Part 21

I had to rescue the dog, or at least try. Sure, he appeared to be down a leg and a tail and he had a sizeable chunk missing from his side and I wasn’t sure how I was going to carry him back up to the surface, but, damn it, no Lovecraftian eyeball pyramid is going to eat my dog without a fight. And since the dog seemed too oblivious to put up one himself, it was on me.

I flung myself at the eyeball pyramid.

And it promptly caught me in its tentacles, rubbed me against its eyeballs, which all felt like warm, pulsing olives, and then ate off my arm. I screamed, but I have to be honest, it didn’t hurt as much as I expected. You see dudes getting eaten by things in the movies—alligators, sharks, aliens—and you have to figure that’s a ten on the pain scale, right? But this was more like a two, like that pain you feel when you cut yourself shaving, but you don’t notice it until later and then only because it kind of burns. But then, when you see the blood, oops. It hurts.

So, I guess, if you have to die by getting eaten to death, you want to get eaten by an eyeball pyramid, because it doesn’t hurt that much. I resigned myself to my fate.

But, of course, Pumpkin did not come all this way to resign herself to shit. She leaped into the air and grabbed one of the tentacles. When another came toward her, she swatted at it. She dug her claws into the closest eyeballs and, when the pyramid let out a roar, she arched her back and seemed to shed enough fur for a billion cats.

The fur floated everywhere! It settled on the pyramid of eyeballs in a thick layer and each time the pyramid tried to open any eyeball, cat fur settled right onto the eye. Each tentacle, therefore, had to busy itself trying to pluck fur out of a thousand eyeballs.

The pyramid let out such a cry of despair I almost felt bad for it. But, this meant that it dropped me and the dog. We both slid across the floor toward an exit.

“Pumpkin!” I called. “Here, kitty, kitty!” And she did come with us, as we slid away on what I can only assume was a slick trail of eyeball juice, but, of course, she acted like she was too cool to really be associated with us in anyway.

Oh, I Forgot to Tell You Guys This!

I think the dog lied to me. Yesterday. He got back from his walk with the Butcher and I got up to get something in the kitchen and he saw me and seemed to mull something over. And then he began to act like he hadn’t gotten his customary end-of-walk treat. But it was a little squirrelly. Not quite right.

So, I was like “Did you not get a treat?”

And he looked over at the Butcher. Like he was checking to see if the Butcher was going to narc him out! And, when he saw that the Butcher wasn’t paying attention, he looked back at me like “Yeah, I totally need a treat.”

I’m going to laugh really hard if I end up with a dog that doesn’t understand that not everything that happens to him is good, but somehow understands deception.

One Problem with this Story

This morning, as I was walking the dog, it was so dark and foggy in the back part of the yard that it was like something out of a horror movie, or a story where a woman very much like myself falls into the wrong side of reality, and it was actually kind of terrifying.

So, good job, self. You may not scare anyone else with this story, but you have done yourself.