Short Story
The rain plummeted against his back like gunfire, each bullet more pinned-point than the next, as if a sabotaging red target had been ingrained into him since the day of birth. Pablo wasn’t ever one for rain, less much water. Such activities were marked on the titles of retrievers or spaniels, hounds who nature deemed for them to sink their teeth into her own tears. The animal groaned, his chest creaking a new sense of jolt, his feet fumbling over the chains that anchored him to human sin. His bones snapped as they succumbed to gravity, plummeting the canine into the mud that cherished his face furs.
Stars vanished and reassembled between his eyes, as the bitterness of the cold chipped the ends of his every limb. The steady momentum of his own heartbeat had been nye unbearable. Roars of pit bulls and the gnashing metal of doberman were mere echoes from a distant hall, the spitting weather above an illusive painting.
Pablo chose not to heed the humans, the demons that roamed the isles of dirt, as battered howls and yelps dragged at their heels, the wicked that threatened unearthly dominance with a primitive violence, the torturers of God’s creatures.
The dog yelped, flinching away from the edges of his make-shift cage, as another canine charged at its walls. Her spit foamed at the seams, her eyes were a brutal sight of its own demise. It took Pablo a few breaths and strained eye coordination to realize the victim matched the stature of a boxer. He shoved his hind as far back the wired fencing until his skin splintered cracks of blood, pulling back his ears in an act of innocence. But the boxer continued her masquerade, as her fractured paws stabbed helplessly at the dirt of his cell. “Don’t let them take me! Please, I can’t die!”
As the boxer screamed in dismay, the thirsty masters commanded orders, trailing the sounds of misery back to its origin. Pablo could merely gander, at those trapped eyes, the quivering stomach of desperation. The stomach.
A needle stabbed its way into Pablo’s brain, shoving everything he ever deemed moral into the bystanding; the dog had been darn pregnant. Don’t let them take her. She can’t die. Her young would be butchered before they ever experienced the chance of abuse.
The mother snared, her eyes popping veins at the very retinas, her pupils were near ghastly. They had her now, by the legs, by the neck, by the muzzle, by the soul, by her dreams. The boxer thrashed, her instinct jittering into a bloody seizure, her roars morphing into gurgled screams against her unborn’s ears.
Pablo felt the sweat of his saliva dampen his lips, his eyes aiming for the first neck he witnessed strangling the poor animal. His hinds that once bled against his cell raised with a new fury, the pain burning away in a rage. His ears that were defeated by an innocence became corrupted to a vigilante.
Pablo was lost to an abyss, a world that didn’t require thinking. He hadn’t known what hit him until he tasted the blood of his master’s fingertips. The rain grew heavy with each slice and yell. He felt a leg trip over him, an arm smashed between his teeth, the cage had never been there.
He saw her, as she lept to an escape, but not before casting him a countenance of tenderness, obligated by Pablo’s fatal attempts.
Before the world spun, Pablo found the painting sky, kissing his eyes with its rain. As graceful as a mother’s tears.
The sun cracked his soul that morning, as he awoke in his battered cell.
