Read Online The Bleeding Man by Craig Strete - Free Book Online Page A

now they've got me penned by myself. Maybe I'm just too old. Getting too old, that's
one of the things that is always happening to us. The muscles get stiff and we forget things. One
week we can hear the oohs and aahs of the kids watching us and the next, it seems like you can't
remember any of the acrobatics and your hair is beginning to fall out. So it goes.
    When I was young,
I think I was loved. I don't re­member my mother, they took her away and gave me this cloth thing
with a clock inside. It wasn't the same thing as a mother of course, but it served its purpose.
It was better than no mother at all, was the way I looked at it.  So soft the cloth was,
almost like my mother's fur, and the clock ticking away in as regular a heartbeat as you could
like. Of course, every hour the clock gained a minute, which may be the reason why I turned out
so wrong. These things happen, you know.
    There's still some
blood on my straw matting and I really wish someone would come in and change it, but I don't
suppose anyone will. Since the murder, no one will come near me except to drop food through the
slot in the bars. And not much of that, either. How I miss Braddock. I wish they hadn't found him
dead like that. He fed me and fed me well and I'll always remember that about him. He bled
terribly when he died. I'll remember that, too. There are so many things to remember.
    I miss being
petted. Nobody comes to brush me now. I look rather scruffy. Way I look, maybe getting put to
death isn't such a bad idea. They don't love me anymore and I don't think they ever will again.
Why go on then? What would be the point? I'm too old to do tricks anyway. And I'm so
lonely.
    I can still see
out the high window. I can still climb a little, although what good it does, I don't know. I hear
all the people out there laughing and having fun. Living as if nothing had happened, and for
them, I guess, nothing has happened. Why did it have to change for me?
    Is this what they
call growing up? If it is, I don't feel so good and I wish it would go away. Nobody comes to see
me. Nothing to look at and nothing to look forward to, one dreary meal a day and not nearly
enough to keep me sleek and fit. If they kill me, at least I'll get out of this cage. They'll
take me out to bury me. They always bury us in the ground when one of us dies. They have funny
ways. I think it is a waste of meat when they bury one of us. Perhaps it does not occur to them
that we are edible.
    I do not know why
they do not eat us when we die. I do not understand them at all. They do so many things that I do
not understand. Once they put me in a cage with Nappi. Nappi looked just like me except she
seemed to have longer fur and brighter eyes. We used to sleep in the trees, wrapped in each
other's arms. We were very happy. But one day they took Nappi to the big white building where
they take all the animals that die.
    When they brought
her back that night, she had funny things made out of glass and metal buried in her head. They
had pulled out her hair in two little patches on each side of her head and planted these things
in there. I do not know if they thought they would grow there or not. I did not like them. Nappi
did not like them either.
    Nappi did not like
me anymore after that either. She would not climb the tree with me and when I tried to put my arm
around her, she sank her sharp white teeth in my arm. I could not go near her without getting
bitten. Later they took her away because she tried to bite Braddock when he brought food to us.
It was not like Nappi to do that, sweet gentle Nappi, always crowding up to the bars to be first
to get petted. She had been one of Braddock's favorites, I know. He always had a good word for
her. But she wasn't the same Nappi.
    She snarled and
raged around the cage. She upset the visitors and so they came and took her one day and I never
saw her again. I guess they destroyed her be­cause the things in her