9:55 am. 5 minutes early, right on time. The client? Hannah Myers, owner and manager of Sunset roads fluffy shelter. A no kill shelter. Daud adjusted his messenger bag and prepared to enter the building. Daud made a real impression, Around half a head above the average person, with a heavy frame and olive skin. His bulky frame clashed with his rimless glasses, behind which sat a pair of lively green eyes. He would probably look pretty intellectual if he wasn’t built like a linebacker.
As for the shelter itself, it was a little run down but mostly cared for, the front could use a powerwash, maybe repaint the sign but overall it was fine.
He stepped through the door to be greeted with a cacophany of moronic drivel in spectacular altissimo. There had to be at least sixty fluffies in the shelter. They were all just playing around in the same pen, no separation of any sort. He groaned almost audibly as he surveyed the super herd. There were mothers nursing, foals running around, fluffies arguing about who gets to play with which toys, the odd bit of bullying. More than the odd bit of bullying actually. There were seven… eight… plenty of mistakes he could see just from a cursory inspection. It wasn’t long before he was discovered either.
“New daddeh?”, Said one of the foals near the edge of the pen. Immediately drowned out by the horde. The fluffies quickly swarmed the side of the pen that he was standing on,
crawling all over eachother with their desperate pleas. “Pwease be new daddeh! Nee housie and nummies fo babbehs!”, “fwuffy wan new dadddeh! Nice mista?”, “New daddeh giv sketties!
Wan sketties wan sketties wan sketties!” The requests were endless. “Christ, not on your lives you shitrats.” he thought, as he silently walked past.
As he walked away, he could hear the mewling of the herd, their desperation turned to disappointment, then to loud complaints. “why nu wan fwuffy? Huu…”,
“Wanned sketties huhu” “why nu dummeh hoomins take smawtie? Wan housie nao!”
“Wait what? There’s a smarty in the pen with the others? Why wasn’t it binned? It sounds like its been in there for a while too. What’s going on here?” This thought was immediately interrupted by a lanky woman in her mid 20s.
She had an impressively sized nose and her hair was up in a bun. She was wearing a brown apron overwhat looked like a decent set of work clothes. At least her outfit wasn’t wrong, though anyone would learn to wear some protective equipment after working with fluffies for more than a few minutes. Lets just say brown was a smart choice and leave it at that.
“Hey, I’m Hannah. Are you the fluffy expert?”
“Yes, that’s me, though I wouldn’t really consider myself a formal authority, I’m just experienced with them.” He firmly shook her outstretched hand. “Daud Kader. Now, what kind of problems have you been having here?”
“Well, actually things have been going mostly alright, I just have a few issues, mostly with foals. They keep dying. I think there’s some kind of disease going around.”
“Disease? What are the symptoms?”
“None that i can pinpoint. They just seem to die during the night. Lots of diarrhea and blood in the stool, along with some pus.”
“Pus?”
“Yeah, some white discharge. Only the talkie-babies. I didn’t think their digestive systems can handle the kibble at first, but nothing i do seems to solve the issue.
It’s really hard on the mothers. I always come in here in the morning and see them crying. Poor things. I really want to help them but i don’t know what to do.”
“I… see, but you seem to have a number of issues. The bullying is way out of control, for one. Why are there smarties just running around in the pens? You have to bin them as soon as you see them.”
“I don’t think there’s a big problem. The fluffies can sometimes get testy, but they’re usually just fine as long as I go down there and set them straight. And what do you mean by bin? I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you have a smarty bin here? You need to dispose of the undesirables somehow.”
“There are no ‘undesirables’ here. Every fluffy here gets a chance at adoption, that’s the whole point of the shelter. Finding every fluffy a new home.”
Daud reflexively scratched at the side of his head. “Good lord, this is all wrong. This girl’s a hugboxer through and through. Not even that, she’s a downright enfie human, a true-blue, dyed in
the wool shitrat enabler.” Daud thought, his job was going to be quite difficult with a client like this. He briefly considered dropping her. She WAS a rat feeder after all.
Eventually, he stopped calling her names in his mind and decided to actually do his job.
“Look. A smarty bin is a containment area for smarties and other unusable fluffies. Smarties, foal killers and other undesirables are sent there so that they don’t scare off customers
or harm the other fluffies.”
“Okay, but how do they get adopted then?” She asked, guarded. She probably didn’t like where this was headed.
“They don’t.” He said flatly.
And before she could even retort, he continued: “The smarty bin is a permanent solution for no kill shelters to deal with unadoptable fluffies. They’re sequestered from the rest of
the facility and immobilized in front of a feeding trough. A worker comes in every day and replaces the feed and litter.”
She was dumbfounded. “What? Immobilized? How do…”
“Amputation typically. Though they may have done that as a write off strategy. Quadruple amputation carries a larger risk of infection, which allows them to euthanize the
smarties and avoid overstock without compromising the “no-kill” brand…”
As Hannah stood in shock, he remembered Tawny Meadows No-Kill Shelter for Fluffies. Their smarty bin was rather extensive. Thirty or so fluffies, mostly smarties,
lined up in rows in front of a metal feeding trough, useless nubs in place of their legs, useless tears in their eyes. He still remembered some of their cries: “Dummeh hoomin
gif weggies back nao!” One smartie screamed through tear filled eyes. It had only been in the bin a week, still trying to make demands. Still believing that it was ever leaving the smarty bin.
Another one, three days in, sobbed quietly in at the end. “Why dummeh hoomins take weggies? Onwy wanned speciaw huggies fwom dummeh mawe. Huuhuu, weggie huwties”
That one had an infected stump, maybe multiple infected stumps. It would be dead by the end of the week. The shelter was aware of the infection, but decided wait until the infection
progresses through the body, then take them to the vet at the last minute, virtually guaranteeing a suggestion of euthanasia. Its last few days would be hell.
A third one was crying loudly and begging, long streaks of dark fluff under its reddened eyes: “Pweeze gif fwuffy back weggies! Fwuffy sowwy fo twy be smawtie! Sowwy fo sowwy
poopies! Fwuffy pwomise nebah be smawty again, jus pweeze gif weggies back! Huu huu huu!”
Too little too late. Any fluffy that showed smarty tendencies was binned immediately.
Not worth the effort of trying to test if its smartyhood was genuine. Though It was lively now, soon it would be like the others.
Fluffies that stay in the bin for long enough eventually become so depressed that they stop speaking altogether. Usually the fluffies that had been in the bin for multiple weeks would suffer this fate. The layout of the bin allowed for plenty of time for socialization, or whatever passes for ‘socialization’ between a bunch of smarties, but no real contact. Certainly no huggies were happening, as all the smarties were strapped down due to repeated incidents of biting. There used to be a tv in the bin too, but the smarties would scream at the fluffies on the television for running around without them. It got so bad at one point that they could be heard through the store and on the showroom, which disturbed the customers. And so the tv soon dissapeared. Human contact was similarly minimal, which is to say, nonexistent, with the sole exception of violence of course.
Nobody wanted to deal with a smarty, And definitely nobody wanted to deal with dozens delusional narcissistic bullies yelling at and demanding from and threatening them in a cramped room. No, the most human contact they could hope for was a hard slap and a possibly broken nose if they were particularly annoying, but if the smarties pissed them off badly enough, the workers would turn the lights off on their way out, and the smarties would spend the next 24 hours in darkness. Some workers would even turn the lights off every time. Smarties lasted maybe two or three months in the bin before the wan die loop set in, and they were euthanized.
Something like a smarty bin exists in nearly every no kill shelter, but Tawny Meadows had a really bad one. Though granted, euthanasia was actually the goal in that one. Euthanasia for terminal illness didn’t cause a shelter to lose their “no kill” status, so it was desirable for shelters that needed to retain their credentials without the overhead on their charges becoming overwhelming. Meadows wasn’t actually that bad though. Now happy trails, THAT place as a hellhole…
“We’re not cutting their damned legs off!”
Oh right, Hannah.
“What kind of sick places were you working at before now?”
She really didn’t know anything if she thought THAT was sick. Pillowing is actually offered as a service even in some reputable pet stores…
“Well you dont have to amputate, you could try immobilization frames like those bathtime fluffy toys. It’s a bad idea to leave them in there unfettered though, they’ll just kill each other.”
“I’m not putting them in a damn smarty bin at all! We’re keeping them out here where they’ll have an actual chance a decent life. Just because some of the fluffies have a slight attitude issue doesn’tmean that we should throw them into some closet to rot!” Hannah fumed.
“Slight attitude issue? They have smarty syndrome. They’re monsters. A bunch of megalomaniacal egotistical psychopaths. Frankly, every smarty needs to be put down. In fact, most places I’ve worked on would just throw them into the incinerators as soon as they started showing signs. Nobody wants to adopt a smarty.” He really emphasized the last sentence.
“That’s insane! And completely wrong! I’ve had someone come in and adopt two smarties just last week!”
Hannah was keeping up a strong front, but she was shaken up a bit by that last line. She never thought the incinerators were actually real. She thought they were just an urban myth.
“Sorry, but you’ve had abusers ‘adopt’ smarties to torture. They like places like this because the owners are usually glad to let the extra stock go and don’t ask too many questions. In fact, Just wait, they’ll probably be back. Probably with some story about how the smarties ‘ran away’ or something to that effect. In fact, while we’re on the subject of smarties, your own smarties are-”
Suddenly, the phone began to ring. Hannah silently broke off the conversation and briskly walked over to answer it.
“Yes, that’s us. Yes. Yes, that’s right… Sure, we can help you… Got it, we’ll be right down, can you give us your address? Perfect, thank you, we’re heading out right now.” She hung up the phone.
“Doing a rescue?”
“There’s a family living behind someone’s shed and they want us to take them.”
“Well, you’ve got me for the rest of the day, so i might as well come and help out. Just let me set up some cameras real quick…” Hannah watched him carefully. She was a lot more wary of him after that smarty bin suggestion.
Ignoring her blatant suspicion, Daud reached into his bag and pulled out a few handfuls of nanny cams, then set them up strategically around the pens. Every dark corner and hiding place was covered, especially in the foal areas. He made sure they were well recorded, no better way to cure the foal’s illness than to get the source of the disease on camera, after all.
And that’s it for now, thanks for reading. You can probably guess what the disease is, but let’s let hannah figure it out tomorrow.
What did you think of the dialogue? I think it felt kind of wooden, but can’t figure out what’s wrong with it, or even if I’m imagining it or not. Let me know what you think.
In the next part of the story, they’ll meet coors. An actually good fluffy. He won’t suffer. Much. Okay, he will, but he wont be injured, and daud will try to explain the necessity of a smarty bin to hannah. I wonder how well that’ll go.