Thunder Under the Bed

Crack, the crude thunder. I growled back at the storm last night, hiding under the bed in the spare room. Thunder is not made from anything -- it's a calamity, a blind quotation, a giant shape in the dark outside the back porch that squeezes till you break. You can't hide in the tub or dark places. I haunched my spine against the bottom of the mattress, pressed myself against the back wall. I heard voices from a television. Crack, then rain, the drizzle slick as the vet's chromium examination table . . . they dump you on the cold table and nothing smells like it should. A dachshund sat here less than an hour ago. I feel the loathsome whiff of puppy. The veterinarian's hands should be taped shut like lobster claws. A growl from my ribcage -- Linda Blair's head twists in circles, Wendy O. Williams blows up a 1977 Dodge Dart on television. Revolutionary technique, swatting and hissing, in the service of poetry. I didn't ask to be in your office. The vet says something to Tony and Shelly about my teeth. I can't hear the words from the hissing. If you want to examine my gums, you'll have to kill me. Thunder is brown, it's unnecessary, the shock of two dogs chasing each other upstairs. The Satanic Majesties Veterinarian at Petco in 2003 tried to give me a rabies shot and said to Tony, "Is she always like this?" Dr. Weiner in Boston couldn't touch me in 1998 without forcibly injecting me with sedatives, and I shat on his examination table. At the Allston-Brighton Animal Free Clinic, I hissed at plodding dogs and pissed on the vicious sheet-metal exam table during a 1997 rabies vaccination. I threw up this morning. Thunder is Ialdabaoth's intelligent design, the fraud of angels.