicular to the front door and windows, leaving him dangling like a chimpanzee, his feet kicking into a vast, blue sky.
Peter, just like he was not very good at a lot of things, was also not very good at dangling by his arms. Dangling well takes strength equal to one’s bodyweight, which seemed almost more than he could summon, right then. The edges of the wood post were digging into his forearms. It was, probably, the most painful thing he’d ever felt, even here in the softer physics of Sparkle-wacko. There were more forces at work here than gravity alone. His grip unraveled, and he was suspended by his hands. As he hung there, for what seemed like a long time, he could feel his palms tallying away each passing second in tingling pumps of blood. As the pull of gravity intensified, he knew would not last very long. That strange sky, a brazen blue slapped on there as if straight from the funny pages, looked infinite, as no doubt it was.
“That’s not where the sky is?” Peter yelled. “Put it back, asshole!”
He felt rumbling through his arms. There was a sound like a slow, rocky scraping. A boulder being slid into the mouth of a cave, sealing it for eternity. The house now moved until it was underneath him, his feet hanging just over the window displaying a giant Peter-eating cat awaiting him, jaws displayed. He turned his options over in his head. One option only turns so many times, however. What would happen if he just dropped? Was the window waiting for him to do that? He knew he couldn’t hold on forever, he could feel his arms and shoulders, his whole upper-body, weakening. He was in such bad shape. The window soon began to look more foreboding now, with the jaws of the gigantic predator situated beneath him. It felt to Peter like a good time to start thinking about his future. God, are you listening? If I survive this, I swear I’ll try to think super hard about exercising, maybe.
Peter landed on the window with a thud. Nothing else happened. He got off it in a hurry, nonetheless. He was relieved, but his heart was still bounding like a stallion's, racing toward a climactic resolution. He was now standing in between the front deck and the balcony, parallel to wood planks he was used to standing on. Looking around him, he was uncertain what to do next. Investigating windows, so far, had led to nothing but misadventure. Gravity had changed direction. He was caught here, with nothing but the front of his house underneath him to keep him from falling up into the sky.
He paced back and forth for a minute or so, getting back his bearings. Where did he go from here? The front door of the house was now underfoot, so he stood on it and knelt down and tried the doorknob. It felt just as it had before, impossibly firm. He stood back up, again, and moved over to the window to his left and below him. Something had changed inside the room full of plastic furniture, which was now beneath him. Another full-sized mural of himself was watching him from across the room. It had not been there moments before, that was certain. It looked wrinkly, a little like a sticker that had been slapped right over the low treetops and bushes the original muralist had painted. There was something odd about the way he looked in the painting. For some reason he was making a silly face. A very silly face. It looked like someone had snapped a photo at the moment he'd sneezed. Peter felt a little violated. Nonetheless, he found himself leaning in against the window for a better look inside.
The mural beneath him, against all sense, started to stir. The figure struggled in place, as if it were a man chained to the wall. Slowly the center started forcing itself out as if being punched through with a fist. After wriggling itself free it began to inch toward him. Apparently, gravity was working the same as always inside the house. Its feet slid across the floor, as if moving under its own impetus, not the guidance of a marionette. Soon enough, it was there, its head staring up at him through the top sash. The sun gave it a vascular look, ridged and wrinkled like the face of Mars. Peter could see the strokes of the paintbrush on his counterpart. The head and body were flat and sticky. The edges were drooping. Little air bubbles stood out all over it, as well, puffed out like buboes and boils. The whole head puckered inward at the lips as the face smiled. It looked like a balloon made of bubble gum. It had an eerie charm, like a creature out of Oz. A half-clown, half-demon, whose persona could go either way. It took him a couple of minutes, but now that it was up close, Peter recognized what he was looking at. It wasn’t obvious at first, but now that he figured it out, he felt a little violated. That's me in the attic! That flash of light in the attic! This thing has been stalking me for days. Well, at least I don’t have a brain tumor.
Another interesting development appeared while Peter wasn't looking: It was now holding a cutout spade in its hands. The mural started to insistently flap the spade against the window, the faux-metal head flipping back and forth. This made Peter angry. “What now? Huh? I’m not falling for it!” Peter yelled. He really thought that he meant it, too. “I lost it! Okay! I lost it when you flipped the world over!”
Peter caught some movement in the side of his eye, his head snapped to the right. The spade was there, leaning against the underside of the balcony. He decided to grab it, if only to have something to defend himself with. Peter tore towards the tool and snatched it up. He clenched the handle of the spade, and it gave him confidence. He gave it a swing or two, slashing from the side, then from over his head like a sledgehammer. Okay, I’m John Henry now. John Henry died, true, but he won, and a win’s a win. He had to stay observant, though. The Onk was going to try to trick him. Just remember, you’re smart, too. You’re an inventor, a geek, a practical joker. You’re a formidable enemy when it comes to games of wit. You destroyed everyone in Star Wars Monopoly. You snapped up Alderaan, and it was just all-out slaughter from there on. You’ve got this.
Something happened in his periphery. A nagging light in the side of his eye drew Peter's gaze up where some glowing phenomenon was stretching into the sky like a searchlight. It was a strange and ethereal pillar of light, a percolating, ghostly stack of colors in the deep hues of the reality he knew back on Earth. It seemed to be originating from the position of the attic, possibly the stained-glass window, which he couldn’t see from where he stood. Peter could do nothing but assume it was intended for him, to show him where next to go. But was it a trap? Why the Onk would be helping him now was beyond him, so there likely was a surprise waiting for him at the end of this rainbow. Peter didn’t care if it was, there was nowhere else for him to go.
Back up on the deck, in front of the window, Peter stood brandishing the shiny, new spade like a war ax. He was starting to feel a little aggressive, and he wanted to work with it. I’m like Schwarzenegger in the first Conan. Two-hundred-and-fifty lbs. of traumatizing masculinity. I’m BIG. Men run away from me screaming like I am rolling death, Mad Max behind the wheel of a recalled Ford Tempo. Inside the house, the strange, floppy thing that looked like him stared back. “I’m coming in there!” Peter growled. “You just wait right there, dickface! I ain’t kidding!” The creature slid backward, receding into the room, so Peter knew he’d gotten his point across. It was one of the few occasions in his life he’d sounded intimidating, and it was, for sure, the only time he’d said the word ‘ain’t’. So, to his mind, this was starting off with some promise.
My father gave an order for his soldiers to surround me. They had out their spears, training them at my body. My courage dashed away, desperately, like a down of hares. Though I whimpered and choked with fear, like a child, there was no mercy in the faces of any of these hard men. He would not look at me, now, though I cried for him. He pointed a long finger at me and addressed them.
“This creature is harmless,” father said to them. Bring it to the ground.” And that was that. It began with a ruckus of hollers. The soldiers surged inward and the points of their spears entered me from every angle. Some merely poked me with their weapons, while some buried them, with a merry battle call, deep within my body. First, with a jab, which pierced my hide; second, when they leaned in, the points often tearing viciously up or down. My throat must have grown hoarse from the cries of pain. From a lofty point above me, in some ethereal nest the mind makes when it needs to escape from the body, I listened to the first pitiable screams of a massive creature. These were the cries of a child’s first taste of betrayal.
When the first sally was finished, I tried to speak, but nothing came out of my throat but my own thick blood. Confusion had me stunned witless. The confusion was as unbearable as the pain. I had felt pain before, but this was different.
“Take the limbs. Remove them, all four,” my father ordered. Knives and swords cut the air as they were torn from their scabbards and their belts. Dizzy and bewildered, I began to struggle, rolling back and forth, my lengthy legs kicking aimlessly, like an infant’s. Some of the soldiers cowered, leaped back and away. Father stepped in again. “Fix him to the ground!” he hollered. Men still grasping their spears, the tips still lodged in my body, turned the back ends up and forced the points into the earth with a dissonance of heaves and hoes. Hide and flesh burst and tore. The pain doubled, and I managed to scream. Words poured from my mouth through an effluvium of blood and bile. People all around us stared, transfixed by fear. Finally, I was restrained. I simply stopped struggling. The wood poles wrenching wide splits in my skin and hide until I held still. Long moments passed and things grew quiet, with nothing but bubbles and small whines coming through my mouth and nostrils.
When father was satisfied, he gave a nod, and the men went back to their work. I was too exhausted to struggle, dizzy from the constant blood flow through dozens of deep holes and zig-zagging rills in my flesh. I was far too weak to struggle as ropes were thrown across my slick body and were tied to stakes that were pounded deep into the earth. The ties crisscrossed me, and I resembled a giant noose when they were done, the lines tight and straining. My limbs poked through the knots like an infant’s legs through its swaddling.
The soldiers soon gathered themselves set upon my legs with their weapons, attacking what joints were protruding through the ropes with slashes and sawing motions. I roared in agony as flecks of bloody meat and tendon speckled my face and filled my mouth. Try as they might, however, my bones were unbreakable to these mortal men, my joints impossible to sever. Soon, my limbs were stripped, skeletal. I stared at them, horrified, wondering if I was hallucinating. The pain is not something I can describe.
“Stop!” father yelled. The men quit their butchery and backed away from the hideous spectacle they’d made of me. I was weeping quiet tears when father approached me. So pathetic I was, I even imagined, right then, that his love for me, his monstrous child, had inspired him to set me free, despite what he'd been instructed to do. He walked around me, carefully looking me over. On his face, a tense look of the pity I longed for, yet it was girded with resolve. A small whimper escaped, somehow, through my glutted throat. I wanted, so desperately, to speak, but could not. Father bent down over me. My head turned pathetically towards him, it took what little strength I had to do. I wanted, so much, for him to pet me, again. I stared at his fingers, as if it they were an idol of salvation. My tongue hung from my mouth, I drew it up and tried to lick him. It was the only part of me that could move like it should. However, father would not pat me or stroke my brow this time. I was even more repulsive now than I had been. I could see that in his face. He brought his lips to my tattered ear, then spoke his last words to me.
“This pain will be great, my child, but it will not last forever. I promise you. Someday, it will end, for the world, itself, shall end. So shall your suffering, along with it. Until that day arrives, I’m afraid, it shall be no good for you. I have my orders, and I must fulfill them. My lords have spoken.”
Then, without a word more, father was gone. He turned his back on me and left. I watched him go, never to see him again. My vision, confounded by the muck of blood and filth, was failing. Confused as I was, I could not fathom the meaning of his words. The pain would continue to the end of the world? Were they going to retain me here and continue this abuse? What did he mean? Why speak to me like this, father, with words so abstruse? Why? In my heart, I called to him. Tell me, your child, your new son, the truth. Had I only known what was to come, I might have fought with what little strength I had. Had I only known.
Thank God that I did not.
Nothing stood in his way but the second-story deck reaching up over his head. Looking it over, the bottom side was covered, leaving bare none of the joists that might have served like ladder rungs, making the climb easier on him. It isn’t easy for Peter Huffy to climb, and his sedentary tendencies made it unlikely that this body would ever improve. He didn’t have a choice, however. So, not wanting to take a chance losing it, he tucked the spade firmly down the backside of his pants, by the blade.
The next few minutes were not the most dignified of his life, but after he got his right leg over the top the job was mostly done. When he climbed down the other side, then walked toward the window, he was wary that the world could change attitude, again, at any moment. The light that had drawn him there was, indeed, radiating from the moon window, which he couldn’t see until he’d reached the edge of the roof and looked down at it, leaning over the short ledge that was perpendicular to the window. Amazingly enough, the light’s magnitude, which had seemed incredibly powerful from afar, didn’t even rouse a squint when he looked down into the stream. The beam began to splinter, as if its source had shattered, then it faded until it was gone and there was nothing there but the window. For a minute, he stared, wondering what would happen next. Patience paid off when the glass started to curl and wave, coming to life.
He could see shapes starting to form on the face of the window. They were not made of bending light, but of the metal and glass twisting, as if smelted and sculpted by invisible hands. The window’s surface spat and spiraled like a distorted picture on the screen of an old television set. Waves of competing vertical and horizontal lines were overlapping, their colliding gravity bending each other out of shape as they passed. He watched, transfixed, for what seemed a long time before, suddenly, the window started busying itself, as if it had just taken notice of him. The whole canvas was swept up behind an old velvet curtain made of crimson-hued glass, its folds and crevices delineated by thin lines of iron framework. It was the sort of cue that might have forced a hush upon audiences during the Golden Age of Hollywood, those days of cigarette girls and uniformed ushers. The theater readied itself for the show. Lights winked out and the curtain was drawn slowly upward, then the tar black cinematic field stood plain.
Then it began, a flipping film reel. Rolling frames and figures sprang into motion. The story started immediately. He was watching an ideal scene of nature unfold before his eyes. Metal twisted to define the shapes of hills lined with trees, the tops poking in and out of view with the peaks and troughs of the countryside. Colored glass tinted green, brown, and blue light filling in the spaces. The sun that lit the country withdrew and night overtook the scene. The picture was then overwhelmed in a fire-like glow as something exploded like a meteorite above the land, raining fire down upon it. The upheaval of dirt raked the treetops with a mighty gust of wind. Everything shook and was set ablaze in light. It was a vivid, wild radiance that didn’t seem natural, but birthed in magic. Its shimmering body unfurled like a scroll, roiling and churning at its center with what seemed like collisions of tinkling atoms. The massive confusion the explosion had made of the world slowly tapered off, disseminating into a strong wind. A crater was left where a mass of trees had once stood, within it was a kind of swirling debris of sparkling particles.
“Sparkles,” said Peter under his breath, mostly understanding what he was watching.
On the window, time seemed to pass as racing clouds into the future until it was a clear, sunny day, maybe years later. A small glass figure came ambling into the frame. It was an obvious depiction of Douglas Windward. He was dressed in his familiar pants and suspenders, topped off with some kind of fedora. Peter wasn’t certain that this was the kind of outfit one would wear when enduring prolonged exposure to the elements, but that was a point worth ignoring. Douglas began to build a house up around the crater, dashing back and forth in a montage of hammering and sawing, disappearing and reappearing in a cloud of dust and wood chips like a Looney Tune.
When he was done, he wiped the sweat from his forehead and huge, comical droplets sprang from his fingers. Everything suddenly went dark and two large predator’s eyes closed in on both sides of him. They came together to form the silhouette of a monstrous head hovering over Douglas’ proud new home. The jaws of the creature opened huge, then slammed shut, swallowing the entire picture, reducing the screen to the darkness it began in. Peter found it more than a little melodramatic. Peter shrugged. Drawing a conclusion. The Onk is a little tacky.
After almost a minute of inactivity, Peter concluded that the strange film was over with. He wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. Something had crashed to earth, Douglas had gone out and found it and built his house on top of it. Why? To guard it? Is it still there? Assume for a minute this is all real, that this isn’t all a dream, that I’m not utterly insane, is there something harmful underneath our house? Something radioactive? Is Alyssa in danger? Should I wake up, right now, and get her out? Is this just another thing Velma neglected to mention, like those damn water tanks? He considered this a moment. Probably not. Probably no one but Douglas knew about it, and dangerous radiation didn’t just occur randomly in nature, very often. He knew that much, and it made him feel a little better.
Nothing in this presentation seemed all that helpful. At least, he didn't think so. The Onk was telling him the story of this place. It has no reason to help him, anyway. However, none of the traps, so far, had done much to prevent him from getting in the house. It's possible that it was helping him by, simply, not stopping him. Douglas did say something about the way it thinks. Something about a 'duality of purpose', which I suppose means it can want one thing but do another. The Onk seemed to be just enjoying itself. All that aside, he had a mission to complete. As much as he hated doing chores, he was committed and obligated now, and he needed to find a way to break into his own house. Not that it’s really my house. It’s Moon Window Wacko.
For the first time in as long as I can remember, time had meaning. The pain and the blood draining from my body made it as substantial as ever. I had always been barely cognizant of time, having no need to keep track of its passage. Why? It had no bearing on my existence. Time was a toothless predator. This incredible pain made me aware of it. I knew that it would be quite a while before these horrific wounds healed and this awful business would be behind me. I dreaded the weeks ahead of me. The pain that was coming. Trapped in a giant body on feeble, skeleton legs.
This terrible treatment I’d received at the hands of my new father had me confused. Why was I being hurt when I had hurt no one? The child-like animal in me wanted to know what I’d done, so that I could do better. How pathetic a sight I must have been. I was not food for these people. My meat would never sustain so many, nor would it be appreciated by any but the most desperately hungry. Flesh was the terrible prize of the hunt, you did not waste it like these men were doing with mine. Here was my own meat scattered all around me in revolting piles on the grass and stones. All for nothing.
I had always wondered, and I was, perhaps, the first of my kind to ever entertain such notions, if the acts one commits somehow became the cause of acts committed upon him, according to some concept of mystical justice. Endless pathos was the curse of my kind, and the most likely reason why we are no more. It occurred to me that perhaps I was paying for all those woodland creatures that had died in my jaws. Since as long as I could remember, I always took great care to kill fast. My victims usually felt nothing, never even catching a glimpse of what was coming to them. I was careful, for if I caused any small beast suffering, if I heard the faintest yelp as its neck twisted and snapped, the suffering that was returned to me was a weight I often could not bear. I cannot fathom this kind of thinking, now.
Your nature can change, one merely has to encounter a force that pushes it beyond the constraints of mortality. How many thousands of fleeing creatures, snatched from their feet, have heard the racket of my teeth, since then? How many cries of agony have I provoked as I tore strips of meat from their backs and flanks and heads? The bodies that had been their own since their birth in their snug nests - paws, noses, ears and eyes - disappearing down my gullet in mouthfuls. All mine, now.
One endures only so much then, naturally, one dies, never knowing what comes after that. The sun shall always set, the moon is due to be risen. Life is meant to end, and that is that. Death is our destiny, for nature strains to destroy us all. Nature’s disdain for us is explicit, not a moment passes in this world that something isn’t fighting for its very existence. Chained to this life, as I am, I have felt it bearing down on me far longer than any other. What it fails to destroy, it reinforces. By dint of surviving, one becomes greater. I am all the proof that is needed of that.
Strength is born of an opposing force. Pain is such a force. What is weak becomes strong. What is tender becomes callous. Some substance is always lost in these transitions. Pain is always there, it lives inside us. It is our tenant and our lord. Lying there at the feet of my King and Queen, I’d had the naive thought this was all that suffering had to offer. This was all it could ever be.
So many thoughts and questions I entertained as I lay there, wincing as the agony returned in waves. I whined and begged as men walked by me, but I was ignored, or assaulted, for my neediness. I turned my head to a young man, unable to withhold a pained cry. Like a child, I appealed to him, with just the pathetic, wide-eyed expectation that a distraught infant would display. For that is what I was. A child. The young man spun angrily around and drove the knife he carried into my neck, then withdrew it, then drove it in, again and again, as I hollered.
These people were not as I was. They did not mind seeing me suffer, nor did they hesitate to be the cause of it. The torture of an animal barely turned a head out of curiosity. Some even took joy in it. This was another thing I’d never witnessed. I’d never even considered such hideousness existed. The sudden agony forced me into unconsciousness. How could it be worse than this?
I awoke to find a rope being coiled around my bloody throat. It was pulled tight, and I cried through my strangled gullet. I felt them heave and I was ruthlessly jerked backward. It felt like my skull was fleeing my spine. My head exploded at the denial of the priceless flow of air, the lack of which would not kill me, but I would feel every hard moment of their absence. A score of men, or more, were now dragging my impossibly heavy body across the courtyard. Yank after yank, I was hove like a lifeless standing stone, treated like a thing that was not living and could not hurt. These hard men were not moved.
In this way, they dragged me through the palace hall. All but dead, though I was, I thrashed with all my, normally, considerable might. My limbs were bloody, gored, and stripped to bone, most of the muscles hanging from me, or gone entirely. They flopped about and the loose flesh spattered the walls. It was all for nothing, however. They were too many, these men of my father’s, and I was diminished by my wounds. Father was gone. He no longer attended this atrocity. My screams escaped when the rope slackened, but on the return they were strangled silent by the murderous noose.
Oh, agony. It went on and on. They pulled me for days over steep hills, sharp fields of rocks, between tight trees, and through small bodies of water. Were I not made of such firm stuff, my head would have been wrenched from my body. After stopping for the evening, the men would build a camp and cook meat over tall fires. On that first night, I pleaded to them for mercy. Though, farcically, we shared no language. They did not speak the ancient tongue of the Garden. I received only contempt in return. Verily, they grew tired of my futile whines and attacked me, forcing, once again, their dull, stumpy swords and jagged spears into my body. I screamed with anguish, they with laughter. As their joy escalated, so did their cruelty. I recall them slicing hunks of meat from my face and limbs and roasting them over their fires. They chortled and mocked me as they consumed it, spitting flecks of my own flesh at my mouth. Their terrifying malice, even after the long life I had already lived, was as nothing I’d ever conceived of in my innocence. It was a new and petrifying world.
Misery has a way of paring away the things that make us dissimilar. What separates you from anyone else are the softer elements one obtains in moments of intuition and discovery. Underneath it all, however, we suffer the same way. We share the same mind when we are sheared down to the quick. The creature we become when we are beaten and low, that ugly, cursed betrayer, he bears the face of we all. It is the destiny of all who live too long that you will meet this wretch, someday, it is but a matter of waiting. So, while at my lowest, I started doing something that countless others have done before me. I performed an act that I had never fathomed, that would not even have made sense in the world I had once believed this was. When the pain was unbearable, when what skin and fur that was left on my bones was flayed and dripping, I started to speak to the sky.
I’m not certain of the moment, but when my screams and cries out there in the wilderness were being ignored by this indifferent world, I began to direct the pleas I made under my breath to that being in the silence. That presence I had always known was there, yet had never spoken to. The one who possessed the world, but did not keep it. You would call that being God. I knew the word, for I had learned it, but I had never come to understand what it meant. What did it mean? I have a much better idea now. One comes to understand God best through suffering. Does God, in turn, understand those who suffer? Indeed, not. She is never more quiet than when she is needed
Ever since the Garden, I had suspected that there was something great in the sky, but it never made any sense to try and know it. How could it know me? How? The sky was too far away. I began to wonder if the thing in the sky was the sky. The stars. The Earth. Everything. Was it all the same? We, as a part of its body, meant no more to it than the regular flux of our bowels is meaningful to us. The open-and-shut of the valves and the contracting of muscles. Such is our woe to God. That aside, I prayed now. I prayed and begged for her to understand how I hurt.
No matter what were the torments of the night, those of day were far worse. They kept me dreading the appearance of the sun, fearing it far more than in the childish way I had. With the peeking of it over the horizon came the yank of the rope. For a fortnight, perhaps longer, I endured this every morning. It was made certain that I was dragged far away from the home of my king and queen, the blasphemy of my existence expunged from their land. But when did this journey end? After being pulled for hours, it would take some time before I became aware, once again, of my surroundings. The ceaseless pain worked me into a state of mind that one could only compare to a rare, aggressive fever. Yet, it was unfathomably worse than that. On the best of mornings, darkness overcame me early. I experienced the terrible day in surges. Surges of screams and pain like fire.
Soon, one morning, when I came back to consciousness after a few hours being dragged, I came to recognize that we had come to rest at a place where men pulled metals from the ground. A mine. One of many, many things I knew of, but did not have a word for and did not fully understand. I had observed, from a great distance, humans working in these strange facilities. Men, children, and women entered and exited these hellish holes at all times of the day. The state of them – their clothing in tatters, their bodies worked unto near collapse – showed these mines to be places of terrible anguish. Sometimes, after having walked in on their own, laborers were dragged out lifeless, having been driven to their sullen ends by the interminable demands of their overseers. As old as I was, I still did not understand what it all meant. I did not know what it was to hate, so how could I understand what a slave was? To compel another into agency of any kind, against their will, was a notion that was far beyond me. Everything I saw back in those days was viewed through the eyes of ignorance. It was my nature to abhor suffering, so how else was I to be?
Here I lay, now, at the feet of this font of misery. The dusty footprints of my exhausted tormentors all about me. All these years later, I wonder, more than anything, what I would have done had I known what they planned. What would it have been like to know? How glad I am that I did not. That thought terrifies me.
As the sun became apparent to my deluded senses, I saw that work went on around me. My father’s men had trimmed away some of my bloody bonds and were reusing them to drag large stones up to the entrance of the mine. If they had taken it all, I could not have run away. I twisted my head and stared at them, not lucid enough, as of yet, to be bothered to wonder what they were up to. I had come to regard any moment of peace as a gift from the sky, and I did nothing to incur the anger of these men any longer. The cave looked comfortable. It was the kind of place I would have sought refuge in. It had been ages, most likely, since it had been used for the purpose of its construction. I know now that it had been modified for a different purpose entirely. A worship not of the mineral that was pulled from the stones underneath the world, but the worship of a deity I have no name for. Perhaps, one whose name is no longer known at all.
I so wished these servants of my king and queen would leave me be. Why was this still going on? If they could not kill me, what did they want? Did they worry that I would return to the home of my royalty? That I would continue to be a nuisance to them, a reminder of those old days that they, apparently, longed for? It was an appalling thought. I wanted nothing more to do with these callous people. It had brought nothing but suffering. When would I return to my happy life? Until this time, I had rarely thought of my life as being pleasant and fulfilling, yet, it was wanton bliss compared to this. What I had found in this cold land bore no resemblance to it.
Soon enough, though, I came to intuit what was happening. They would shut me up in the cave. When I realized this I wanted to shout with delight. Shut me up? A blessing! What cave, what hole, what dungeon of Earth or stone could be as terrible as the torments I’d suffered these last handful of days? No matter how tightly bound I was, how well barricaded, I would return to the Earth, someday. I would heal and claw my way out of there; day after day, year after year, scraping and scratching till the skin I’d grown back was worn to bone, once more. My loneliness was not a curse, but the greatest of comforts. I vowed, right then, that I would never, as long I lived, bother with human beings. No more kings, no more queens, and no father but the one who’d brought me into this world. Whatever had become of him. I would condemn all men for the actions of a few, but I would never be in awe of them, again, as long as I lived.
You see, after all of this, I was no different than I had been. I was still full of goodness and hope. More goodness than any thinking being should ever be cursed with, perhaps. If there is a price for goodness, surely, it is pain.
The next morning, after being left blissfully alone for most of the previous day and night, the noose took me, once again. As the pain exploded throughout my head, it was ameliorated by the thought that this stage of constant agony was at an end. The tunnel mouth was smaller than I had estimated in the side of my eye. The top was low and the sides were wide. What remained of my paws folded under as they scraped the jagged roof of the man-made cave. What skin there was left was torn and ragged. The pain was terrible. Without meaning to, I began to call, again, for help. My quiet friend in the sky. As always, none answered but the brutes who were my captors. Answered with curses, cuffs and kicks. Soon we came to a point in the dense, dark tunnel where a void opened up underneath me. A hole. I teetered on my spine, then dangled and fell into an awful blackness. What did I find there in the dark? Not the hell of a preacher’s tale. If only.