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thinkingagain · 4 years

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The Beast posed cheerfully in picture after picture with a gun and a dead animal. The Beast held up the animals’ heads so the photo could capture their dead eyes.

Sir Sleepy of the Bunny Nest (A Novel of the Revolution) Book Two: Empire Chapter 37

Sir Sleepy of the Bunny Nest found himself in a different room. Light came so brightly through the door into its dark interior that at first he couldn’t see. He was sitting in a Beast chair. His eyes focused firmly on the Commandant’s shadow, watching for any physical reaction. The Commandant’s pose remained relaxed.

The Sir’s eyes adjusted. He could see, around him, what seemed a regular Beast drinking establishment, a place where Beasts became intoxicated so they could risk dying in their vehicles. Handles that poured the deadly beverages stood in a row across a shiny counter and smelled of heavy sugars.

Behind the counter stood a plump Beast Madam, her face half wide and friendly, half grumpy, as she poured a container full of a beverage. A few other Beasts moved around the room. None seemed to notice the Sir. Although he found that odd, he acknowledged that it was so.

The Commandant settled into a chair next to him. The shiny Beast objects on its shirt flashed when they caught the light from the open doorway.

“Why have you brought me here?” the Sir asked. Not for a second did the Sir let the Commandant entirely out of his vision. He took in what was above and below him only enough to make sure he wasn’t about to be attacked.

The Commandant stared like it didn’t comprehend. Its eyes wandered up towards the ceiling as if asking a question, and stayed up.

The Sir followed the Commandant’s wandering glance and saw what there was to see. Silently, he stared.

Arrayed around the upper walls of the drinking establishment were the mounted and stuffed bodies and heads of multiple animals. A lion, a rhino, a bear, a wolf, smaller animals of many shapes and sizes. Some had their full bodies stuffed, others had only necks and heads remaining. They were lined one after another, several rows high, on the walls. They covered the whole bar area and, the Sir could now see, lined the walls of an even bigger restaurant area beyond the bar.

Beneath and around the stuffed bodies and heads were old photos of one main Beast, its rough beard growing whiter as it aged. The Beast posed cheerfully in picture after picture with a gun and a dead animal. The Beast held up the animals’ heads so the photo could capture their dead eyes.

The Sir took in as much as he could stand. “I see. How would you and other Beasts feel if those of you I have killed, I mounted on a wall, then celebrated in drunken revelry beneath your desiccated corpses?”

“Desiccated? I think they seem plump, myself.” The Commandant’s eyes darkened, as if it had wished it had never lived. Its mouth flattened into what was almost a smile. “Still, I’ve asked that same question again and again, for years.” The artificial minty aroma of the Commandant’s skin came unpleasantly into the Sir’s nostrils. “Of course I always knew the answer. My shock and my asking were just ways of trying to hide from what I knew.”

The Commandant nodded at the array of animals on the wall. “There’s 25 years of work here. The bodies of over 300 animals are mounted on these walls. Only devotion could have achieved this massive collection. The man who shot most of them, and who led the expeditions that shot them all, retired from hunting eventually and continued mounting his collection. He would come here in the evenings and greet friends and patrons.”

“And other Beasts greatly admired his unashamed love of slaughter and gore, I imagine,” the Sir said, his tone ice. “What is it you think can change my mind about, here?”

“It’s easy for you, isn’t it?”

The Sir startled. Before he could respond, the Commandant continued. “You can look at this and see clearly what you have to struggle against. I have to look at it and see my own kind. See myself. That’s a struggle I hope you never have to face. Deciding what to do, as a Beast in a world of Beasts. It requires asking myself how I can change the things that I myself am part of.”

The Sir stared hard at the Commandant. He didn’t believe that such an arrogant Beast could be sincere for a moment. But by any animal signs that the Sir could read, the Commandant was sincere.

“Look at this room.” The Commandant gestured with its Fleshy Piedmonts at various corners of the room. “Most Beasts who come here think they’re well-meaning. They have friends and people they love. Their struggles in life have been difficult, and they’ve often felt lost and alone. They come here and they know others and they laugh and banter with them.

“While they’re doing it, while they’re feeling a moment of warmth and togetherness in a world that has often strained them to the breaking point, they’re doing it around animals who were shot and had their dead bodies displayed for a camera. Then those animals were gutted and had their insides stuffed with artificial fluids before their bodies were stitched back together with wire or thread.

“You can stand outside it, disgusted, because you’re a rabbit, a superior animal. You don’t have to be a Beast and feel what it’s like to be so lovely and powerful and horrible at the same time. You don’t have to ask yourself how to make more grandness and less horror out of you and your own kind.”

“You don't have to behave the way you do,” the Sir said. The Commandant’s melodramatic tone made the Sir’s ears pin back in rage. “Oh, it’s true, you need food and water and shelter like all animals need, and those needs are sometimes desperate. But it’s not the fact that a Beast has needs that makes a Beast horrible. It’s that, in a world full of wonderful things that any other animal can see without trying, all Beasts do is indulge themselves in their horrifying whims. They don’t care who or what they destroy, even themselves.”

“It sounds like you may think it’s possible to change them.” The Commandant’s eyes grew even darker and more rueful. “I didn’t realize. Myself, I’ve always felt certain that Beasts can’t really change, not in the mass. For every Beast who learns to treat others better, there’s another Beast who learns only abuse.”

The Sir struggled to respond. He wanted to balance giving an honest answer, whether the Commandant deserved one or not, with his certainty that the conversation was a ruse. “Early on,” he said, “I believed that a Beast was a Beast, that there was no difference between Beasts worth understanding. Then I took charge of my own poor hapless Beast. I could see that with care, even a worthless Beast poet could, maybe, feel it had a life worth living. Then I met the Madam, who does not need me to take care of her at all, and whose life is an example of how commitment to any cause must be done out of love.

“So how can I say what Beasts are capable of, either as individuals or as a group? It’s not my place to decide that. My place is fighting back against Beastly abuse of other animals. And no Beast is as deadly to other animals as you.”

The Commandant winced. “If it makes it easier for you to believe that, go ahead. Most Beasts don’t have a complex enough view of the world and of others, so why should you? Why not treat me like a one-dimensional cartoon villain in some bad Beast film? That way, you won’t have to think about the real moral problems created by Beasts for other Beasts, or that lead Beasts to treat animals like they do. It can’t help you fight, I suppose. So what’s the point in understanding? What’s the point in trying to cooperate with some Beasts and change what’s happening in the world?”

“Do you think you can delude me with these Beastly tricks?” The Sir’s face grew hot, his paw twitched in the direction of his sword. “Your behavior and character is well known.”

“Is it?” One of the Commandant’s Fleshy Piedmonts brushed at the shiny objects on its uniform as if they were meaningless distractions. “Maybe it’s just easier for you to believe the things you’ve heard about me. Then you don’t have to consider, firsthand, what is or isn’t true. Then again, maybe, if you’ll listen to me, you’ll see that what you’ve heard isn’t the whole truth.”

The Sir started to speak, but the Commandant raised one of its Piedmonts. “Please. Let me finish. I know how some of the things I’ve done look. I also know that some of the things I’m supposed to have done, I didn't do. I’m not trying to convince you of that. I just want you to hear me out, to understand why, from my point of view, I’ve done what I have. Then, if you want, we can go back to fighting. I don’t want it to be said that I didn’t even try to find a way to work with you. Even though it will be said, since distorting the truth is one of the main failings of Beasts.”

The Commandant’s eyes shrunk backed, pained. “But is it one of your failings too? Do you want to have to go on fighting me, and other Beasts much worse than me, your whole life, until all your strength has been thrown away on the attempt, and yet the Beasts come on, wave after wave? Or do you want to try another way?”

The Sir had wondered the same thing many times. His chest fluttered, faltering a moment. At the sign of it he caught himself and remembered what to do. His voice took on a more arrogant tone. “I shall hear you out. We shall see whether you have anything to offer me and my Magic Animal friends. We have shown already that you cannot defeat us, so I will listen to what you have to say.”

The Sir stood up haughtily from the chair, looked around at the Beast establishment with its many animal heads staring dead from the walls. “But beware.” His voice was full of scornful defiance. “Maybe someday animals will treat Beasts this way.”

The Commandant laughed, almost gleefully. “It could very well be. I have other things I want to show you.”

The arrogant rabbit followed the Commandant out the door of the Beast establishment.

Behind them, seen by no one, materialized as if from an unknown dream, a small bunny watched them both, carefully.

#bunny #rabbit #revolution #empire #satire #animals #animal rights #politics #adventure #theory #fantasy #science fiction #environmentalism #sir sleepy

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