Suffocating

I’m supposed to be quiet. My owner and one of the trainers are with me. It’s very early in my training process. I’m young and small and stupid. One of them is holding down my arms while pushing into me. I think it’s my owner from the way He presses on my biceps, turning my arms into big bruises. It hurts so bad; I can’t stop myself from squirming around and making noises.

The trainer has a pillow over my face, muffling my cries and shouts. I’m not even fully conscious of the words coming out of my mouth. The trainer keeps saying, firmly and sternly, that he’ll take the pillow off my face once I’m quiet, but I don’t understand him. I can’t process anything over the intensity of the panic in my chest, the pain in my arms and lower body, the primal survival instincts ravaging my frontal lobe. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. I am all alone, begging and pleading for it to be over, isolated in this pillow-clad prison, and no one is coming to help me.

I’m suffocating.