Page 102 of The End of the World As We Know It
“I think I can reach it next time. Leave me alone.” Tak Tak Tak always thinks he’s the boss of me, even though he’s only one minute older.
Tak Tak Tak chirps. “Taste the air.”
I do as he says and it has buzzing in it, electricity. A storm is coming. I follow him inside. We curl up together beneath the palm fronds, in each other’s warmth. Our two hearts beat together through our flanks.
“You’re a good brother, Tak Tak Tak,” I tell him with my nose.
“You’re a good brother, Chachacha,” he says in our high language, and we kiss. We need each other. We’re lonely. We’re not supposed to be just two—we’re supposed to be many, charging across the savanna, mouths open and tongues lolling, in a great pack. I talk to them in my dreams, in the running trill of language that is just ours. I feel them, the tens of dogs that should be with us, their absence like missing toes.
Soon, if we don’t eat, Tak Tak Tak and I will try to eat each other. I can feel him thinking it, too. It’s in his tongue and his eyes when he looks at me. We don’t blame each other for it.
(I dream of theInthisEnclosureistheDholeCuonAlpinus.I never met them, but I knew them from their scent, three fences over. We lived side by side for a long time. I was jealous of the Dholes because they were a whole family, seven of them, three adults and four pups, and I heard them playing together at all times of the day and night. I got used to the pups’ high sounds. You could say we grew up together. As time went by, we all got bigger. Sometimes we spoke to one another, shouting into the night air. We didn’t have much in common, but we yelled,Ya Ya Ya!And they yelled back,Hoo hoo hoo!Half friendly, halfDon’t come near my MEAT. Two of the females developed a spicy, attractive scent. I didn’t know what the word meant at that time, but it drifted through my head again and again. WIFE. One day, through some error, a gate was left unlocked, and I heard them, the Dholes, streaming out into the night. They brought two of them back later, males, angry and shouting, but the rest are still out there somewhere or dead, I guess. Anyway, I’m glad some of the Dholes weren’t here when the LAST VISITOR came.)
The storm comes over us, screaming in the night, white flashesand spears of rain, a wind so high and strong it feels alive. Fists of hail hammer the ground and the world cracks open. Somewhere wood breaks, a plastic chair hurtles through and smashes on the side of the enclosure. Ee Ee’s abandoned carcass, her remaining fur, is raked by wind and rain, and it looks like she’s rolling over. Like she’s going to get up and walk her bones over here. Tak Tak Tak and I cower. Lightning forks through the night, spreading like a bony hand across the sky. Something comes down with a greatcrash, throwing up silver daggers of rain. The world roars and goes black.
I pant where I lie. I am not dead. There are wet things all around me, sharp things sticking into my flanks, but I am not hurt. I nose up through the wet dark. Leaves from a fallen tree that almost fills the enclosure lap at me like cold tongues. “Tak Tak Tak?”
“Chachacha?” Our voices are like birds on the storm. The wind lashes through the branches of the tree. It’s a fir, trunk broken and sappy and white above us in the night. At the top, around the jagged base of the trunk, something black whips about, spitting fiery venom like a snake. The dusty scent of electricity mingles with the rain.
“We can get out,” Tak Tak Tak says. “We have to.”
But what isout? We were born here in this place, this enclosure, surrounded by rock walls. I know about some thingsout there. Sound, heartbeats, scents. I have a picture of the world made of these things. It is not safeout there. Why would the VISITORS have kept us in here, if not to keep us safe?
“Come on,” Tak Tak Tak says.
I place my two forepaws on the bark. I am scared, but something else is stronger. The pulse in my head, MEAT MEAT MEAT.
We climb carefully up the trunk of the fallen fir where it lies at a steep angle—a narrow bridge out of here, to the top of the enclosure. We creep forward, upward along the trunk, toward where the end of the broken tree rests on the edge of our pit. Our paws slip on branches and wet foliage. The stink of singed wood and rubber is everywhere. It’s too much, my delicate nose burns. The sky boils. With a crash,a sheen of mud pushes out of the cliff walls on the other side of the enclosure. A brown wave crashes down into our home. It slowly begins to fill with water—it is becoming a prison, a trap. Below, Ee Ee Eee’s bones and hide are slowly covered with water. The fiery snake spits and curvets above us. It falls into the water with a hiss, just like a real snake.
We crouch on the tree trunk, chirping with fear. “I’m afraid,” I tell my brother.
“Me too,” he says, “but we have to go anyway.”
We creep up, up the trunk. It feels like it will roll at any moment and tip us into the white foaming water below. There is no backward, there is only forward.
Tak Tak Tak slips on the wet bark and scrabbles and falls. I am frozen in place, trilling his name. He lands straddling the trunk, legs hanging down either side. We gasp at each other, eyes wide and mouths also. I creep close and lick his hindquarter, which is all I can reach. He gets up, leg by trembling leg. We inch forward, up, forward, up, until the broken end of the trunk is before us. Tak Tak Tak jumps, slips, lands on the stone edge of the pit, hauls with his front legs and pistons with his back legs. He somersaults onto solid ground. I stand on my toes to get purchase with my claws and leap. The world drifts by below, the place where we were born, and I’m sure I’m going to fall and die, but I don’t. I land neatly beside Tak Tak Tak. We kiss one another and pant. Below, the sparking black snake leaps and lashes at the water, as if angry it can’t reach us. It seems furious that we’re free. So we get up and dance on our hind legs and shout down at it all, water and snake, dancing in the rain. Thunder and rain pounds at us, but we’re part of it all now.
“Take that, snake!” I yell. It hisses in reply, whipping back and forth:snake snake snake.I scamper back from the edge, heart beating fast.
We are on a cement walkway lined with tall trees that dance wildly in the gale. Tak Tak Tak and I can hardly hear one another over the wind.Let’s get out of here.If one tree can fall, others will follow (oldpainted dog wisdom). We run along the wide avenue of trees following the natural downward slope of the hill. Even though we’re afraid of the storm, everything in my nose and body is shouting. The feel of new ground beneath our feet. The new scents all around, the wide-open space, no longer surrounded by rock walls. New, new,new! We love new things. We are travelers by nature—I realize that now. My legs tell me, my joy tells me, my tongue lolling and my great bounds, which eat yards at a time, they all tell me. I had no reason to know it before. Even as we run Tak Tak Tak rises onto his hind legs, then launches, twisting into the air, trilling high. He feels it, too.
Once clear of the trees, we slow down. We trot past the enclosures containing the dead, the felled, the MEAT. There are interesting things strewn across the path. An orange cat still holds the imprint of a small VISITOR’s hands. Scraps of rotten food litter the path and we snap them up, but there’s not much. We’re not the only hungry ones out here, it seems. MEAT MEAT MEAT, my mind cries, but there is no more MEAT, only sinew, bones.
We come to a large flat place divided by white lines into squares. In some of the squares there sit containers made of metal and glass. Some of the containers have food inside. We paw at the smooth surfaces, but there is no way in. What a waste, good MEAT sitting there rotting away. But the containers provide shelter at least. Tak Tak Tak and I crawl into the oily space beneath one of them. We put our heads on our paws and watch the shining needles of the downpour. Maybe we sleep a little. But our ears know when the rain eases suddenly, and we wake then, as watery sun is pouring down over the lot.
My stomach complains. There is MEAT above us, encased in metal, but we can’t get in.
“We need something living,” Tak Tak Tak says. “We need to hunt.”
MEAT MEAT MEAT, goes the pulse in my brain, and as if I summoned it, something darts into view in the center of the lot. I’venever seen one moving about. But I’ve eaten it before from a bucket. MEAT. Specifically, RABBIT.
(Maybe I did summon it, who knows what I can do, I am Chachacha the snake eater and escapee, explorer of new worlds.)
The RABBIT goes to a pile of things that lie on the ground, spilled from a bag. They are NOT MEAT, but I have eaten them before, cooked. Potatoes, sprouting. They have delicate green tubers and leaves coming from them. The RABBIT nibbles.
Tak Tak Tak and I confer in silence. Then he backs out silently from under our shelter, out of the RABBIT’s eyeline. I wait until he’s in position and then I burst from cover and run straight at the RABBIT. It’s not a very smart plan, one that would only fool an idiot. But the RABBIT believes me because the RABBIT is young, has probably never seen something that looks like me, and is an idiot. He turns and runs, making for the nearest cover. He’s nearly under the car when Tak Tak Tak darts out and seizes him by the throat.
We tear him apart down the middle. Tak Tak Tak and I sit down together politely a few yards apart. We eat together at the same time because we are both young and strong. There are no pups to care for, no Ee Ee Eee to give the first bite to. For a moment I feel sad about this, then all my mind turns to
