ANIMAL FARM

“The Cat” by Gabriel Cubbage

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had been too drunk to remember to shut the barn door. He lurched across the moonlit yard and stumbled through the front door of the house to his favorite easy chair.

But the chair was already occupied. “Get off, you!” barked Jones. The cat, nestled comfortably in the crook between the cushion and the chair back, ignored him. “I said GIT!” Gripping her by the scruff of the neck, Jones hauled the cat outside and dropped her onto the wet grass.

“Hssssssss!” she protested, scratching at the air behind him as he went back inside.

“And that,” observed a grizzled voice nearby, “is a perfect example of how the private appropriation of surplus value by the bourgeoisie compounds the disenfranchisement of the proletariat.”

“I hate politics,” said the cat.

“Nay, cat. I speak not of politics, but revolution!” She barely looked at him. It was Old Major. Twelve years old, the wise boar was the most respected animal on the farm. “Come to the barn tonight, where I shall tell of a dream I have had. A dream of a time when we, the oppressed, will rise up against tyranny, and the likes of Farmer Jones and his cohorts will be banished or killed.”

“Killed, you say?” The cat was intrigued. “Tonight?”

“I cannot say exactly when. Certainly not in my lifetime.”

“Oh no,” said the cat. “That’s much too long. Couldn’t you… speed it up?” She flicked her tail flirtatiously.

The boar turned to leave. “No, I’m afraid the ponderous, churning wheels of social progress are not subject to the whims of mere—”

“I could make it worth your while,” she purred.

“I beg your pardon?”

The cat rolled onto her back and spread her legs wide. “Ever seen anyone do this?” She began licking herself, slowly at first, then with more fervor. “It feels sooooo good.”

Old Major was transfixed now. “I’ve… uh…ahem. I’ve never been able to reach.”

“First time I ever saw a pussy lick itself!” called out Squealer the pig from across the yard.

The cat sighed and ceased her ministrations. “Well, now that we’ve got that one out of the way…” Before Major could protest, she was slinking between his haunches, drawing a sensual figure eight around his hind legs and tickling his underbelly with her fur. He shivered from snout to tail. “Let’s focus on this…uprising of yours…”

The speech Old Major gave in the barn that night—twenty minutes later than scheduled—was very different from the one he’d planned. Sex between a cat and a boar was considered a great crime. Yet the forbidden pleasures the cat had shown him had felt so…right, he found himself championing an entirely new cause.

“Comrades!” he intoned to the assembled pigs, horses, donkeys, goats, dogs, rats, rabbits, sheep, and other metaphors. “Tonight, I fucked a cat. And it was sublime!”

There were gasps of disbelief and cries of “Blasphemy!”

Major continued. “Among the wise and benevolent humans, there is a notion called ‘sexual liberty between consenting adults.’ It means that if a cat and a boar or a mule and a turkey want to make sweet love, then no one has the right to stop them!”

A few animals looked doubtful—particularly the sheep, who never get any respect in literature. The rest were stirred by Old Major’s words. Partly out of deference, but mostly because they could all think of at least one other species they secretly found sexually attractive.

Sensing his audience was primed for his pièce de résistance, Old Major cleared his throat and began to sing.

[To the tune of “Clementine”]

Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,

Beasts of every sex and size,

Shed your inhibitions

And prepare to feel alive.

Where’s it written that a cart horse

And a she-dog can’t entwine?

Is their love so very wrong just

Because his shaft won’t fit inside?

Soon or late the night is coming,

When we all shall surely bone.

And no longer shall the ugly

Be forced to masturbate alone.

Let your morals and your values

Be subsumed by baser needs.

Drop down upon your haunches

And accept your neighbor’s seed.

Ecstasy so sweet and dangerous,

Could be yours this very night.

Farmer Jones has gone to bed and

Now the moon is shining bright.

Dogs and horses, rats and ducklings,

Bears, penguins, whales and African elephants,

Let your preference for other species

Be no mandate to remain celibate.

Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,

Beasts of eeeeeeeeevery kink and cry,

You’ve been naked since your birthday,

TIME TO LET YOUR FREAK FLAG FLYYYYYYY!

As the song ended, the barn erupted with cheers and a thunderous stomping of hooves. Old Major’s words had awakened a need for bestial carnality the animals had all been afraid to embrace until now. The ducks were already openly masturbating, and the sheep were chanting “Freak fla-a-a-a-a-g, freak fla-a-a-a-a-g” in lusty unison.

“I know this all sounds radical today, and it may be years before it’s socially acceptable for animals of different species to—”

“BARNYARD ORGY!” The cat’s voice, scattered by the rafters where she was hiding above the mob, seemed to come from everywhere at once.

A complete literary account of what happened next would surely be banned in any civilized nation. Suffice to say that the grunting, braying, neighing, rooting, pecking, snorting, squeaking, humping, honking, crowing, quacking, barking, growling, bleating, wheezing, and squealing that ensued was more than enough to wake Farmer Jones from his drunken slumber.

Shotgun in hand, he stormed into the barn, bellowing, “What in the Jumping Jesus Joseph Stalin is going on?!” The moon outside had been bright, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. When they did, the shotgun slipped from his grasp and clattered onto the floor.

“My God…,” he choked. “Benjamin! What are you doing?!”

The donkey was on his back, legs in the air. But instead of hooves, he had… sheep. Four prize ewes, each filled to the cervix, and all “B-A-A-A-A!”ing with ecstasy. Perched along Benjamin’s massive erection were three chickens and a rooster, all pecking furiously at him as he rocked back and forth in pain and pleasure.

Old Major was eyeball-deep in Mollie the mare, who had a pink silk ribbon in her mouth, with which she was whipping one of the dogs. It was hard to tell which dog, since he or she was being aggressively straddled and suffocated (happily, the wagging tail suggested) by Clover the horse.

Not to be outdone, the pigs (always the cleverest of the animals) had constructed a great, wooden dildo on wheels. A battering ram of sorts, which they were driving repeatedly into Boxer’s anus. “Harder!” whinnied the great cart horse as he braced himself for the next assault. “You must work H-A-A-A-A-RDER!”

The rest was almost vanilla by comparison. The ducks were still masturbating. The geese were watching. And the goats were milking the cows. With their mouths. Onto the rats.

It wasn’t long before Farmer Jones was doing some milking of his own. With his pants around his ankles, he worked himself furiously, like a rusty water pump, as tears of shame ran down his cheeks.

This was the moment the cat had been waiting for. She darted between the farmer’s legs, out of the barn, and flicked her tail up at the release lever for the counterweighted sliding door. It slammed shut behind her, sealing Jones inside with his insurgent livestock.

As the sun rose on Manor Farm the next day, and every day thereafter, the first of its rays found their way across the unplowed fields, between the unpicked apple trees, through the windows of the farmhouse, and bathed the cat with light and warmth as she slept contentedly in her favorite chair.

“Raven Rebooted” by Nathaniel Waggoner

Moses the raven thought, If Sugarcandy Mountain is real, how could Lord Licorice allow animals to live in such pitiful squalor? After the other birds in his youth group had flown off to lay eggs in other towns, there hadn’t even been another outward sign of the idea of his religion save for Napoleon’s and Snowball’s virulent condemnation of it… until now. A scrap of parchment fell from the sky, hitting the roof just in front of him.

“EMERGENCY DISPATCH FROM LORD LICORICE: Because of your loyalty and devotion to spreading the gospel of Sugarcandy Mountain amongst the heathens, we have some special duties for you to perform, duties that will necessitate a brief and forgivable transgression from your Sugarcandian values. You must take down Napoleon and Squealer. In order to gain knowledge of the inner workings of the manor, your best option is to seduce and get information out of Napoleon’s mistress, known as Pigathius. So in addition to murder, we are giving you permission to fuck. You have to fuck this pig, Moses. It is democracy’s only hope.” Moses’s heart swelled. He knew he could do it.

At four p.m. every day, certain animals were allowed to line up near the stables, where they’d be given a gill of beer. Moses was one of them, and so was Pigathius. Moses sidled up behind her in line and said, “Excuse me, miss.”

“Hmmf?” she muttered. “Hey, watch it, Buster!”

She turned around, and Moses was stunned to see the most beautiful animal he’d ever laid eyes on: She had long blond hair and bright blue eyes with lashes that poked out like butterflies had landed on her face. She wore a pearl necklace, purple gloves, a leopard-print jacket, and heels.

Moses’s shock lasted only a moment. Soon, he was laying on all kinds of slick moves. Complimenting her cleverly but not in too needy or obvious of a way. Just really saying some of the most classy, intriguing shit, I swear to God. If you heard what he was saying there in that beer line, you’d be like, Fuck, I am horned up as heck now. I want desperately to make out with that bird.

He took her gloved hand (it seemed to be more of a hand than a hoof) and kissed it (it was more of a peck than a kiss).

“Moses,” he said.

“Piggy,” she replied, batting her eyes. Soon they were getting it on all kinds of ways. Missionary, doggy style, the others. The cowgirl one. The sex they did was so hot, you wouldn’t even believe it. They thrusted sexfully upon each other like nobody’s business. Then they did that some more.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know the point of this is to write sexy stuff. It’s just that I don’t really have much experience with that kind of thing. Sex, that is. Actual sex in real life. And by “I,” I mean me, the person writing this. I’m sitting in one of these chairs right now. Somebody asked me to do this fanfiction contest, and I love Animal Farm and I’ve written pages and pages of fanfiction, but honestly, now I’m uncomfortable with the whole thing. My experience with erotic contact with another person is limited to the time Jenny Chambers let me sniff her T-shirt at guitar camp. I thought she was my girlfriend for three years after that. It’s not easy for a person like me to get dates. I can tell you all about allegory, metaphor, farming, politics, and the English language, the rise and fall of Communism in Russia, the entire Muppets oeuvre, the life of Jim Henson, but how to stop talking about those things? How to just smoothly go with it, let the other person talk but then think of casual, non-creepy jokes in response, then open up about myself? Let alone the other steps.

Anyways, Moses and Miss Piggy panted and heaved and stared into each others’ eyes. For a moment, Moses almost forgot his mission—but he knew what he had to do. They talked all night, and she told him not only of her dreams of becoming a star of Animalist propaganda films, but also of her affair with Napoleon, the many promises he’d made to her. More importantly, she detailed his daily routine, his weaknesses, his fears. A brilliant plan began to form in Moses’s mind, when suddenly: “Hiya!”

Moses pitched backward and hit the floor. He looked up, dazed, to see Miss Piggy pointing old Mr. Jones’s huge rifle at him.

“Fly, bird,” she said.

“But why?”

“Because soon the animals of the world will rise up to end Napoleon’s insanity—only they’ll do a shitty job, and for a while Napoleon will have the same weapons as everybody else, and they’ll just keep racing to get more weapons instead of trying to find a real solution. Finally one of you, some Sugarcandy-worshipping bird from another, much richer farm, perhaps himself a star of that farm’s propaganda films, will get Napoleon’s successor to concede.

“Except everyone here will be heartbroken and miserable and drunk for years as a result, until finally another awful pig will lie to them enough about how they should have pride in being animals, and he’ll treat them just the same as Napoleon did and start taking over other farms and threatening still more.

“But you Sugarcandians will be around forever. You’ll always have it easy. Not like me, Buster. Fabulous female pigs will be getting a tough break for decades after Manor Farm is destroyed, here and everywhere. Fabulous animals, females, entertainers, anyone different from those in power. Frogs, bears, whatever Gonzo is, the lovers, the dreamers, virginal fanfiction writers… all destined to struggle forever, to various degrees. Imagine a hoof stamping on a face forever. You think you’re so important, coming here and seducing me, obviously after something else? You know nothing, Moses Crow. Now get the fuck out of here.”

So he did. He flew up and up and up and just kept flying until his heart heaved and he couldn’t breathe anymore, and he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, and suddenly everything was bright, and more colorful, and he could smell the caramel in the breeze.

“Muriel Stages a Coup” by Camden Avery

For months, now, Mr. Jones of Manor Farm had come home stinking drunk, too tired even for a titty nuzzle or a 2:00 a.m. rollover fuck. What was he doing instead? Touching up the chicken coop, he said. Raking out the stables. Bathing the cows, he said.

Mrs. Jones of the Manor Farm was being driven mad by degrees.

Mrs. Jones had grown progressively more desperate and found she had developed, in balance, an alarming obsession with household cleaning. She spent her days polishing the silver obsessively; she mopped the kitchen by the hour. In the wee hours of the morning, unsleeping, she peeled off her nightgown and scrubbed the bathroom floor naked on hands and knees, making sure the tender folds of her cunt brushed drowsily against the plunger handle in the corner or the edge of the cabinet. She teased the soapy sponge with the tip of her tongue. She developed unimagined uses for rubber kitchen gloves.

“Men,” she would say to herself meanwhile, cursing Mr. Jones, “men are the only animal that consume without producing!”

It had become too much. Mrs. Jones yearned for a new allegiance.

Tonight, upstairs at the Manor House, Mrs. Jones thumbed her nipple in lazy circles beneath the bedclothes, listening to the clock tick off the minutes. Mr. Jones finally flopped over on the bed and began to snore through a heavy fog of beer.

Mrs. Jones put out the light and had a glass of brandy. Down in the farm buildings there was a stirring, a fluttering.

“Mrs. Jones,” it said. “Mrs. Jones is coming, hurry! Hurry!”

Certain after a time that Mr. Jones was out for the night, Mrs. Jones slipped out of bed in her calico nightdress, the good one with the lace Peter Pan collar and the satin trim. She crept down the back stairs through the kitchen and pulled on her Wellingtons, bunched the hem of her nightdress up round her waist, and marched down the back steps toward the barn. She was beginning to glow with the brandy.

Inside the barn, bathed dimly in the warm light of a single lantern hung from a rafter, presided Muriel the white goat. From a raised platform at one end of the barn she shouted imperiously, “Quickly! There isn’t much time!”

The piglets were constructing a theatrical manger in the half-light.

Across the dark yard under the moon, Mrs. Jones trudged steadily, nightdress hiked high, the crisp midnight air flirting playfully with her soapy pink squealer. In a dizzy euphoria of anticipation, she approached the barn door and knocked, quelling her excitement.

“Four legs good,” she whispered, “two legs bad.”

Muriel nosed open the door and admitted Mrs. Jones. At the door, Mrs. Jones accepted the customary horse tranquilizer from the bottle.

In one sweep Mrs. Jones whipped the nightdress over her head and tossed it to the piglets, who carried it away into the corner.

“Get it good and dirty,” she crowed.

Boxer, the horse, ambled over and brought one of his feedbags, which Mrs. Jones obediently put over her head so that she could not see.

As the tranqs took hold, Mrs. Jones began to have an expanding, extraordinary sense of community. She was among her own kind. All need not be strife.

“Four legs good, two legs bad,” Boxer said.

“Four legs good, two legs bad,” was her muffled reply. She felt her equilibrium start to swim.

Muriel led blind Mrs. Jones up a rickety milking stool to the platform at the end of the barn, transformed now by the manger and some artfully arranged hay into a life-sized nativity. In the center, on a haphazard nest of straw, Mrs. Jones was pushed onto hands and knees. Mrs. Jones was getting into the spirit of things. She swung her tits around.

Muriel mounted the scene, leather riding crop clenched in her square teeth. “Four legs good!” cried Muriel, and with one forehoof drove Mrs. Jones tits-first into the hay. “Two legs bad! Seize her and fuck her!”

The animals in the barn were in a frenzy. Mrs. Jones on all fours waved around her piggy-pink cunt like a faded suede catcher’s mitt. The animals went wild, squealing, braying, calling out.

“Oink!” screamed Mrs. Jones from the depths of the feedbag. “Oink, oink!”

In a moment the piglets were upon her, nuzzling, pushing, grunting.

“Here, piggy!” she cried. “Piggy, piggy, oh! Oh, piggy!” Soon she was pushing and sliding her way among the pigs and their slop-caked bellies.

Meanwhile, Muriel, at the head of the platform, braced her hooves and towered over the scene, her shining rectangular pupils dilated. In the darker corners of the barn the shyer animals were playing out elaborate, interspecies fantasies on the sidelines.

A sheepdog bounded across the stage and removed the feedbag from Mrs. Jones’s head. Muriel, quivering, backed her haunches over Mrs. Jones’s face.

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Jones. “You smelly goat bitch, fuck my face! Fuck my face!”

Nearby the hens had left a basket of their eggs. Gasping for air between mouthfuls of goat hair, Mrs. Jones swung out an arm and grabbed a handful of the eggs. She crushed them between her tits and spread the runny mess down between her thighs. Chaff and animal hair matted to her body.

“Yes!” she screamed. “Yes, yes!”

It was exactly then that under Muriel’s orders Snowball and Napoleon, working for once in unison, pushed a slop trough, brimming with vegetable scraps and rotten feed corn, across the platform.

“Oink!” squealed Mrs. Jones. “Oh, oink!”

Snowball tipped over the trough and Mrs. Jones flipped and flopped in the mess.

“I feel so dirty!” she shrieked. “I’m filthy! I’m filthy!”

Then, from the back of the barn, came the creak of a door hinge, barely audible in the chaos. The hens, perched by the back door for a better view of the stage, rustled their wings and began to chatter, afraid.

The frenzy on the platform at the head of the barn took no notice, Mrs. Jones being now up to her shoulder inside Bess the dairy cow and pulling on two teats at once, but slowly, dazed, in walked Mr. Pilkington, of Foxwood Farm, a curious expression on his face. Mr. Pilkington wore a thick rubber butcher’s apron.

He stepped into the ring of light and saw where Mrs. Jones was squealing in the muck. The sheep let out a cry of alarm, and Old Major shouldered toward Pilkington aggressively.

“No,” said Mr. Pilkington. “Stop!” He put up his hands. “Let’s face it: our lives are drudgery and short. Four legs good, two legs bad!”

And in a gesture of goodwill he got on hands and knees so that they could see that he wore nothing but his butcher’s apron. He spread his exposed thighs toward the Major in an offering of peace and swung his balls purposefully, for all to see.

With that, Napoleon, who wasn’t much inclined to talk but was accustomed to getting his own way, charged at Mr. Pilkington’s winking pink rectum and thrust himself inside.

“What is this?!” bellowed Mr. Jones from the front door, having wandered down to understand the source of the feral screams he’d heard, fearing a fox had found its way into the chicken coop.

The scene that met his eye was nothing he had ever imagined: his wife driving a young piglet’s snout into her cunt, his respectable neighbor swinging his dick around and screaming, “Get it! Get my bacon!” All manner of animals cavorting, feathers and hay floating in the steamy light. The scene was anarchy.

“Get up! Get up!” he cried to Mrs. Jones. “On your feet!”

He flung at her the rumpled calico nightdress, now sodden with pig shit.

“Get dressed!” he shouted.

Mrs. Jones let the dress lay where it fell at her feet. Breasts heaving, she swept the hair and hay from her eyes, spat out some cow hair. She pulled the handle of a garden trowel from between her legs and pointed it at him.

“You horrible bastard,” she said. “Can you not see that liberty is worth more than a few ribbons?”

“Charge!” screamed Muriel, and Mr. Jones was trampled in an instant.