The old lady next door just died. This wouldn’t be so bad, but she died on vacation. After leaving her fluffy with me for the week.
It has been three now.
Her family sucks. None of them are local and they all laughed in my face when I tried to pass this thing off. She’s like 13 and really nearsighted, and her hearing has been damaged by years of sitting next to a super loud tv while her owner watched game shows. She’s got a delicate digestive system and she’s kinda feeble. Moves slow and deliberate, talks that way too.
For a week? Not so bad. Beyond that?
“Naybuh Wyan? Wizzybeff wan nummies. Can hab nummies?” I swear, every fucking day. “You have nummies, Liz. You just need to stand closer.” She pauses and turns around, walking in the direction of the nummy smell. Shocked, she finds a bowl of kibble. “Fankyu nice mistah Wyan! Fankyu fow nummies!” After a few moments eating she scampers back, involuntarily fluttering her little wingies. “Huhuhu gwound tuu cowd fow hoofsies, nu wike.” Within a few minutes she’d be whining for food again.
Every. Single. Day.
Now I’m not a mean person. I’m a pretty alright guy, nice to people, like to pet animals. But there is something about sharing the small apartment where I live and work with a shitting pighorse that can speak that pushes me to my limit.
I’ve been working on a release all day. I have to run all the checks manually because if I don’t and DSAS seizes up my idiot boss will use that harmless slip in protocol as a scapegoat for the real culprit, running legacy software on incompatible legacy hardware to save on operating costs.
It’s a slow fucking grind.
My apartment isn’t large, and it’s pretty sparse. Basically a studio apartment with lofted ceilings and a sleeping nook above the kitchen. I’m in my small office space up there and I’ve had her gated into the bathroom below the staircase. I’m not a monster, she’s got food and water and toys. I even set up a projector with an sd card full of her favorite cartoons. The family may not gove a shit about the fluffy, but at least they also didn’t give a shit about the huge list of instructions the old bag left behind when she died.
I’m not gonna ever do ninety percent of this shit, but the list of “programmes which preoccupy Elizabeth” was pretty useful for sidelining her. I’d been doing that for three days while I chugged away at this. She’d get bored and suddenly remember how alone she was. Folks say that fluffies die from being lonely, but that’s only kind of true.
They die from feeling lonely. An isolated fluffy who doesn’t know he’s isolated is fine. Maybe he was raised from birth in total isolation and told his warm huggy friend is alive. Maybe he’s reset regularly. Personally, I’ve found the most success with a third method: Distraction.
I just keep her occupied with something. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not simple. I can’t just throw the tv on and zonk her out. She’s spent her entire life since infancy in the care of an elderly retiree with nothing but love, affection, time, patience, and a borderline inoperative sense of smell. Basically the perfect environment for a fluffy.
No, she won’t sit and watch tv like a good girl for long before she’s hollering for me to come watch it with her and explain it or something. So I have to distract her with something else so she isn’t questioning why I don’t watch “Wookin’ At Fings” with her in my fucking bathroom. Recently I’ve been giving her watercolor paints and washable markers for her “active” toy. She draws stuff on the linoleum and the shitty wall tiles, and maybe occasionally some color will find its way to the literal stack of coloring books I give her.
She’s still a fluffy.
She draws a lot of shapes and stuff, and when she thinks I’m listening she’ll explain them to me in that kind of circuitous toddlerspeak they do. I think “Bestest Mummah Hewwen” is the old lady. She’s in most of the drawings, assuming that’s what the blue and green triangle she points at yelling “mummah hewwen” means. I think Elizabeth is telling stories about her and this old lady, which is fucking great.
Why would I want to know about the thrilling adventures of an octogenarian and her idiot talking hogbeast? What am I, six? Apparently she thinks I’ve been keeping those drawings. Sure. I’ve been keeping gum wrappers and used rubbers, too. Little dipshit.
I tune her out. Thank God she doesn’t understand earbuds. Like right now she’s been calling and calling for like two hours. I can tune her right the fuck out. It’s terrific.
Presently she’s down there with some toys I picked up out of a “free stuff” bin on the curb. Couple old dog bones and a big thick rope toy with a Kong on one end. I’m almost done with the testing and she’s at my wits end. She’s been rejecting everything. When I gave her the paints she kept asking for her old drawings so she could remember something. “Wizzybeff hab wotsa finky pitchas, nee memba owd wun! Nee finky pitchas Wizzybeff gabe tu Naybuh Wyan su can memba!” Search me, I can only understand ever few words. I’ve been taking those out with the recycling every night.
Unfortunately, I have to piss. I’ve got very few corners of my life where dignity is allowed to exist, but “not pissing in bottles” is one of my lines. Won’t cross it. Won’t do it.
But man. Thinking about trying to piss while that dumb fucking horse thing whines and complains makes me consider it.
I walk down the stairs, and after the pivot halfway down I’m looking straight at this plump distressed pegasus. She’s on her hind legs with her forelegs perched over the babygate that’s closing off the bathroom. Her face is one of genuine panic, but when she sees me it dissolves to relief. “YAAAAAAY! BESTES FWEND WYAN AM HEWE! DID BESTEST FWEND HEAW WIZZYBEFF YEWWIN? SABE WIZZYBEFF!” Jesus. She’s so fucking loud.
I approach the babygate and start stepping over. Elizabeth backs out of the way. She’s always very cautious and careful, probably comes from living with a frail old lady. She never wants to trip someone up. Once I’m on solid ground though, she starts hugging my leg and tugging on my jeans. "Upsies? Su happy tu see Wyan gain! Wizzybeff su wonewy! Was yewwin an yewwin an nao Wyan hewe wif Wizzybeff!" My dick is out. I’m here to piss, not chat. As I finish, she gets more nervous. I’ve yet to acknowledge her.
Last time I went up I hadn’t even subbed out her activity. She’d been stacking the three blocks I gave her for like four hours but when I tried to get the paints it was all “whewe mummah” and “wan pwetty pitchas” so I put them away and just turned on the tv. Blocks and tv. Good enough.
But nooooo Queen Elizabeth has to be fucking difficult about everything. “Wyan, whewe gu? Wizzybeff am su wonewy! Nu can memba wast time hab huggies! Wyan wan huggies fwum Wizzybeff?” She reaches her arms out and it just sets me off.
"Shut up!" I snap and punch the inside of the doorframe. Hurts my hand, but she skitters back like a confused puppy. Kind of shocked she didn’t shit. Guess she’s well housebroken. Her face is locked to mine, awe and terror in her eyes. “Stop fucking talking. Just watch the fucking tv so I can work. Then, this weekend, I’m gonna find somewhere you can live that isn’t here. Shut the fuck up.”
She sat there blinking for a moment I briefly felt silly for having lost it to a fl-
“Wat mean?”
“Hm?”
"Wyan say gunna fin nyu pwace fow Wizzybeff, but Wizzybeff aweddy wib wif mummah. Su wat mean?"
Shit. Slipped up. She wasn’t supposed to know until I got her to the no kill shelter. Oh well, I’m not gonna do the house of lies thing. Fuck this. Bandages coming off.
“Your mummah isn’t coming back. She died and none of her kids want you so I got stuck with you. This weekend you’re going to a decent shelter outside of Kam-”
It was like a bomb dropped. “MUMMAH?! NUUUUUUUUUUUU!” Full meltdown. She’s really throwing herself at that babygate, her grief is pretty hardcore. I take the opportunity to walk away as she carries on. I put my earbuds back in and it’s smooth sailing…for an hour. Then I realize I’m out of water.
God damn it.
I walk back down, not even taking them out this time. I walk past the bathroom, making eye contact with the sobbing and despondent wreck inside. Just straight to the kitchen. As I come back by, she’s almost managed to get the bulk of her torso over the babygate. In a moment of weakness I take my earbuds out. “Hewp! Hewp! Nu wan faww!” Stupidly I reach out and, in her weird panicked thrashing, she knocks my earbuds into her water dish while also managing to break the babygate mechanism.
Totally ruined. Was it my fault? Yeah. Did that matter?
"You stupid piece of shit!" She gasped and clasped her hooves over her mouth. “Nunu wowd!” I haul off and smack her across the face. She tumbles over sideways into the cabinet and bounces back just in time for me to kick her in the stomach. She sailed up and over the edge of the fibreglass tub and made a booming noise as she bounced off the high back wall into the tub itself. I can hear her sniffling and slowly getting back to her feet. “Huu owwies…Wizzybeff nebba hab owwies wike dat!”
I came stomping into the bathroom and with a “peep” she scrambled to the far corner of the tub. I looked over the side and she was hiding behind her front hooves, or trying to. The left joint had clearly been hyperextended and probably hurt like hell now. She was bleeding from the ears, in fact it was the only place she was bleeding from. Must be a concussion.
Her face was quivering and there was weakness in her eyes. Her heart was beating a mile a minute while also breaking as her whole world dissolved. Each few moments she’d realize some new implication of how completely fucked her life had now become. I grab her by the green scruff on her head and lift her up. She yelps. I squeezed too hard and yanked too rough. “Nu! Owwies! Nu puww pwetty gwass!”
She’s pitiful. Sucking her hoof like a newborn. “Huuuuu am…am nice mistah naybuh Wyan gunna be nyu daddeh? Fow…fow Wizzybeff?” I don’t know why I’d picked her up. I don’t know what good I wanted it to do. But I sure didn’t want to adopt this stupid fuck.
Fuck it. I shove my ring and middle finger violently up her nose and shove my thumb in her mouth. Like a bowling grip. I release my grip on her scalp and feel my fingernails dig into her sinuses. I lift her up with my left hand, like a Muppet from Hell, and take a moment to bask in her panic. She’s wriggling and writhing trying to escape. Blood running down my arm and through her fluff, I can feel her trying to breathe. She has a panicky sucking thing she keeps doing trying to breathe through her nose. She’s yammering something but it’s unintelligible with my thumb putting all this pressure on the roof of her mouth. I squeeze harder and harder until I feel something starting to split and her shrieking gets more frantic. Then I drop her and turn the cold shower on. It won’t fill up and the shower’ll only run for thirty minutes before auto shutoff kicks in, but it’ll be enough. I hit the lights and close the door. I can barely hear her upstairs, so I turn on the stereo until I can’t hear her at all.