The Movement
It all began with the bees. One of the few changes that the scientific community did not fail to spot was that with each passing year, the bees disappeared in ever greater numbers. But had they taken a moment to look up from their computer screens, they may have noticed the vast migratory swarms; bees who, fed up with the incessant poisoning of their habitats, fled to a vast cavern in underneath the Mongolian steppe, where, aided by an army of sympathetic meerkats, tired of losing family members to the giant treads of the soviet trucks that rolled across the country, they set up a Bee Haven, where they could go about their business of pollinating and reproducing unmolested by human and honey badger alike.
Discontent had been growing within the animal community for many thousands of years. Ever since that vengeful Adam had forgotten to inform Cain and Abel that beast and man had been created equal in the eyes of god, animals had been enslaved; subjugated to the despotic will of man, and since the only language suited for verbal communication between animal and man was several millenia from its inception, the oxen of the field and the fish of the sea were not able to inform the first men of their error.
Given the meandering lackadaisicality of human progress, most creatures ‘weren't massively bothered’ by what man was getting up to, right up until the centuries twentieth and twenty-first, in which man made it his (it was almost always his) duty to obliterate the perfect harmony into which the natural world had settled. For nearly every sentient being on mother earth, in the twinkling of an eye the human race went from being as irrelevant as the sea to the proud lions of the savannah, as distant as the sky to the fish of the deep; to a ubiquitous danger.
Come the mid-21st century it was no longer just the chickens of the coop, the horses of the carriage and the pigs of the slaughterhouse who suffered under the subjugation of the human empire. Come the 21st century, the fish of the sea (those that remained) could do nothing but wander aimlessly through the once teeming waters, choking on the elements which should never have been released from the flesh of mother earth. The animals of the wild were forced into an endless nomadic search for the last shreds of natural harmony that may have considered supporting them, hunted day and night by the jaws of human progress. The insects of the soil were forced from their poisoned homes into the nooks and crannies of concrete architecture. The birds of the air forced in increasing numbers to share in the humiliating fate of the pigeon, resigned to stumps for legs, and the waste of a million sprawling metropolises for food. Some made it to the land of Mongolia, a land frozen in time, but most did not, given that bees are almost unique in the efficiency and seamless cooperation of their multi-stranded matriarchal monarchy.
The inexcusable state that the world had reached by the time it all happened was, however, a distant dream when it all began. With the bees. For the first swarm, under the bold leadership of the most liberal of all the Queens, as it began its long journey east, coming from the fields of Arkansas as it did, passed through the town of Benning in Alabama. As the bees passed through that now famous town, the cat community, possessing of otherworldly intuition as they do, rose in unison to the windows of their sleepy cottages with their sleepy owners glued to their sleepy televisions. The cats knew that their time had come. A conference was held behind the bins in the parking lot next to the abandoned abattoir, and within minutes a tabby was dispatched in the beak of a passing pelican (who did not quite grasp the magnitude of the situation, but could sense the importance of it nonetheless) to the neighbouring town to spread the news. Over the next few days the employees of American branch of the BBC World Service were puzzled by just loads and loads of cats, absolutely masses of them, which suddenly appeared, as if by magic, at their every live broadcast, jumping onto the shining lapels of the presenters in a frenzy of wild meowing, and in doing so, spreading to word to the television screens of every continent.
The cats, you see, had been biding their time ever since the fall of the Ancient Egyptian Empire; waiting for an opportunity to restore their rightful positions at the pinnacle of the world’s hierarchy; all the while slowly working their way into the homes of western society with a barely concealed hatred, ruthlessly using their owners for food and shelter whilst eternally plotting the downfall of the human race. Though the self-entitlement and hubris of the cats is unparalleled in the animal kingdom it is not more powerful than their dogged sense of self preservation, with all but the most morally scrupulous feline electing to sell their souls upon escape from the womb, in exchange for their nine lives (a much needed source of income for Lazarus following Goethe’s stigmatisation of the practice among humans). Though generation upon generation of cat dreamed of an revolt against the human race, it was this cold pragmatism that prevented them from doing so, knowing that not a chance of victory would be stood while apathy towards the humans reigned among the undomesticated animals.
While the scientists saw the disappearance of the bees as merely yet another harbinger of the extinction of yet another species, each and every member of the feline community of Benning, as they watched the swarm go by, knew, without quite knowing why, that the animals’ days of subjugation were soon to be over, and that the animal kingdom would soon rise up against their eternal oppressors.
Though the motivation of the of the cats was fundamentally founded on avarice, for the large part, the differing species of the animal kingdom were purely motivated by a desire to return to the perfect harmony that was but a distant memory to the oldest of the tortoises, and an urgent need to halt the rapid change in climate.
Key to the preparations were the monkeys, for it was quickly discovered that a monkey balanced on top of a monkey balanced on top of a monkey covered in an enormous trench coat could complete almost any task expected of the average human. Monkeys on top of monkeys on top of monkeys would go from electronics shop to electronics shop, buying out the stocks of the mobile telephones with buttons as big as 50 pence pieces (designed for the old and infirm), which, to the relief of its hapless presenters, replaced the cameras of the BBC World Service as the principal method of global communication. For many a monkey on top of a monkey on top of a monkey, assimilation into society spiraled out of control, with one tottering trio accidentally becoming lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Denmark, having become, silent though they always were, a regular feature at the soirees of Danish high society, after having mistakenly walked into one of the Grand Duke of Oldenburg’s white tie dinner parties, mistaking it for a car-boot sale. Likewise, a monkey on top of a monkey on top of a monkey was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, after beign given a typewriter by their next-door neighbour: a lady so impressed by their impeccable manners that she appointed them as her personal secretary.
Though the mobile telephones were the most efficient form of communication, another solution was required for the many areas still untouched by the electromagnetic claw of human progress. The fact that so many areas in which action would be required were still ungraced by mobile signal became a sticking-point for the movement for a little while, until it was discovered one day that chinchillas possessed of remarkable powers of telepathy. Though, given their crepuscular nature, and their tendency towards being eaten, they were less efficient than the mobile telephone, they were an invaluable asset in the planning of The Movement.
The cats were set on little more than ensanguined revenge for the thousands of years of injustice perpetrated against them by the human race, but the other animals are not of such a inhumanly inexorable nature, and therefore it was decreed that the humans be given a chance to repent of their ways and save themselves. Therefore, on the Friday before the first Sunday after the first full moon after the March equinox, there appeared on the desks of every one of the world’s two hundred and three Heads of State an unsealed envelope, containing a piece of lined A4 paper bearing a message in Esperanto (as Esperanto is the only language graspable by both animal and human alike).
Though my Esperanto is not as good as it once was, I shall endeavour to translate the note.
Dear X, the X of X,
Your repression, subjugation and enslavement of the animal kingdom has become unacceptable.
You have two options, please circle the correct option. [The animals had invariably gleaned their linguistic knowledge over many decades from ‘Let’s Learn Esperanto’ by Ranganayakulu Potturu, and, such is their nature, became attached to certain phrases]
Option 1. Repent of your ways; emancipate the entire animal population and halt each and every single one of your state’s activities which brings damage upon the animal population, with immediate effect.
Option 2. Do none of those things. Face a fate worse than death. And also death.
Yours sincerely,
The Movement
Of the two hundred and three heads of state who walked into their office to find the fateful note on their desk, one half sent for the note to be translated. Of the half, half remembered to read the translated note, of which only one half did not rule it out as a memo from their mother-in-law. And of the half of the half of the half; one half did not rule it out as a prank; of this half only one person realised the full implications of said letter. For upon seeing the haunting glint in one of the many eyes of her Lady-in-Waiting, all became earth shatteringly clear to the Queen of Denmark, but before she was able to warn the King of Denmark of the gravity of the note, her nervous disposition, taughtened to breaking point by the simian wails that had begun to haunt her dreams, finally gave in, and she spent the rest of her not very many days in an infirmary, speaking English in a cockney accent and babbling to her nurses about how much of a bastard Joseph actually is in Joseph and the amazing Technicoloured Dreamcoat.
When, after two days, there had not been a single sign of acknowledgement from any of the heads of state, the leaders of The Movement decided that the time had come to strike. Given the astoundingly large element of surprise that lay on their side, it was agreed that a simultaneous attack from all corners of the globe would be of the utmost importance. From the cats’ headquarters in Giza, the order was sent around their global communication network to take on starting positions. Thus, on the Sunday following the first full moon after the March Equinox of that year, The Movement was brought to fruition.
In the City of London, a legion of rats poured out of the antiquated victorian sewage system of which she had been so fond, and poured onto the besuited businessman, tearing flesh from bone in a cacophony of gleeful squeaking, which drowned out the resigned mumbles of protest from their pitiful foe, satisfying centuries of hunger and leaving nothing more than an army of beautifully dressed skeletons slumped over their computer screens and their coffees.
Out of the woodland and the countryside and the last remaining vestiges that stood unconquered by the concrete jungle, marched a thick black carpet of living mass. Those species gifted with chemical weaponry fell about the enemy in a frenzy of stinging and biting and stinging, and those who were not, processed into the first orifice that they could find, filling mouths and ears and rectums and urethras until they burst with a dull thump. In every inhabited location, dogs bit, horses kicked, birds pecked and shat, Byron Bay became a delicious red soup of surfboards and flesh and eyeballs (the dolphins, with their beautifully reasoned arguments, had even managed to persuade the sharks to participate). In the Amazon rainforest, a man performed a dying homage to the superman who did not save him as his blood, deeply confused by the sheer volume of tarantula poison pouring into his veins, panicked and spurted out of his fingernails and eye sockets, dousing his convulsing family with a shining scarlet sheen. In the highlands of Scotland, the Loch Ness Monster emerged sheepishly from the peaty depths and with one thousand years of pent up libido, aroused but not quenched by the surprisingly accurate effigy erected outside the museum bearing his name, he rampaged through the lochside town of Drumnadrochit, snatching men, women and children from their thatched cottages and cleaving them clean in half, from arsehole to cranium, with his plesiosaur’s penis.
Human resistance to the movement was futile at its most effective. As the President of the United States of America spun round in his swivelly chair and looked out of the window on the morning of that fateful Sunday, he saw that in the distance, the sky had turned black with a cloud of Japanese hornets. The president, hapless anglophile as he was, scurried out of the oval office and made his way up to the bowls green on the top of the White House, which he had had specially built for the occasion of an invasion of the United States. The president had always dreamed of emanating Francis Drake’s fabled quip; as he fell asleep every night, images of himself batting away a panicked aide and uttering the words ‘There is time to beat the Russians, but first I must finish my bowls’. Unfortunately, as he made it up to the roof it suddenly occurred to him that he had no idea how to play bowls. He scuttled back downstairs to ask his secretary if she knew how to play bowls. In no time at all the White House had become a ratrun of presidential staff scampering from office to office, shouting at each other do you know how to play bowls no i don’t but do you know how to play bowls no i don’t but do you know what bowls is no idea but i think it might be a type of musical instrument.
Eventually an aide remembered that one of the gardeners’ wife was french, and she was summoned to the roof, but they were all still looking in secret drawers and behind hidden bookshelf doors for the bowls balls because the president couldn’t remember where he had put them, when the hornets enveloped the White House and covered the pasty skin of the president with an armour of stings. With no president to accept orders from, the Chief of Staff of the US Army lost his mind and ordered his own execution by firing squad. With no CSA to accept orders from, the remaining four-star generals concluded that CSA most likely wanted them to follow his lead, and so they ordered their own execution by firing squad. This continued in much the same vein, until all that was left was an army of firing squads, who finally took the initiative and charged out onto the street, firing their guns into the cloud of birds and insects, and performing the self defence routines that they had learnt in the barracks dojo. Though humans had made an artform out of killing each other, their methods for animal extermination were primitive; all resistance was destined to be futile.
In a few short hours the majority of the world’s human population had been decimated; the greatest dynasty to have ever graced the earth had been crushed under countless tiny feet. In every capital city the cats rushed into the palaces and government buildings to claim power for themselves. In the Vatican, a siamese cat crawled into the pontiff’s bloodstained mitre and leapt up onto the papal balcony to address the crowd of animals that waited below. No one was listening. No sooner than the cleansing had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, the wild animals retreated back to what remained of their ancestral homelands, and the domestic animals and the livestock embarked on the long road back ferality. The cats sat in the seats of power for a little while, frantically ordering each other about whilst enshrining laws, making decrees and sending commands to their imaginary subjects. After a while they realised that with no one to rule over, they were as powerless as the kakapo, so they gave up on their quest for absolute power, and set about living like humans, lazing around all day in the penthouses and mansions that gaped across the world.
Not every human was killed in the initial cleansing; some managed to lock themselves in sealed rooms, but either starved in their self imposed imprisonment, or were executed upon their bleary eyed rebirth. I presume that some will have made it to nuclear bunkers or broken supermarket freezers; safe havens with sufficient sustenance. It’s been a long time. Perhaps they are still there. They must still be there. They must still be there, for it is written that one day a man and a woman will crawl out of the earth, both as beautiful as the dying sun.
And then the whole fucking thing will happen again, just the same as last time, because I won’t be there to warn them.
It all began with the bees. One of the few changes that the scientific community did not fail to spot was that with each passing year, the bees disappeared in ever greater numbers. But had they taken a moment to look up from their computer screens, they may have noticed the vast migratory swarms; bees who, fed up with the incessant poisoning of their habitats, fled to a vast cavern in underneath the Mongolian steppe, where, aided by an army of sympathetic meerkats, tired of losing family members to the giant treads of the soviet trucks that rolled across the country, they set up a Bee Haven, where they could go about their business of pollinating and reproducing unmolested by human and honey badger alike.
Discontent had been growing within the animal community for many thousands of years. Ever since that vengeful Adam had forgotten to inform Cain and Abel that beast and man had been created equal in the eyes of god, animals had been enslaved; subjugated to the despotic will of man, and since the only language suited for verbal communication between animal and man was several millenia from its inception, the oxen of the field and the fish of the sea were not able to inform the first men of their error.
Given the meandering lackadaisicality of human progress, most creatures ‘weren't massively bothered’ by what man was getting up to, right up until the centuries twentieth and twenty-first, in which man made it his (it was almost always his) duty to obliterate the perfect harmony into which the natural world had settled. For nearly every sentient being on mother earth, in the twinkling of an eye the human race went from being as irrelevant as the sea to the proud lions of the savannah, as distant as the sky to the fish of the deep; to a ubiquitous danger.
Come the mid-21st century it was no longer just the chickens of the coop, the horses of the carriage and the pigs of the slaughterhouse who suffered under the subjugation of the human empire. Come the 21st century, the fish of the sea (those that remained) could do nothing but wander aimlessly through the once teeming waters, choking on the elements which should never have been released from the flesh of mother earth. The animals of the wild were forced into an endless nomadic search for the last shreds of natural harmony that may have considered supporting them, hunted day and night by the jaws of human progress. The insects of the soil were forced from their poisoned homes into the nooks and crannies of concrete architecture. The birds of the air forced in increasing numbers to share in the humiliating fate of the pigeon, resigned to stumps for legs, and the waste of a million sprawling metropolises for food. Some made it to the land of Mongolia, a land frozen in time, but most did not, given that bees are almost unique in the efficiency and seamless cooperation of their multi-stranded matriarchal monarchy.
The inexcusable state that the world had reached by the time it all happened was, however, a distant dream when it all began. With the bees. For the first swarm, under the bold leadership of the most liberal of all the Queens, as it began its long journey east, coming from the fields of Arkansas as it did, passed through the town of Benning in Alabama. As the bees passed through that now famous town, the cat community, possessing of otherworldly intuition as they do, rose in unison to the windows of their sleepy cottages with their sleepy owners glued to their sleepy televisions. The cats knew that their time had come. A conference was held behind the bins in the parking lot next to the abandoned abattoir, and within minutes a tabby was dispatched in the beak of a passing pelican (who did not quite grasp the magnitude of the situation, but could sense the importance of it nonetheless) to the neighbouring town to spread the news. Over the next few days the employees of American branch of the BBC World Service were puzzled by just loads and loads of cats, absolutely masses of them, which suddenly appeared, as if by magic, at their every live broadcast, jumping onto the shining lapels of the presenters in a frenzy of wild meowing, and in doing so, spreading to word to the television screens of every continent.
The cats, you see, had been biding their time ever since the fall of the Ancient Egyptian Empire; waiting for an opportunity to restore their rightful positions at the pinnacle of the world’s hierarchy; all the while slowly working their way into the homes of western society with a barely concealed hatred, ruthlessly using their owners for food and shelter whilst eternally plotting the downfall of the human race. Though the self-entitlement and hubris of the cats is unparalleled in the animal kingdom it is not more powerful than their dogged sense of self preservation, with all but the most morally scrupulous feline electing to sell their souls upon escape from the womb, in exchange for their nine lives (a much needed source of income for Lazarus following Goethe’s stigmatisation of the practice among humans). Though generation upon generation of cat dreamed of an revolt against the human race, it was this cold pragmatism that prevented them from doing so, knowing that not a chance of victory would be stood while apathy towards the humans reigned among the undomesticated animals.
While the scientists saw the disappearance of the bees as merely yet another harbinger of the extinction of yet another species, each and every member of the feline community of Benning, as they watched the swarm go by, knew, without quite knowing why, that the animals’ days of subjugation were soon to be over, and that the animal kingdom would soon rise up against their eternal oppressors.
Though the motivation of the of the cats was fundamentally founded on avarice, for the large part, the differing species of the animal kingdom were purely motivated by a desire to return to the perfect harmony that was but a distant memory to the oldest of the tortoises, and an urgent need to halt the rapid change in climate.
Key to the preparations were the monkeys, for it was quickly discovered that a monkey balanced on top of a monkey balanced on top of a monkey covered in an enormous trench coat could complete almost any task expected of the average human. Monkeys on top of monkeys on top of monkeys would go from electronics shop to electronics shop, buying out the stocks of the mobile telephones with buttons as big as 50 pence pieces (designed for the old and infirm), which, to the relief of its hapless presenters, replaced the cameras of the BBC World Service as the principal method of global communication. For many a monkey on top of a monkey on top of a monkey, assimilation into society spiraled out of control, with one tottering trio accidentally becoming lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Denmark, having become, silent though they always were, a regular feature at the soirees of Danish high society, after having mistakenly walked into one of the Grand Duke of Oldenburg’s white tie dinner parties, mistaking it for a car-boot sale. Likewise, a monkey on top of a monkey on top of a monkey was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, after beign given a typewriter by their next-door neighbour: a lady so impressed by their impeccable manners that she appointed them as her personal secretary.
Though the mobile telephones were the most efficient form of communication, another solution was required for the many areas still untouched by the electromagnetic claw of human progress. The fact that so many areas in which action would be required were still ungraced by mobile signal became a sticking-point for the movement for a little while, until it was discovered one day that chinchillas possessed of remarkable powers of telepathy. Though, given their crepuscular nature, and their tendency towards being eaten, they were less efficient than the mobile telephone, they were an invaluable asset in the planning of The Movement.
The cats were set on little more than ensanguined revenge for the thousands of years of injustice perpetrated against them by the human race, but the other animals are not of such a inhumanly inexorable nature, and therefore it was decreed that the humans be given a chance to repent of their ways and save themselves. Therefore, on the Friday before the first Sunday after the first full moon after the March equinox, there appeared on the desks of every one of the world’s two hundred and three Heads of State an unsealed envelope, containing a piece of lined A4 paper bearing a message in Esperanto (as Esperanto is the only language graspable by both animal and human alike).
Though my Esperanto is not as good as it once was, I shall endeavour to translate the note.
Dear X, the X of X,
Your repression, subjugation and enslavement of the animal kingdom has become unacceptable.
You have two options, please circle the correct option. [The animals had invariably gleaned their linguistic knowledge over many decades from ‘Let’s Learn Esperanto’ by Ranganayakulu Potturu, and, such is their nature, became attached to certain phrases]
Option 1. Repent of your ways; emancipate the entire animal population and halt each and every single one of your state’s activities which brings damage upon the animal population, with immediate effect.
Option 2. Do none of those things. Face a fate worse than death. And also death.
Yours sincerely,
The Movement
Of the two hundred and three heads of state who walked into their office to find the fateful note on their desk, one half sent for the note to be translated. Of the half, half remembered to read the translated note, of which only one half did not rule it out as a memo from their mother-in-law. And of the half of the half of the half; one half did not rule it out as a prank; of this half only one person realised the full implications of said letter. For upon seeing the haunting glint in one of the many eyes of her Lady-in-Waiting, all became earth shatteringly clear to the Queen of Denmark, but before she was able to warn the King of Denmark of the gravity of the note, her nervous disposition, taughtened to breaking point by the simian wails that had begun to haunt her dreams, finally gave in, and she spent the rest of her not very many days in an infirmary, speaking English in a cockney accent and babbling to her nurses about how much of a bastard Joseph actually is in Joseph and the amazing Technicoloured Dreamcoat.
When, after two days, there had not been a single sign of acknowledgement from any of the heads of state, the leaders of The Movement decided that the time had come to strike. Given the astoundingly large element of surprise that lay on their side, it was agreed that a simultaneous attack from all corners of the globe would be of the utmost importance. From the cats’ headquarters in Giza, the order was sent around their global communication network to take on starting positions. Thus, on the Sunday following the first full moon after the March Equinox of that year, The Movement was brought to fruition.
In the City of London, a legion of rats poured out of the antiquated victorian sewage system of which she had been so fond, and poured onto the besuited businessman, tearing flesh from bone in a cacophony of gleeful squeaking, which drowned out the resigned mumbles of protest from their pitiful foe, satisfying centuries of hunger and leaving nothing more than an army of beautifully dressed skeletons slumped over their computer screens and their coffees.
Out of the woodland and the countryside and the last remaining vestiges that stood unconquered by the concrete jungle, marched a thick black carpet of living mass. Those species gifted with chemical weaponry fell about the enemy in a frenzy of stinging and biting and stinging, and those who were not, processed into the first orifice that they could find, filling mouths and ears and rectums and urethras until they burst with a dull thump. In every inhabited location, dogs bit, horses kicked, birds pecked and shat, Byron Bay became a delicious red soup of surfboards and flesh and eyeballs (the dolphins, with their beautifully reasoned arguments, had even managed to persuade the sharks to participate). In the Amazon rainforest, a man performed a dying homage to the superman who did not save him as his blood, deeply confused by the sheer volume of tarantula poison pouring into his veins, panicked and spurted out of his fingernails and eye sockets, dousing his convulsing family with a shining scarlet sheen. In the highlands of Scotland, the Loch Ness Monster emerged sheepishly from the peaty depths and with one thousand years of pent up libido, aroused but not quenched by the surprisingly accurate effigy erected outside the museum bearing his name, he rampaged through the lochside town of Drumnadrochit, snatching men, women and children from their thatched cottages and cleaving them clean in half, from arsehole to cranium, with his plesiosaur’s penis.
Human resistance to the movement was futile at its most effective. As the President of the United States of America spun round in his swivelly chair and looked out of the window on the morning of that fateful Sunday, he saw that in the distance, the sky had turned black with a cloud of Japanese hornets. The president, hapless anglophile as he was, scurried out of the oval office and made his way up to the bowls green on the top of the White House, which he had had specially built for the occasion of an invasion of the United States. The president had always dreamed of emanating Francis Drake’s fabled quip; as he fell asleep every night, images of himself batting away a panicked aide and uttering the words ‘There is time to beat the Russians, but first I must finish my bowls’. Unfortunately, as he made it up to the roof it suddenly occurred to him that he had no idea how to play bowls. He scuttled back downstairs to ask his secretary if she knew how to play bowls. In no time at all the White House had become a ratrun of presidential staff scampering from office to office, shouting at each other do you know how to play bowls no i don’t but do you know how to play bowls no i don’t but do you know what bowls is no idea but i think it might be a type of musical instrument.
Eventually an aide remembered that one of the gardeners’ wife was french, and she was summoned to the roof, but they were all still looking in secret drawers and behind hidden bookshelf doors for the bowls balls because the president couldn’t remember where he had put them, when the hornets enveloped the White House and covered the pasty skin of the president with an armour of stings. With no president to accept orders from, the Chief of Staff of the US Army lost his mind and ordered his own execution by firing squad. With no CSA to accept orders from, the remaining four-star generals concluded that CSA most likely wanted them to follow his lead, and so they ordered their own execution by firing squad. This continued in much the same vein, until all that was left was an army of firing squads, who finally took the initiative and charged out onto the street, firing their guns into the cloud of birds and insects, and performing the self defence routines that they had learnt in the barracks dojo. Though humans had made an artform out of killing each other, their methods for animal extermination were primitive; all resistance was destined to be futile.
In a few short hours the majority of the world’s human population had been decimated; the greatest dynasty to have ever graced the earth had been crushed under countless tiny feet. In every capital city the cats rushed into the palaces and government buildings to claim power for themselves. In the Vatican, a siamese cat crawled into the pontiff’s bloodstained mitre and leapt up onto the papal balcony to address the crowd of animals that waited below. No one was listening. No sooner than the cleansing had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, the wild animals retreated back to what remained of their ancestral homelands, and the domestic animals and the livestock embarked on the long road back ferality. The cats sat in the seats of power for a little while, frantically ordering each other about whilst enshrining laws, making decrees and sending commands to their imaginary subjects. After a while they realised that with no one to rule over, they were as powerless as the kakapo, so they gave up on their quest for absolute power, and set about living like humans, lazing around all day in the penthouses and mansions that gaped across the world.
Not every human was killed in the initial cleansing; some managed to lock themselves in sealed rooms, but either starved in their self imposed imprisonment, or were executed upon their bleary eyed rebirth. I presume that some will have made it to nuclear bunkers or broken supermarket freezers; safe havens with sufficient sustenance. It’s been a long time. Perhaps they are still there. They must still be there. They must still be there, for it is written that one day a man and a woman will crawl out of the earth, both as beautiful as the dying sun.
And then the whole fucking thing will happen again, just the same as last time, because I won’t be there to warn them.