Pets

He watched as the creature tore the pages from his book. It was a small, hideous creature with patches of matted fur covering its gray, slimy skin. It looked up at him and growled as it shredded the pages between its claws.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, clenching his fists. He had to calm down before he killed the creature but in moments such as this one he found calmness eluding him. It wasn’t the first item of his that the creature had destroyed and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last.

But he couldn’t kill the creature. It was one of her beloved pets. Killing the creature would mean losing her love, and he didn’t want to think about that.

It was his love for her that kept him only partially sane. She made him feel whole. Having her in his life gave his life purpose. He couldn’t imagine her not being there, not seeing her when he came home, not feeling her presence throughout the house.

His life had been great throughout the years. It was a simple life as he wasn’t famous nor rich. But he thought of it as a good life. He had everything he wanted and a few things he didn’t know he wanted. There was a calmness in his life that came from her. That calmness made him love her all the more.

But he despised the pets with a depth that no other human could possibly understand.

At the beginning of the relationship he was taken aback by the pets, but the new love allowed him to overlook his repulsion. As the love grew more mature, he learned that to love her meant he had to live with the pets. In his youth this wasn’t a problem, for feeling her love was an addiction that he knew he would never overcome. As the years turned into decades, his loathing for the pets burned in his heart.

The creatures were hideous. One had uneven eyes and gnarled fur on half of its body. Another had no fur, only bare skin covered with boils that oozed pus. A smaller one had three and a half legs and two tongues.

Every couple of years another pet arrived. Sometimes the new arrival would replace one that had died. Other times she would simply bring home another pet for no reason.

They destroyed furniture, left feces, vomit, and blood wherever they roamed, and left other dead creatures inside the doorways. Over the years he learned to hide his repulsion and anger, for upsetting his love would risk losing her. Instead, he purchased new furniture and carpets and other objects destroyed by the pets. It was the physical cost of his love.

He was subtle in his requests to her to own fewer pets, but his requests were ignored. He watched as she loved the pets, patting them with affection and kissing their hideously misshaped heads. She let them sleep in her bed, something he couldn’t do any longer due to the smell, stains, and shed skin the pets left behind.  

He cowered in his own room at night, listening to the pets roam the house. He kept the door closed so they could never enter, but that didn’t stop them from trying. They mocked him, thought of him as a weaker animal.

They weren’t wrong. It was his love for her that made him weaker. It was his fear of losing her love that made him endure the pets and their destructive nature.

As he clenched his eyes shut in a vain attempt to calm himself, he came to a simple realization: her love was so great that he, alone, couldn’t fulfill it. She needed the love of the decrepit, sickening, and disgusting creatures because she needed more love than any single person could provide.

He couldn’t have her without the creatures. He could never tell her how much he hated the creatures. He had to lie to her, make her think that he loved the creatures. He had done this with little success over the years, but now he either had to lie harder or he would kill the creature.

And if he could lie to the woman he loved, he could lie to himself.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the grotesque creature that was shredding his book. It growled at him again, which caused it to cough up something that was once living but now only partially digested.

He closed his eyes and took another deep breath. When he opened them, the creature had transformed into the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Its white flowing mane partially hid its big blue eyes. The pet stepped forward and he picked it up and hugged it.

While carrying the beautiful creature he saw another pet. It stood on its hind legs and let its hair flow to the floor. He reached down and picked up that pet, too, and carried it up the stairs.

Both of the pets licked his face and he smiled as he looked around the room. He saw the carpet without the stains and the furniture without any damage. He sat on the couch and let the pets come to him. If he didn’t concentrate very hard, he saw them as beautiful creatures. A tear fell from his eye as he had finally found peace.

His love entered the room and the sight horrified him. He remembered her beauty and the aurora she exuded, but it was gone now. What he saw was something roughly the shape of a human, but with extra partial limbs. Her skin was a pale gray and there were areas where the skin simply didn’t exist, exposing the blood and muscle underneath. She gave him a wide smile, exposing her toothless gums.

“You finally see me as I have always seen you,” she said as she sat down in a chair. One of the pets jumped onto her lap and started licking her face.

He closed his eyes and ran his fingers through the fur of the pet that stayed on his lap.