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The Man in the Cage
The Man in the Cage
The naked man gripped the bars and gazed forlornly through them. Above the cage, a sign labeled the occupant a "WERE-ELEPHANT."
The visitor read the sign, and ambled over. "Were-elephant?" he asked.
The man in the cage looked annoyed, but answered straightforwardly, "Yeah."
The visitor laughed. "Pretty small cage for an elephant."
"When I woke up from the tranquilizer gun, I was in the holding cage," the naked man said sourly, "so I switched to my human form. I thought they'd let me go when they found out I was a man, but they just put me in a smaller cage when they got me here."
"At least they labeled it right, you can't complain about that."
"I can't? They coulda killed me. This cage is too small for me to change back into an elephant, and I can't eat hay in my human form."
"What do they feed you?"
"What time is it?" asked the man in the cage.
"2:30." answered the visitor, looking at his watch.
"It's feeding time now." The man in the cage braced himself against the bars; above him, the top of the cage opened, and a wave of some suriupy, gelatinous mess poured down into the cage, pressing him against the bars and washing up and over his waist, between the bars, and out onto the visitor's shoes.
"Jesus!" said the visitor, screwing up his face at the smell, "what is that shit?"
"It's a mixture of shrimp, small mollusks, crustaceans, seaweed -" the man in the cage looked down at the suriupy liquid with some distaste. "It's called krill. They have me down in the feeding records as a whale."
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