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Mary Beth awoke with a start.
"What the fu…," she said, groggily.
She looked around and realized immediately that it had been a dream. But what a strange dream it was. Stranger
than most, to be sure. Not necessarily a nightmare; more of a disturbance. After all, it's not often you hear a
voice in your head telling you to, "Eat Pete". Least that's what Mary Beth thought she heard. It did
sound like that, but the message was coming in faintly like a low howl. "Eeeeaaat Peeeete," it repeated
in her addled brain, almost too silently too hear. Unfortunately, not silently enough. She heard it all right,
and the thought put an unease in her, the likes of which she had never felt before.
Pete was her neighbor Mrs. O'Reilly's dog. And no, Mary Beth didn't exactly care for Pete, but she didn't want
him dead either. "Do I?" she asked herself. "Well, I definitely don't want to eat him, that's for
sure. Yuck." Still, the thought stuck with her throughout the day; kind of like a toothache that kept pounding
ever so slightly in her head. Just barely discernable, but there nonetheless.
When she returned home, she was exhausted and rattled. Voices, she had read and heard about, usually came from
either: God, Satan, a spirit, or a soon-to-be demented brain. She didn't like the thought of hearing from any of
them.
"Maybe it was just a dream," she tried to convince herself, as she quickly downed two consecutive shots
of Bailey's Irish Cream. "Though it sure did sound like something or someone outside my own head." Mary
Beth shook the thought from her mind and stared out her kitchen window.
Pete was staring back at her from the lawn next to her driveway. He was an all black Pug. Black as deep, dark night.
And drooling, as was his habit. Drooling and snorting. "Gross," Mary Beth uttered. "Why couldn't
there be a nice Lab over there? They don't snort, do they?" But what she was thinking was that it would be
harder to cook a Lab, or eat one, for that matter. Pete the Pug would easily fit into one of her large cooking
pots. Just like a medium-sized chicken. Would probably taste like chicken too, Mary Beth thought. "Doesn't
everything?"
Again, she shook the idea out of her head and walked away from the window and over to the freezer to remove some
meat for dinner. She took out some hamburger patties, carefully avoiding the chicken. "I just need a vacation,"
she said, as she started to prepare her dinner. "Or a good night's sleep." Though by then the thought
of sleep fairly terrified her.
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