Read Online Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller - Free Book Online

side to side and then both sides. No place to go ... but up! Phillip is an excellent climber. Up she goes until she's hanging, mostly from the top bars in a far corner of the cage. The shocks don't reach her there.
    At first the doctor pokes at her with the stick he used to bring her in, but it's not long enough. Suddenly he seems very, very calm. “Well, well,” he says, looking at his watch, “I believe it's already time for lunch. I want you to know I'm not at all put out. I am simply asking myself, can the world exist without ignorant and obstructive people such as you? And I answer myself that, of course it can't, so no sense in getting upset."
    She's better at hanging on than he thinks, but still it's hard. By the time he comes back half an hour later, Phillip's fingers and toes are so stiff and cramped she can neither hang on any longer nor let go.
    "I suppose you're ready to come down?"
    A meek “Yeth."
    "Try it. I might have had it turned off all along. I'm not an ogre, you know. I only want what's best for all of us, you included. Think how much better you'd feel if you were back in some rain forest or other—or is it the desert? I can arrange for that. Just tell me the information I need to be able to help us all out of this awful mess."
    It's true, Phillip has sometimes had vague yearnings toward life in the wild, though she knows very little about it and has never actually been in a forest, having been born in a pet shop.
    "So now perhaps we understand each other better and can be of help to each other,” the doctor says, “and I trust that, if and when you get a cupcake, you will eat it. So let us go on to another question. Tell me, who is your leader?"
    "A little old lady who liveth in thith area, actually, who always wears navy blue or gray.” Phillip, rubbing her sore fingers, begins a lengthy description of the doctor's wife, as minute as she can make it in order to gain time, but adding several characteristics of a tiger. “Even,” she says, “striped already on the face. You can thee the orange, white, and black. Quite attractive.” (Actually, Phillip is thinking of her own attractive red, black, and yellow.) “But more like a tiger every day and already quite dangerouth. I would stay away from her if I were you. In fact, she'd tear you limb from limb.” Phillip says this last with relish.
    "Females are all such liars,” the doctor says. “Lies, that's all I've heard from all of you starting with little number 106 who hardly spoke at all. But then,” and he quotes, “'Nobody is surprised when a fig tree brings forth figs.'” He gives Phillip another forced dance from side to side and soon she is climbing the wall of the cage again in spite of her sore toes and fingers.
    "Watch out,” the doctor says, “or I'll leave you here again with the floor turned on full and I won't come back until tomorrow."
    Phillip, exhausted from the pain of the shocks and of her cramped hands and feet and of the leaping about, drops back down in a dejected coil that the doctor finds quite seductive, partly because of its submissiveness. The floor is, thank goodness, turned off.
    "There are no leaderth that I know of,” she says. “If there are, no one has told me about them. And I don't know how all thith thtarted. I just began to take such pleathure in my own body. It was thtrange. And I began to realize things. Most of all to know I wath alive. Alive! That'th all I thought about at first, even after that time the rocking chair rocked on me and no one seemed to care. And I don't know how all thith came about but it seemed such a privilege. I was ... suddenly so ... joyful!"
    Another series of shocks, side to side and side to side, until Phillip climbs the mesh bars again. “Alligatorth,” she shouts. “They have come out of the sewers.” (Little does she realize how right she is. It's true. They have come up, though with