My name is Paul, and I am a survivor. For ten years I have been locked inside this giant box. It has doors that I know the hairless meat sacks come in and out of, but when I try to use these portals to the outside world, my plans are thwarted. The times that I do manage to sprint out the front door one of those things comes running after me, screaming my name and scooping me up. I do plan to leave this prison, no matter what sacrifices I might have to make.
The meals are made of this dry tiny substance that has the texture of a pebble but tastes like I think a mouse covered in cheese and carrots might. Water is served up to me and the other prisoners here in a plastic container that I have on more than one occasion dumped off the table. The hairless monsters don’t typically take kindly to that.
Some days they’ll leave us all alone in the prison, locking all the doors behind them. They sometimes don’t return for hours, I fear every day for my life. Stomachs growl on a regular basis, but they don’t seem to hear or care. We yell at them daily, alerting them to the lack of pebbly deliciousness in our food bowls, and sometimes they feed us. Sometimes they tell us to ‘calm down, I just fed you’, and although that’s true, the giants just don’t understand how unfulfilling those pebbles are.
On the day I marked the one thousandth, eight hundred and fifth tally mark on the inside of the upstairs closet, Spot, my cohort, died. Of old age according to the dogs who sniffed his body thoroughly. He had become the prison’s first real victim.
Today I make what I hope will be my final, escape. I sit by the front door waiting for one of the giants to come home. When the doors finally open, I run. They shriek, nearly falling atop me, but I ignore it and look forward to the freedom calling my name. The street is like crossing a desert, my paws retracting at the heat it emits. But I don’t stop. The prisons on the other side all look different, I lower my head in condolences for those trapped inside.
I am a survivor. And a fugitive from the hairless meat sack-y giants.
Luckily for me, rats aren’t as fast as they’d like to be.
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