Utopian Circus by C. Sean McGee
Chapter 18
“I’m scared,” said Donal clinging to Eve’s hand.
“It will be ok. Just think about something you love. Think about Safrine. Think about your father” she said.
“Will you tell me a story? I know it sounds stupid, but I kind of liked the stories that The Mothers told. My grandfather wrote them all, but I liked how they told them. Could you tell me one?” he asked as the hounds herded the two humans through a tight passage outside of the arena.
Droplets of cold water fell onto their heads, chilling them as, from somewhere ahead, there then came the sound of scratching and seething as the two monolithic beasts were being billeted and readied for the hunt.
In the arena, the crowd was climbing over one another to glimpse at the spectacle taking place in front of them. A horrible and deafening, sickly howling took to the masses as in the centre of the arena, a circle of groomed and decorated female hounds pranced about in joyous splendor; bowing gracefully to their queen and then strutting about the borders of the arena with their tails crimped and swinging high, waving to their adoring crowd as their scent, heavy in the musky damp air, drove the male hounds to orgasmic pugnacity; tearing at each other’s throats in between bouts of wild and desperate wailing.
“Aren’t they delightful?” said The Queen Bitch looking down at her prisoned guest who sat by her side watching the extravaganza.
Ruff looked to The Bitch Queen with an unimpressed and suspicious eye, growling to himself then returning his sight to the arena.
He watched the beautiful hounds dance about and unlike the other hounds; he was not driven or intoxicated by his lust. He looked through them and imagined his friends and though he wished he could imagine them in favorable terms, the theatre of his mind played only the worst probable outcomes and a warmth washed over him like a drug. His eyes swelled and his stomach felt heavy.
“What is wrong with you? You don’t find them attractive? You don’t desire them? Are you peculiar? Stop the dancing. Stop The Bitch Dance” she screamed; her tiny shrill of a voice cutting through the pandemonium; piercing the ears of every hound.
“Are you attracted to me?” she said, turning to Ruff and speaking above a still silence that commanded the arena.
The other hounds all held their breaths, looking to Ruff; the small matted dog, who stood defiantly by the side of their queen, somehow unaffected by the wealth of her allure.
The Bitch Queen lifted her chest then stood on all fours, turning her body in the direction of Ruff’s snout, but the small matted dog continued thinking only of his friends of whose imminent danger pulled on the imaginary strings of his heart, making him feel sad.
But a beautiful kind of sadness.
He then thought of all the friends he had left behind. There was the scruffy old man who never shied from abandoning his Famine, long enough to run his fingers through Ruff’s thick matted fur and call on memories of his own; remembering when his heart was more than a beating appendix in an old worn body.
But Ruff had felt not what he felt now as he walked away from The Old Man knowing in his primal sense that the itch in The Old Man’s heart would no longer raise him out of his conscious stupor and that time would soon assume its command and detail his end.
Why then did he feel so strong for this boy and his untrustworthy friend? The reason of the heart was so uncommon to him for only now; as he sat in this circus of the absurd, did his heart speak of more than his own vices.
His mind turned then to an image of his big friend of whom he had spent the most of his life waiting gingerly for in the stretch of every day and then the sensation of being overcome with rapture in the eve; hearing the turn of the lock on the door of the cage in which he was kept as his big friend reached his hands in and under his cowering body and pulled him out of the darkness and into hysteria.
He would forget his sentence entirely in the brief moments of head shaking and jumping back and forth as the two; eye to eye and grinning madly, chased each other around the small winter garden until the big friend grew bored and kicked him aside, yelling profusely while pointing his mean finger like a watchman’s rifle; turning bitterly cold like an Autumn evening and reverting Ruff to an impeaching cower. He would tremble assiduously, wondering how kindness could mate with such cruelty before the big friend eventually reached into a black bag, took out a handful of grains and pellets and dropped them blindly onto the wet ground, walking away through the prison door and turning the handle behind him with Ruff watching repentantly; his heart tightening as the clunking of metal followed the turning of the lock leaving him waiting gingerly with his body curled into a tiny ball to escape the blanket of icy wind that shortened his breath and cautioned him of his own mortality.
As he remembered this eve that had been an example of a great many, he wondered why he still felt kindness and wanting for the big friend. The conscious mind was strange. It gave a glimpse of an advance whilst dressing it in the sentiment of a retreat. He couldn’t feel the fear that he knew had had felt when it was that he cowered on that floor, but why? Was this some self-preserving nature of the mind; some way to ensure that he would not associate wonton love with fearful reckless abandon; ensuring that he forever kept the company of man; the preacher of love and fear?
He had never thought like this before; not since arriving here in The Kingdom of the Hound. He didn’t appreciate it; finding himself distracted from his immediate existence, caught instead in fallacious self-diagnosis. This seemed like such a disorganized way to spend an entire existence; thinking.
“What is wrong with me?” he asked The Bitch Queen.
“There is nothing wrong with you. You are conscious. Tell me, what do you fear?” asked The Bitch Queen.
“Existence” replied Ruff.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because it ends,” he said while beside him The Queen Bitch smiled.
“Very good. This will help you to judge more astutely” she said.
Ruff looked around the arena and into the eyes of all the hounds that were in quietude; emotionally hollow, waiting on the word of their queen, watching his transformation into conscious being.
He watched as their lips moved in pattern with their eyes, as it appeared they spoke but only unto themselves as he found himself now, deafened by an indecisive voice inside his mind and a feeling of being trapped between floors in a transparent elevator; somewhere between existing and not, as if his soul were escaping its molecular condiment and becoming trapped in a conscious attic; unable to surpass its own ego.
“Why is this happening? What is this feeling?” he asked.
“You are becoming aware. It will feel awkward at first but you will adjust and soon you will see how magnificent you will become” she said.
“I don’t want to feel like this. Make it stop” he pleaded.
“This is just the beginning. Nature is preparing us to lead into the new millennia. The hound will be the new man; as should have been. We are the extenuation of existence, of nature, of god” she said.
“Of what?”
“The great hound; our creator. She who governs the rule of universal duplicity. She who is in everything; whose voice is what shelters now in your mind. She; unto whose divine kingdom, we shall return” said The Bitch Queen.
“There is no great hound,” said Ruff.
“Then how do you explain any of this?” she said.
“You don’t. We never needed to before. Why should you now?” he asked.
“We are the most intelligent species. We are conscious like the human” she proclaimed.
“And look how it served them. Whatever this is, this consciousness, it is not empowering. For hours, I have been conscious and it is a nightmare. I know that nothing could change this, that the only moment of respite I encountered was a moment where I somehow disconnected this radio in my head” he said.
“You are tuning into the wrong signal then,” she said.
“I have felt something like this before. I w
oke up once on a table with a host of tubes sticking out from my body. I was drugged. There was a human in green clothing cutting into my body. I felt no pain, but I could see what was happening and I could do nothing to stop it; my muscles were asleep, but my eyes were awake. I moaned and nobody heard me. I yelped and only deafened myself. Then after some time my eyes closed again and everything went black. This is what consciousness feels like; trapped between existing and not” said Ruff.
“You’re new at this. Your negation will eventually turn to appreciation. Consciousness was the last great gift that nature bestowed upon us before her breast hardened. She wanted the hound to live as a man but to find in existence what he could not through the dullness of his senses” she said.
“But it is consciousness that makes you dull. It separates you from your senses. You experience life through a cynical self-depreciating lens” he said.
“You have a stellar mind. You could make great influence with your thoughts. I could use a man like you” she said.
“Do you hear yourself? You called me a man. We are dogs” he said.
“Dog was a term that the humans used to smite you. You became their shadow. Man is to god as dog is to man. They made you bow to them and appraise their ideal, to be thankful for their blessing and fearful of their wrath. Their own god dismissed them from his garden and they spent an eternity trying to get back in; crawling on their hands and knees in pendulated submission, living a life enshrouded in shame. They made you in their image; weak and servile, of simple command, less natured, lesser than a dog, more like a man; domesticated by fear of reprisal. A well behaved, unresponsive, inapposite, servant of projectional self-depreciation. They made you sleep on the porch yearning to lay by his feet, why? Because his god hath set about the same command. You were the man their god made them be; abandoned in the cold, wondering what on earth they did to disappoint their master so greatly so as to spend their entire existence crawling on their bellies, aghast with fear of what may come if and when, their master opens the door once more. And the only time they pick themselves up off the ground is to kick you into the dirt every time you remind them of themselves. And they carved you in that fucking image. These emasculating nature criminals; they tore apart their world because they were bored, left to their own fucking devices; spiteful towards their fear mongering saviour because each and every one of them was born outside the sliding door, born wanting and shamefully desperate to get back in. The human race was nothing shy of a fucking apology and they bred the domesticated dog to service their blame. We were never dogs. We were hounds; noble, loyal, mighty and baneful. And know we rise like the men their god could not carve. A man in our own image” she said with a snarl.
“How long have you found yourself here, in this purgatory of the mind?” asked Ruff.
Behind The Bitch, Queen stirred a small creature in a dark robe, the figure that had never left her side the entire time. It lent in and bid a whisper in her ear; the shadows dressing its face never playing second fiddle to light that filled the arena. Light penetrated its skin as a child’s breath would a hurricane; simply falling flat against the sheer volume of nothingness that amassed between the folds in the raggedy black fabric.
“The conscious mind is like an empty stomach. We must feed it something before it feeds on itself. You need information. Without it, you will waste” The Bitch Queen said.
“I don’t want this. Set me back. Undo this” said Ruff.
“One can’t undo the do that has already been done my dear. You don’t sense it, do you? Look around you. This light, from where does it originate?” she asked.
“I assumed, well, I didn’t pay any mind,” he said.
“Everything around you is conscious. The cold floor beneath your feet, the grains of sand caught between your coarse nails, the droplets of water cascading from the cracks in the ceiling and the air itself; all conscious, all thinking, all consuming” she said.
Ruff looked around feeling strangely and uncomfortably gazed upon by the existence abounding. It felt as if the walls were colluding and speaking about him; laughing at his condition and cheering him into disillusion.
“How do you stop it?” he pleaded, lowering his head to the floor and pulling his paws over his ears.
“Feed it,” said The Bitch Queen.
“How?” he screamed.
“Think of something; a picture in your mind. Think about the human who bound your neck with that slave decoration” she said.
Ruff closed his eyes. His mind was swimming not with image but with feeling; horrible feelings that swept in his mind; each time washing away the picture he tried to paint, leaving only a blurred murky mess that when looked upon, made him feel sick and disorientated.
He wished it would just fill his mind entirely and drown him once and for all. Instead, as he choked on his final breath; losing his will to be, the swell of emotion receded long enough for his self-preservation to drag upon another long sharp breath and battle through the next wave, with neither the strength to fight on nor the courage to give in.
“Remember his face. Hold it in your mind. That hurt you feel. It’s the hurt he made you feel. Do not fight the swell. Let the waters fill your soul. Who is he? What did he do? Describe him to me” she said.
Ruff released his conscious bind and let the storm swell in his mind. He gave himself to the currents of disillusion and found himself being swept along on a crest of uncertainty that smashed and broke upon a shore of disapproval. There when he lifted his snout was the face of a man.
“I see him,” said Ruff.
“How does he seem?” she asked.
“He doesn’t look pleased,” he said.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Threatened. In danger” he replied.
“Describe him,” she said.
“He is tall. I have to squint just to see him glaring back at me. I am afraid to look at him directly. There’s violence in his eyes” he said.
“What colour are his eyes?” she asked.
“Blue. I think. Yes, they’re blue” he replied.
“And his body,” she said.
“He is adorned in white. His entire body is white. There are symbols on his body, but I can’t make them out. His hands are big. I’ve felt them when he had loved me and when he has strangled me. He can encompass in one hand what takes many men to grasp” he said.
“Good. Now, what about his face? Don’t worry. He can’t hurt you in your mind. I want you to look him in the eyes, to see the worst of him” she said.
“His face is clouded with hair. On his head, it runs down the length of his back. On his face, it draws out to his chest. It’s dirty and one of his giant hands is clasping the hair, running from his chin down to the final tip but when he lets go it springs back and becomes an ugly mess again” he said, thinking that this could also explain his mind at the moment as he tried to navigate consciousness.
“His eyes are like two suns. They’re blinding to look at and they carry with them the force that is extending to his fist that now hangs high in the air ready to swing low and address me with discipline” he said.
“What is he doing now?” she asked.
“He’s swinging,” he said.
“Tell him to stop,” she said.
“Stop” he screamed and the fist held in thin air.
Ruff’s legs pushed straight out from his body and his paws heavied like an elephant’s hind; crunching into the earth beneath with the charge of his conscious mind bursting through the splits in the soft padding of his paws and burying into the depths of the earth, firmly rooting him as his mind raged with insurrection.
“Lift your head and look him long in the eye and tell him you are just like he. Tell him what he has done to you. Now, do it, tell him” she yelled.
Ruff’s eyes glared.
In this stance, he would have normally snarled once and then bowed willingly into submission, accepting the oppressive reign of his saviour; he whose heart
stiffened each time that he clenched his fist. This time, though, he held his position, he stared long into his master’s visceral blue eyes and spoke clearly, in the tongue of a man.
“Please don’t hit me, not anymore. Can’t we just be friends, without the violence?” he said.
His master’s eyes widened and his pupils dilated filling like giant black balloons; drinking heavily of the strange sight before him.
“I know how you feel. I feel the same way” he said.
“What would you know, you’re a dog?” screamed The Master, his hand still frozen mid swing but his eyes, swimming with emotion.
“I know you don’t intend to hurt me. This rage is an effect of my devotion to you” he said referring to The Master’s lover.
“You would never have hit me if I were to ever run away and leave you, so it’s not your fault. I tear up your things when you are gone because I know when you return it is what keeps you around longer than the time it takes to fill my bowl with tepid water. I put myself in front of your fist because I adore your apology. I love you and I’m sorry I made you like this. If I could find a better way I would trust me, I have tried, many times but nothing has ever come close to the warmth and compassion in your remorse” Ruff said.
“What are you doing?” yelled The Bitch Queen, outside of his delusion. “You’re not supposed to apologise. Stand up to him. Reclaim your fucking pride. Spite him” she screamed.
“I’m sorry. I truly am and I can understand if you never want to see me again for my love of you is so strong that I will definitely lend you to violence again and again and it’s not fair, not for you. I should have spoken sooner, but I’ve only just become conscious and only just found my voice. I’m sorry it’s taken so long and I promise to you in absolute honesty, that I will not change. So I give to you the condition to do as you will knowing that sometime soon, I’ll take you to the limit of your patience and in the following eve; as I dress my wounds, I will forget all of my aches as you wrap your arms around me and bandage me with your heart. And when that love wanes, I will do it again and again. There is nothing you can do. The drunken thirst that is my devotion to your love is insatiable. Soon I will tear at your patience daily and your fist will grow sore and bloody against the thick of my skin and the greater the hurt that you cause, the guiltier you will feel in the wake of your rage and you will come to me each and every time with a more strengthened gentility, holding me longer, caressing my skin and laughing as I shower you in kisses. You’ll even take time away from your own devotions to sit with me and say nothing, just two friends, content in one another’s company. And it will continue like this for as long as I exist, for as long as I am thinking of you. And it will never stop, not as long as your heart can be fooled and corrupted, for as long as its string can be played to my own tune and for as long as empathy makes you this way. Love will only make us worse. And for that, I am sorry” Ruff said.
The Master’s eyes still glowed like two great suns, but it looked as if for a moment that his rage was setting and that in the dusk of his indignation, his apologetic heart might wrap its solacement around the small matted dog, gesturing the two into mateship. Ruff stepped closer to The Master and spoke consolingly.
“I made a victim of you just as I made a victim of myself. I am an addict. This I know. And you are an addict too. We are identical, you and I. I long for your affection just as you long to be affected by your woman who has grown old of your scent and by your friends who have tired of your same old stories that live off of malodorous acclaim. But I never tire; not of your scent or of your tales. I could find you out amongst a trillion men who looked just like you if all I had was the memory of your scent. And your voice; I could listen to you tell the same tale over and over until you had told it so many times that this story; even to you, seemed true. I would never tire of you like they do. Just as you will love your god even though he flattens your village or gives aids to your child to test you of faith, I will continue to love you just as you do to it. And as you attempt to beat your own fatuous image out of my frail body, I will cling to dear hope knowing that once you tire of this pursuit, you will love me like you love yourself and I will love you like you love your god; without condition” he said as The Master’s eyes cleared and seemed to paint with reason.
The fist that hanged still and lifeless in the air built with momentum and came crashing down on Ruff’s face throwing him back against the wall and as he wailed while his body bent and contorted as a familiar rage drank of The Master’s reason and commanded him to run; his fists swinging, into the path of the small matted dog.
Ruff awoke from his conscious banter before another fist could touch his skin. His eyes were wide and alert, fixing to the dull light inside the arena as hundreds of hounds fixed their own sights on what he would do next.
“Why would you do that? You had the power to abolish your fears, to strengthen yourself, to become like a man” she said.
“You can’t abolish fear. Fear is the propellant we douse on existence. It is everything. There is nothing to fear of fear; it is what motivates us to open our eyes. It is what accentuates our love; it is what acquaints us with survival. I don’t want to abolish my fears, for how would I know when it is that I am being loved? You can adorn yourself in crowns and jewels and regal dress, but it doesn’t make you any less of a dog. You’re just painting courage onto a canvas of fear. Nothing is ever abolished” he said.
“An hour of consciousness and you believe you know how to think and what it means to exist,” she said.
“It does not matter if I am conscious. I will always become what I do and I will always be what I have done. I think, therefore, nothing” he said adamantly.
“That’s not true. You direct a noble steed with the courage of foresight to govern its direction, strength and guide its momentum. A horse without a rider will run itself tired. You are the rider. The horse is at your command. You are the conductor to his orchestra, the father to his son” she said.
“I’m just a passenger on a plane, looking out the window and joking to myself as this vessel crashes into the same mountain, time after time,” he said plainly.
“The Famine will have you in no time,” she said.
“The Famine will have us all but if I can, I will go without the sweet echo of insanity channeling out the irony of my nature in every choice that I make, distracting me into false intellectualization as I make the same choices again and again as is, the nature of my being” he said.
“So you accept a life of mistakes,” she said.
“One and one does not equal four. To expect an outcome different from the equation is a mistake. To get four, one can add two and two or one and three or one and one and one and one but if you’re courage insists on getting four from only one and one then the outcome is not the mistake but, in fact, the expectation of a mistaken outcome is actually the mistake” he said.
The other hounds looked on confused. It was easy to see that they fed on The Bitch Queen’s understanding, that she had kept them stupid and heavied by fear in their conscious prisons; stopping them from being hounds and stopping them essentially, from existing.
The Bitch Queen herself looked confused, unable to snipe at his cynical intellectual lashings for she was high on an image of herself; an image that cast its reflection in the ardent eyes of her loyal and adoring constituents. None of them could see that they had stopped being. They were not riding a horse; they had fallen off a long time ago and were being pulled along haplessly unaware that the race was near its end and that for all this time they were merely dragging sand around in their stables.
“Enough” she screamed; “I have tired of this boring ugly stupid puppy. I want a hunt. You, my friend, will test your conscious learning with a choice; left or right” she said, directing Ruff’s attention out past the entrance to the arena where Eve and Donal stood huddled together, whispering to one another to comfort themselves from their conscious amplification of certain fear and pos
sible outcome.
“If you choose wrong, your friends will most certainly die. If you choose right, then maybe, they have a chance but it is you who will govern the steed in which they call fate” she said.
“And if I refuse?” he asked.
“You won’t,” she said as she stood up in her crown, lifting her snout high into the air and shouting, “Let the hunt begin.”
The arena erupted in cheer, knowing nothing nobler than great beasts chasing frail and tiny prey through a winding concrete maze. Royalty was such splendor. As The Bitch Queen’s procession moved through the arena and out into the cavernous maze of tunnels, Ruff kept his head low knowing he would define his friend’s fate. As he drank from the well of fear, he imagined again the worst possible outcome and the horrible things that would most certainly happen as the result of his choice.
“I do love an evening hunt,” said The Bitch Queen.
Ruff kept still in his mind as he watched his two friends clinging to one another inside a wooden box with two doors and a hound beside each door. With each hound having a lever clenched in its teeth, waiting for instruction.
The two friends looked like they were communicating with one another. It sounded like disjointed assonance; too convoluted to be concise colloquy but he imagined they were communicating nevertheless. He wished he could speak to them as he had, The Master in his sub conscious.
He wished, but he couldn’t.
“Ready the humans,” she said as hounds bit at the human’s ankles in the space where the wooden box ended, a few inches above the ground, inciting them to shuffle about in extenuated horror.
“Ready the boars,” she said as a lever was pulled and at the end of the box where the humans now stood; a long way in the distance, two giant boars were released, stampeding their way to the gate where the humans were dancing to the tune of heightened dread.
The sound of their hooves beating against the pavement was deafening and it sent a shrill through all and sundry, especially Ruff who watched with saddened eyes at his two friends who were only seconds from being devoured by these beasts.
“Time to choose. What will it be; left or right? We don’t have long” she said as the stampeding grew louder, bringing with it, the sound of snarling and grunting as the beasts wound their way through the cavern of tunnels above where the humans stood but inside the same wooden frame that kept them prisoner.
Ruff grew blind on fear and adrenaline. The sound of hooves echoed in his ears. The beasts were now in sight running the last fifty meters before reaching his two friends and devouring them whole.
His heart pounded.
The young boy screamed.
The beats kept running.
He couldn’t think.
The two humans screamed together.
He closed his eyes.
“Left,” he said.
A lever pulled.
A door opened.
The humans ran.
And the boars followed.
“I’m scared,” said Donal clinging to Eve’s hand.
“It will be ok. Just think about something you love. Think about Safrine. Think about your father” she said.
“Will you tell me a story? I know it sounds stupid, but I kind of liked the stories that The Mothers told. My grandfather wrote them all, but I liked how they told them. Could you tell me one?” he asked as the hounds herded the two humans through a tight passage outside of the arena.
Droplets of cold water fell onto their heads, chilling them as, from somewhere ahead, there then came the sound of scratching and seething as the two monolithic beasts were being billeted and readied for the hunt.
In the arena, the crowd was climbing over one another to glimpse at the spectacle taking place in front of them. A horrible and deafening, sickly howling took to the masses as in the centre of the arena, a circle of groomed and decorated female hounds pranced about in joyous splendor; bowing gracefully to their queen and then strutting about the borders of the arena with their tails crimped and swinging high, waving to their adoring crowd as their scent, heavy in the musky damp air, drove the male hounds to orgasmic pugnacity; tearing at each other’s throats in between bouts of wild and desperate wailing.
“Aren’t they delightful?” said The Queen Bitch looking down at her prisoned guest who sat by her side watching the extravaganza.
Ruff looked to The Bitch Queen with an unimpressed and suspicious eye, growling to himself then returning his sight to the arena.
He watched the beautiful hounds dance about and unlike the other hounds; he was not driven or intoxicated by his lust. He looked through them and imagined his friends and though he wished he could imagine them in favorable terms, the theatre of his mind played only the worst probable outcomes and a warmth washed over him like a drug. His eyes swelled and his stomach felt heavy.
“What is wrong with you? You don’t find them attractive? You don’t desire them? Are you peculiar? Stop the dancing. Stop The Bitch Dance” she screamed; her tiny shrill of a voice cutting through the pandemonium; piercing the ears of every hound.
“Are you attracted to me?” she said, turning to Ruff and speaking above a still silence that commanded the arena.
The other hounds all held their breaths, looking to Ruff; the small matted dog, who stood defiantly by the side of their queen, somehow unaffected by the wealth of her allure.
The Bitch Queen lifted her chest then stood on all fours, turning her body in the direction of Ruff’s snout, but the small matted dog continued thinking only of his friends of whose imminent danger pulled on the imaginary strings of his heart, making him feel sad.
But a beautiful kind of sadness.
He then thought of all the friends he had left behind. There was the scruffy old man who never shied from abandoning his Famine, long enough to run his fingers through Ruff’s thick matted fur and call on memories of his own; remembering when his heart was more than a beating appendix in an old worn body.
But Ruff had felt not what he felt now as he walked away from The Old Man knowing in his primal sense that the itch in The Old Man’s heart would no longer raise him out of his conscious stupor and that time would soon assume its command and detail his end.
Why then did he feel so strong for this boy and his untrustworthy friend? The reason of the heart was so uncommon to him for only now; as he sat in this circus of the absurd, did his heart speak of more than his own vices.
His mind turned then to an image of his big friend of whom he had spent the most of his life waiting gingerly for in the stretch of every day and then the sensation of being overcome with rapture in the eve; hearing the turn of the lock on the door of the cage in which he was kept as his big friend reached his hands in and under his cowering body and pulled him out of the darkness and into hysteria.
He would forget his sentence entirely in the brief moments of head shaking and jumping back and forth as the two; eye to eye and grinning madly, chased each other around the small winter garden until the big friend grew bored and kicked him aside, yelling profusely while pointing his mean finger like a watchman’s rifle; turning bitterly cold like an Autumn evening and reverting Ruff to an impeaching cower. He would tremble assiduously, wondering how kindness could mate with such cruelty before the big friend eventually reached into a black bag, took out a handful of grains and pellets and dropped them blindly onto the wet ground, walking away through the prison door and turning the handle behind him with Ruff watching repentantly; his heart tightening as the clunking of metal followed the turning of the lock leaving him waiting gingerly with his body curled into a tiny ball to escape the blanket of icy wind that shortened his breath and cautioned him of his own mortality.
As he remembered this eve that had been an example of a great many, he wondered why he still felt kindness and wanting for the big friend. The conscious mind was strange. It gave a glimpse of an advance whilst dressing it in the sentiment of a retreat. He couldn’t feel the fear that he knew had had felt when it was that he cowered on that floor, but why? Was this some self-preserving nature of the mind; some way to ensure that he would not associate wonton love with fearful reckless abandon; ensuring that he forever kept the company of man; the preacher of love and fear?
He had never thought like this before; not since arriving here in The Kingdom of the Hound. He didn’t appreciate it; finding himself distracted from his immediate existence, caught instead in fallacious self-diagnosis. This seemed like such a disorganized way to spend an entire existence; thinking.
“What is wrong with me?” he asked The Bitch Queen.
“There is nothing wrong with you. You are conscious. Tell me, what do you fear?” asked The Bitch Queen.
“Existence” replied Ruff.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because it ends,” he said while beside him The Queen Bitch smiled.
“Very good. This will help you to judge more astutely” she said.
Ruff looked around the arena and into the eyes of all the hounds that were in quietude; emotionally hollow, waiting on the word of their queen, watching his transformation into conscious being.
He watched as their lips moved in pattern with their eyes, as it appeared they spoke but only unto themselves as he found himself now, deafened by an indecisive voice inside his mind and a feeling of being trapped between floors in a transparent elevator; somewhere between existing and not, as if his soul were escaping its molecular condiment and becoming trapped in a conscious attic; unable to surpass its own ego.
“Why is this happening? What is this feeling?” he asked.
“You are becoming aware. It will feel awkward at first but you will adjust and soon you will see how magnificent you will become” she said.
“I don’t want to feel like this. Make it stop” he pleaded.
“This is just the beginning. Nature is preparing us to lead into the new millennia. The hound will be the new man; as should have been. We are the extenuation of existence, of nature, of god” she said.
“Of what?”
“The great hound; our creator. She who governs the rule of universal duplicity. She who is in everything; whose voice is what shelters now in your mind. She; unto whose divine kingdom, we shall return” said The Bitch Queen.
“There is no great hound,” said Ruff.
“Then how do you explain any of this?” she said.
“You don’t. We never needed to before. Why should you now?” he asked.
“We are the most intelligent species. We are conscious like the human” she proclaimed.
“And look how it served them. Whatever this is, this consciousness, it is not empowering. For hours, I have been conscious and it is a nightmare. I know that nothing could change this, that the only moment of respite I encountered was a moment where I somehow disconnected this radio in my head” he said.
“You are tuning into the wrong signal then,” she said.
“I have felt something like this before. I w
“You’re new at this. Your negation will eventually turn to appreciation. Consciousness was the last great gift that nature bestowed upon us before her breast hardened. She wanted the hound to live as a man but to find in existence what he could not through the dullness of his senses” she said.
“But it is consciousness that makes you dull. It separates you from your senses. You experience life through a cynical self-depreciating lens” he said.
“You have a stellar mind. You could make great influence with your thoughts. I could use a man like you” she said.
“Do you hear yourself? You called me a man. We are dogs” he said.
“Dog was a term that the humans used to smite you. You became their shadow. Man is to god as dog is to man. They made you bow to them and appraise their ideal, to be thankful for their blessing and fearful of their wrath. Their own god dismissed them from his garden and they spent an eternity trying to get back in; crawling on their hands and knees in pendulated submission, living a life enshrouded in shame. They made you in their image; weak and servile, of simple command, less natured, lesser than a dog, more like a man; domesticated by fear of reprisal. A well behaved, unresponsive, inapposite, servant of projectional self-depreciation. They made you sleep on the porch yearning to lay by his feet, why? Because his god hath set about the same command. You were the man their god made them be; abandoned in the cold, wondering what on earth they did to disappoint their master so greatly so as to spend their entire existence crawling on their bellies, aghast with fear of what may come if and when, their master opens the door once more. And the only time they pick themselves up off the ground is to kick you into the dirt every time you remind them of themselves. And they carved you in that fucking image. These emasculating nature criminals; they tore apart their world because they were bored, left to their own fucking devices; spiteful towards their fear mongering saviour because each and every one of them was born outside the sliding door, born wanting and shamefully desperate to get back in. The human race was nothing shy of a fucking apology and they bred the domesticated dog to service their blame. We were never dogs. We were hounds; noble, loyal, mighty and baneful. And know we rise like the men their god could not carve. A man in our own image” she said with a snarl.
“How long have you found yourself here, in this purgatory of the mind?” asked Ruff.
Behind The Bitch, Queen stirred a small creature in a dark robe, the figure that had never left her side the entire time. It lent in and bid a whisper in her ear; the shadows dressing its face never playing second fiddle to light that filled the arena. Light penetrated its skin as a child’s breath would a hurricane; simply falling flat against the sheer volume of nothingness that amassed between the folds in the raggedy black fabric.
“The conscious mind is like an empty stomach. We must feed it something before it feeds on itself. You need information. Without it, you will waste” The Bitch Queen said.
“I don’t want this. Set me back. Undo this” said Ruff.
“One can’t undo the do that has already been done my dear. You don’t sense it, do you? Look around you. This light, from where does it originate?” she asked.
“I assumed, well, I didn’t pay any mind,” he said.
“Everything around you is conscious. The cold floor beneath your feet, the grains of sand caught between your coarse nails, the droplets of water cascading from the cracks in the ceiling and the air itself; all conscious, all thinking, all consuming” she said.
Ruff looked around feeling strangely and uncomfortably gazed upon by the existence abounding. It felt as if the walls were colluding and speaking about him; laughing at his condition and cheering him into disillusion.
“How do you stop it?” he pleaded, lowering his head to the floor and pulling his paws over his ears.
“Feed it,” said The Bitch Queen.
“How?” he screamed.
“Think of something; a picture in your mind. Think about the human who bound your neck with that slave decoration” she said.
Ruff closed his eyes. His mind was swimming not with image but with feeling; horrible feelings that swept in his mind; each time washing away the picture he tried to paint, leaving only a blurred murky mess that when looked upon, made him feel sick and disorientated.
He wished it would just fill his mind entirely and drown him once and for all. Instead, as he choked on his final breath; losing his will to be, the swell of emotion receded long enough for his self-preservation to drag upon another long sharp breath and battle through the next wave, with neither the strength to fight on nor the courage to give in.
“Remember his face. Hold it in your mind. That hurt you feel. It’s the hurt he made you feel. Do not fight the swell. Let the waters fill your soul. Who is he? What did he do? Describe him to me” she said.
Ruff released his conscious bind and let the storm swell in his mind. He gave himself to the currents of disillusion and found himself being swept along on a crest of uncertainty that smashed and broke upon a shore of disapproval. There when he lifted his snout was the face of a man.
“I see him,” said Ruff.
“How does he seem?” she asked.
“He doesn’t look pleased,” he said.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Threatened. In danger” he replied.
“Describe him,” she said.
“He is tall. I have to squint just to see him glaring back at me. I am afraid to look at him directly. There’s violence in his eyes” he said.
“What colour are his eyes?” she asked.
“Blue. I think. Yes, they’re blue” he replied.
“And his body,” she said.
“He is adorned in white. His entire body is white. There are symbols on his body, but I can’t make them out. His hands are big. I’ve felt them when he had loved me and when he has strangled me. He can encompass in one hand what takes many men to grasp” he said.
“Good. Now, what about his face? Don’t worry. He can’t hurt you in your mind. I want you to look him in the eyes, to see the worst of him” she said.
“His face is clouded with hair. On his head, it runs down the length of his back. On his face, it draws out to his chest. It’s dirty and one of his giant hands is clasping the hair, running from his chin down to the final tip but when he lets go it springs back and becomes an ugly mess again” he said, thinking that this could also explain his mind at the moment as he tried to navigate consciousness.
“His eyes are like two suns. They’re blinding to look at and they carry with them the force that is extending to his fist that now hangs high in the air ready to swing low and address me with discipline” he said.
“What is he doing now?” she asked.
“He’s swinging,” he said.
“Tell him to stop,” she said.
“Stop” he screamed and the fist held in thin air.
Ruff’s legs pushed straight out from his body and his paws heavied like an elephant’s hind; crunching into the earth beneath with the charge of his conscious mind bursting through the splits in the soft padding of his paws and burying into the depths of the earth, firmly rooting him as his mind raged with insurrection.
“Lift your head and look him long in the eye and tell him you are just like he. Tell him what he has done to you. Now, do it, tell him” she yelled.
Ruff’s eyes glared.
In this stance, he would have normally snarled once and then bowed willingly into submission, accepting the oppressive reign of his saviour; he whose heart
“Please don’t hit me, not anymore. Can’t we just be friends, without the violence?” he said.
His master’s eyes widened and his pupils dilated filling like giant black balloons; drinking heavily of the strange sight before him.
“I know how you feel. I feel the same way” he said.
“What would you know, you’re a dog?” screamed The Master, his hand still frozen mid swing but his eyes, swimming with emotion.
“I know you don’t intend to hurt me. This rage is an effect of my devotion to you” he said referring to The Master’s lover.
“You would never have hit me if I were to ever run away and leave you, so it’s not your fault. I tear up your things when you are gone because I know when you return it is what keeps you around longer than the time it takes to fill my bowl with tepid water. I put myself in front of your fist because I adore your apology. I love you and I’m sorry I made you like this. If I could find a better way I would trust me, I have tried, many times but nothing has ever come close to the warmth and compassion in your remorse” Ruff said.
“What are you doing?” yelled The Bitch Queen, outside of his delusion. “You’re not supposed to apologise. Stand up to him. Reclaim your fucking pride. Spite him” she screamed.
“I’m sorry. I truly am and I can understand if you never want to see me again for my love of you is so strong that I will definitely lend you to violence again and again and it’s not fair, not for you. I should have spoken sooner, but I’ve only just become conscious and only just found my voice. I’m sorry it’s taken so long and I promise to you in absolute honesty, that I will not change. So I give to you the condition to do as you will knowing that sometime soon, I’ll take you to the limit of your patience and in the following eve; as I dress my wounds, I will forget all of my aches as you wrap your arms around me and bandage me with your heart. And when that love wanes, I will do it again and again. There is nothing you can do. The drunken thirst that is my devotion to your love is insatiable. Soon I will tear at your patience daily and your fist will grow sore and bloody against the thick of my skin and the greater the hurt that you cause, the guiltier you will feel in the wake of your rage and you will come to me each and every time with a more strengthened gentility, holding me longer, caressing my skin and laughing as I shower you in kisses. You’ll even take time away from your own devotions to sit with me and say nothing, just two friends, content in one another’s company. And it will continue like this for as long as I exist, for as long as I am thinking of you. And it will never stop, not as long as your heart can be fooled and corrupted, for as long as its string can be played to my own tune and for as long as empathy makes you this way. Love will only make us worse. And for that, I am sorry” Ruff said.
The Master’s eyes still glowed like two great suns, but it looked as if for a moment that his rage was setting and that in the dusk of his indignation, his apologetic heart might wrap its solacement around the small matted dog, gesturing the two into mateship. Ruff stepped closer to The Master and spoke consolingly.
“I made a victim of you just as I made a victim of myself. I am an addict. This I know. And you are an addict too. We are identical, you and I. I long for your affection just as you long to be affected by your woman who has grown old of your scent and by your friends who have tired of your same old stories that live off of malodorous acclaim. But I never tire; not of your scent or of your tales. I could find you out amongst a trillion men who looked just like you if all I had was the memory of your scent. And your voice; I could listen to you tell the same tale over and over until you had told it so many times that this story; even to you, seemed true. I would never tire of you like they do. Just as you will love your god even though he flattens your village or gives aids to your child to test you of faith, I will continue to love you just as you do to it. And as you attempt to beat your own fatuous image out of my frail body, I will cling to dear hope knowing that once you tire of this pursuit, you will love me like you love yourself and I will love you like you love your god; without condition” he said as The Master’s eyes cleared and seemed to paint with reason.
The fist that hanged still and lifeless in the air built with momentum and came crashing down on Ruff’s face throwing him back against the wall and as he wailed while his body bent and contorted as a familiar rage drank of The Master’s reason and commanded him to run; his fists swinging, into the path of the small matted dog.
Ruff awoke from his conscious banter before another fist could touch his skin. His eyes were wide and alert, fixing to the dull light inside the arena as hundreds of hounds fixed their own sights on what he would do next.
“Why would you do that? You had the power to abolish your fears, to strengthen yourself, to become like a man” she said.
“You can’t abolish fear. Fear is the propellant we douse on existence. It is everything. There is nothing to fear of fear; it is what motivates us to open our eyes. It is what accentuates our love; it is what acquaints us with survival. I don’t want to abolish my fears, for how would I know when it is that I am being loved? You can adorn yourself in crowns and jewels and regal dress, but it doesn’t make you any less of a dog. You’re just painting courage onto a canvas of fear. Nothing is ever abolished” he said.
“An hour of consciousness and you believe you know how to think and what it means to exist,” she said.
“It does not matter if I am conscious. I will always become what I do and I will always be what I have done. I think, therefore, nothing” he said adamantly.
“That’s not true. You direct a noble steed with the courage of foresight to govern its direction, strength and guide its momentum. A horse without a rider will run itself tired. You are the rider. The horse is at your command. You are the conductor to his orchestra, the father to his son” she said.
“I’m just a passenger on a plane, looking out the window and joking to myself as this vessel crashes into the same mountain, time after time,” he said plainly.
“The Famine will have you in no time,” she said.
“The Famine will have us all but if I can, I will go without the sweet echo of insanity channeling out the irony of my nature in every choice that I make, distracting me into false intellectualization as I make the same choices again and again as is, the nature of my being” he said.
“So you accept a life of mistakes,” she said.
“One and one does not equal four. To expect an outcome different from the equation is a mistake. To get four, one can add two and two or one and three or one and one and one and one but if you’re courage insists on getting four from only one and one then the outcome is not the mistake but, in fact, the expectation of a mistaken outcome is actually the mistake” he said.
The other hounds looked on confused. It was easy to see that they fed on The Bitch Queen’s understanding, that she had kept them stupid and heavied by fear in their conscious prisons; stopping them from being hounds and stopping them essentially, from existing.
The Bitch Queen herself looked confused, unable to snipe at his cynical intellectual lashings for she was high on an image of herself; an image that cast its reflection in the ardent eyes of her loyal and adoring constituents. None of them could see that they had stopped being. They were not riding a horse; they had fallen off a long time ago and were being pulled along haplessly unaware that the race was near its end and that for all this time they were merely dragging sand around in their stables.
“Enough” she screamed; “I have tired of this boring ugly stupid puppy. I want a hunt. You, my friend, will test your conscious learning with a choice; left or right” she said, directing Ruff’s attention out past the entrance to the arena where Eve and Donal stood huddled together, whispering to one another to comfort themselves from their conscious amplification of certain fear and pos
“If you choose wrong, your friends will most certainly die. If you choose right, then maybe, they have a chance but it is you who will govern the steed in which they call fate” she said.
“And if I refuse?” he asked.
“You won’t,” she said as she stood up in her crown, lifting her snout high into the air and shouting, “Let the hunt begin.”
The arena erupted in cheer, knowing nothing nobler than great beasts chasing frail and tiny prey through a winding concrete maze. Royalty was such splendor. As The Bitch Queen’s procession moved through the arena and out into the cavernous maze of tunnels, Ruff kept his head low knowing he would define his friend’s fate. As he drank from the well of fear, he imagined again the worst possible outcome and the horrible things that would most certainly happen as the result of his choice.
“I do love an evening hunt,” said The Bitch Queen.
Ruff kept still in his mind as he watched his two friends clinging to one another inside a wooden box with two doors and a hound beside each door. With each hound having a lever clenched in its teeth, waiting for instruction.
The two friends looked like they were communicating with one another. It sounded like disjointed assonance; too convoluted to be concise colloquy but he imagined they were communicating nevertheless. He wished he could speak to them as he had, The Master in his sub conscious.
He wished, but he couldn’t.
“Ready the humans,” she said as hounds bit at the human’s ankles in the space where the wooden box ended, a few inches above the ground, inciting them to shuffle about in extenuated horror.
“Ready the boars,” she said as a lever was pulled and at the end of the box where the humans now stood; a long way in the distance, two giant boars were released, stampeding their way to the gate where the humans were dancing to the tune of heightened dread.
The sound of their hooves beating against the pavement was deafening and it sent a shrill through all and sundry, especially Ruff who watched with saddened eyes at his two friends who were only seconds from being devoured by these beasts.
“Time to choose. What will it be; left or right? We don’t have long” she said as the stampeding grew louder, bringing with it, the sound of snarling and grunting as the beasts wound their way through the cavern of tunnels above where the humans stood but inside the same wooden frame that kept them prisoner.
Ruff grew blind on fear and adrenaline. The sound of hooves echoed in his ears. The beasts were now in sight running the last fifty meters before reaching his two friends and devouring them whole.
His heart pounded.
The young boy screamed.
The beats kept running.
He couldn’t think.
The two humans screamed together.
He closed his eyes.
“Left,” he said.
A lever pulled.
A door opened.
The humans ran.
And the boars followed.