Excerpt from short story 'STOP ANIMAL ABUSE'
Okay, okay yes—I am far away now. It is almost like, I am nowhere at all. My hands move, my body-mind produces images and my little fingers tap tap tap and my mouth mouths. La dee dah. It is like. A song we have been listening to for our entire lives. We know all the words but have never thought about the message. We just sing. See? We are connected. Without these words we don’t exist. Or we do but it doesn’t feel like it. Which is the scariest thing. It is like when we embrace in my bedroom and I forget about space-time. Or it is like that but not in a good way. It is the real stuff, the bad stuff, the mystery meat. La. Some days are just days and some days are fateful. Like the time we rode in your truck and that song came on. There was a moment unlike any previous ones in which a portal opened up in the sky and I felt compelled to say, what do these words even mean, and we thought about it together and saw a metaphor laid out in soupy rainbow letters on the horizon line. We separated ourselves from it, and then from our susceptible bodies, and in walking away from our living became finally, really, alive. Reality check. This all happened while driving down the highway. What is this I hear? Bird song. What did you say? Don’t listen. Mouth these words, this is who I am. Let me hear you say it, this is who I am. That’s right, good. Tap tap tap. La. There is no other world, only this one.
In a dream I was back in the factory with Shana, Mary, Kayla, Ebony, and Ana only we were animals, the non-people kind. Shana was a parakeet, Mary was a koala, Kayla a tiger, Ebony a fox, Ana was a cow, and I was a cat. I knew that we were beautiful. There was something about us. You know, the way beauty is. A certain pervasive, upright quality. There was no sun in the factory only big white lights but under them we shone like the proud ancient beasts that we were. We couldn’t help it. That was just our energy. As animals there was still a clear affinity amongst us only the problem was that in the dream we didn’t speak the same language. All I could say was meow and this made no sense to Mary, though each time I spoke she nodded and smiled at me with her round koala eyes. That morning there was a new hire and a Kool-Aid came out onto the floor to introduce us and I recognized him immediately. It was the dog man. But in the dream I could really see him. And like us, he was beautiful. Maybe even more so. Suddenly in his presence things were different. We could understand each other. I meowed and Shana chirped and it all made perfect sense, it always had. And the more we spoke, we realized, the more that sounds from the outside world made their way in, too. Meow. The walls began crumbling. Was that a little bit of sky? Yes. Woof. Was that a leaf that just fell onto the factory floor? It was. Chirp. Was that a gust of wind I just felt across my cheeks? You bet. The roof was gone. It was universal. It was wonderful. It was. Meow. Sunshine.