The Life of Ivan - Chapter Seven
(My laptop has been acting up, and I had to rewrite multiple parts multiple times. If this chapter seems kind of disjointed I apologise.)
“A Series of Mistakes”
Yea, though I walk through a shit filled valley in the shadow of fluffies, I shall fear no mess, for I have the baddest power washer in the valley
You are Ivan, and you just found an incredibly unhealthy way to deal with built up stress. Though, you are incredibly embarrassed at the thought of you letting an electric blue monstrosity with a dumb horn goad you into violence. But, some small part of you feels intense relief over going all out on a small herd of shitrats. Good thing you don’t have neighbours!
To your surprise, Crown took no notice whatsoever to the racket you made outside. When you returned to the safe room after a shower, she was captivated by the television. With effort, she crawls onto your lap after you take a seat on the floor. Sleepily babbling about “bestest daddeh” and “wub huggies”, her tail swishes slowly as you pet her head. Not ten minutes pass and she is fast asleep. Crown doesn’t wake as you carefully transfer her to the obnoxious pile of blankets in the corner.
More time has passed than you thought. It’s nearly 19:30 and plenty dark, you won’t be able to start cleaning now. You do remember you left a likely injured smarty in your garage sink, but you don’t intend to do anything about it just yet. You left the garage open again, with any luck he will have passed in the night. Returning to the kitchen, you open a beer from the fridge and sit at the table.
<BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ - BUZZBUZZBUZZ - BUZZ - >
You lean over the side of the couch, pressing the ‘Dismiss’ button on your phone. You never made it to bed last night. Instead, you passed right out on the couch in your computer room. With one yawn and a big stretch with an unhealthy snap-crackle-pop, you stand up straight and head for the kitchen. After going through your morning routine you take a peek in the safe room, Crown is still passed out. Perfect. With coffee now in hand, you step outside to see last nights carnage in the morning light.
“Well shit, is this better or worse than I thought it would be?” you say aloud. Stepping into the garage, now stale piss and shit take over most of the first bay, the side closest to the house. The second bays garage door is still open as it was last night. Just outside the doorway though, the young fluffy that you bayonetted must not have died straight away. It now lies face down, legs splayed out to the sides in a sizeable pool of blood.
Speaking of blood, it is all over the floor coming from the direction of the open garage door. Stepping outside, the fluffy you stomped is still as flat as it was last night. What a mess. Worse still is the spray of exploding fluffies has covered the entire front of the garage, the driveway, the back half of your truck, and the surrounding foliage. With a fluffy head here, a stray leg there…where to get started?
Later!
SSSSCRAAAAAAAPE
“Hah, fluffy corpses stick to concrete. That was a bad idea!” You drop a dead fluffy into large bucket with a dull THUNK. It doesn’t take you long to clean up most of the mess, the hard part is the power washing without missing anything. Shortly after, you’re mostly done washing the truck off when your phone starts to go off. One of the cameras you installed shows a fluffy crawling around your kitchen.
Peeking into the garage you take a look at the slop sink at the very back of the second bay. You get closer, and see the sink is in fact empty, except for a load of shit. And the door to the house, “Open, of course.” You move slowly, you can hear the former smarty struggling to breathe as he drags himself across your kitchen floor. And there he is, coated in crusty shit. One back leg drags uselessly and he wheezes with every breath.
You have to get him out before Crown notices, you waste no time. Gloves still on, you scruff him and run straight out the back door. He tries to scream as he fails to shit on you, but instead makes this sickening, wheezy screech. Last nights kick must have broke his ribs, and it sounds like a collapsed lung. You don’t give it much thought, holding him over the burn barrel in the yard you give his fat little neck a twist, putting an end to that nonsense.
“Entirely too much excitement for today!” you exclaim. Unceremoniously dropping the dead fluffy into your burn barrel, you focus your attention to the new mess inside your house. You work quickly to finish before Crown wakes up, knowing today she will want to spend time with you as you promised. Is this what it’s like having kids?
A quick shower later!
Busy, busy, busy. If your head wasn’t attached, you might lose track of that too. This time you made sure all the doors were shut before checking on Crown in the safe room. You enter, and she’s humming away horribly off key whilst stacking blocks.
“Hewwo daddeh! Wub daddeh!” she drops her block and clumsily waddles towards you, letting out a muffled “owwies” when she trips over her own legs.
“Good morning Crown,” petting her head. “Let me clean the litterbox and I’ll spend time with you after, okay?”
“Otay daddeh!” she replies, tail swishing vigorously.
Litterbox duty, not much different from cleaning up after cats….assuming you have six cats. You forgot exactly how much fluffies shit even when they aren’t doing it out of fear. With Crown now distracted with Fluff TV, you ferry the surprisingly heavy bag of shit out the back door and to your burn barrel. While outside, you walk around to the front of the house and do the same with the bucket of fluffy gore you forgot about earlier. And now for your favourite activity, ignoring fire safety rules.
Petrol, some dry firewood, and a lit match later, the barrel is now a small inferno. Walking back towards the house, you see Crown has made her way to the kitchen door, staring in awe through the screen at the fire in the yard. You can barely hear her babbling at you, but she looks excited.
Kneeling down in front of the door, “You like that, Crown? That’s a fire.”
“Wat am dat, daddeh? Wook pwetty, is bad fow fwuffies?”
“Yes Crown, looks very pretty. But gives fluffies ‘burnie hurties’. Very bad for fluffies. But you can still look at it.”
“Huuu, nu wike buwnie huwties.” She tries to hold her tail fluff, but to no avail as it’s too short.
“I’ll be right back Crown, then we can watch TV.” You realise you forgot to lock the shed, and as you walk away you hear more fluffy babble. This time, it’s coming from…the bushes.
On the end of the house opposite of the garage, there is a small patch of bushes on the corner, just under the windows. That side of the property has patches of foliage and a tree stump adjacent to the house. You just now realise that by slacking on yard work, you accidentally created a plethora of fluffy nesting places. Not wasting any time, you lock the shed and sprint back to the house. Crown had already waddled back to the safe room, hopefully she didn’t hear the fluffies outside. The last thing you need right now is her crying for a ‘special friend’.
Crown has proven to be pretty mellow and trainable for a former feral fluffy. But feral or not, all fluffies seem to want the same things barring some kind of severe trauma: special friends, special huggies, and babies. Bio-engineered they may be, but they’re still basically animals right? You’re still operating on the possibility that you may have to ‘liquidate’ if things go poorly, but she has grown on you.
Lost in thought, you wander back into the safe room. The rest of the afternoon is fairly quiet, you even end up rolling around on the floor with Crown and pushing a ball back and forth. But you can’t stop thinking about the fluffies you know live next to your house. You don’t feel the need to go scorched earth just yet, but you haven’t been able to decide how to approach it.
Your indecisiveness comes back to bite you in the arse yet again when, whilst using the bathroom, you can hear Crown babbling excitedly from the kitchen.