Friday, August 08, 2008

Confessions of a Movie Hound: The Pembroke Ultimatum


By Lucy in Disguise Wells

I know it’s been a while, but the people I live with decided to move and have turned my life upside-down. I can’t say the change has been all that bad. In fact, it has made my job as the family herder much easier. The new home has a circular design that allows me to conquer all traffic patterns.

Now, I operate like the ultimate action hero, working under the noses of those who would be my master to foil all their plans and ultimately make them succumb to my will. Like Jason Bourne, it is like I have been reborn with the slate wiped clean. They don’t even know who I am anymore.

When we first moved, I even feigned a sickness, changing my features from the stocky corgi machine into a sleek stealth version—a supreme corgi specimen. They thought they could mold me and change me into something else, taking me frequently to their evil collaborator—a doctor acting out of a front, claiming to be a legitimate veterinarian. But she couldn’t fool me. I know she worked for some shadow government.

She gave my people some drugs to give me, but I developed a system for ejecting the pills from whatever wonderful food substance in which they tried to hide them. Meatloaf? No problem. I eat the meat; hold the pill in my jowls, and when they aren’t looking… Plinck! Out on the floor.

Oh, sure they had their cover story. Some business about my pancreas failing. They said it was making anything I ate run straight through my body without processing any nutrients. Hey! If it makes me poop more… well, that just means I get to eat it more frequently. They couldn’t fool me.

OK! Maybe they did find a way to make me eat those pills—the scoundrels! They started covering them in gravy. Well, to even the perfect corgi specimen gravy is like a beautiful woman to James Bond—simply irresistible! And maybe I have become a little more regular, but that only makes it taste better.

After I built up a resistance to their drugs, I set out on my mission to keep order in the traffic patterns of the new domicile. Of course, the little one—the one the man and the woman call Jude—is the most dangerous. And they seem to speak sternly at him as often as they do me, so my assessment that he poses the greatest threat to the household must be correct.

They must suspect I have broken from my programming. That’s the only explanation I can come up with as to why they would ever speak harshly to me. Don’t they know I’m the only one who knows what I’m doing in this house?

Anyway, I try to make sure they know to fear me. My stuffed cat is the best instrument for that purpose. Whenever the man or the woman get out of line, I’ll drag that cat into the room, flip it into the air, tear at its ears until its stuffing starts to come out, and generally work it over the way Jason Bourne might drive some car until it falls apart. That’s when they know I mean business, when they have to spend the next half hour picking up my cat’s innards.

Then I’ll sneak up behind them and bark. God, I love the way they jump when I do that! The man’s face will get all purple as he reaches down to catch me and just like Batman, I’m gone before he knows it. Like a shadow I jump from room to room, barking here, nipping there, and all the time I have them right where I want them. I can make them go anywhere in that house I want them too.

Sure, sometimes they catch me and incarcerate me in the metal cage, or worse tie me to the pole in the back yard. But every hero is misunderstood. Bourne is merely trying to find out who he is. Batman is only trying to strike fear in the hearts of criminals so no one will ever have to suffer the way he did as a child. But Bourne is chased by the very people who made him, and Batman must defend against criminals who claim he created them.

Lucy in Disguise, however, answers to no authority. She has no breaking point, because she depends on no one. In the Wells household, Lucy is the law!

Now, I’m going to the kitchen to see if those fools have filled my food bowl yet.


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