Puppy Kicker

Sneering, Diana raised her leg to yet again kick the puppy.  Its melancholy eyes, teeming with adoration and devotion, beckoned her boot to its face; so she complied.  It whimpered and, whining a bit, slunk off to lick its wounds in some dark corner somewhere, but it would be back.  

Like clockwork, it greeted Diana as she exited her bedroom the next morning, the previous night’s brutality already forgotten, its warm, living hide begging for more abuse.  So she indulged its desire for pain: the kicks became more steadily more damaging; she took longer to pull her leg back; she offered a treat just before delivering the blow.

Eleanor called her cruel, but the other girl just didn’t understand—she showed love by severing birds from their freedom, and could not comprehend that others may express themselves differently.  Because Diana had grown up in an orphanage as the plaything of the headmaster, with companions who were only transient at best, Love was simply a word to her, no more.

Then this puppy had appeared, more than willing to oblige her in any way, prepared to suffer her wrath and yet never tire of her.  Considering her upbringing, it was no wonder Diana did not quite know how to deal with Unconditional Love.  Surely nothing was so constant.  So she tested its boundaries—its limits—repeatedly, violently.

She still had yet to find them.

And that was perhaps why the puppy returned after every beating; perhaps somehow, in its own way, it knew what Diana really meant.

That each kick was truly begging: “Please don’t stop loving me, Meg.”