Keeping A Promise (Fictoid)

“I forbid you to enter,” the abolitionist told the coyote.

“Who are you to forbid anything?” the coyote sneered.

The abolitionist ignored the retort.  “You’re not going to prey on people any longer.”

“I only give them what they want,” said the coyote.

“Slavery,” said the abolitionist.  “You sell them to overseers who work them like dogs and barely feed them enough to sustain them, then threaten them with arrest and deportation if they complain.”

“You have a keen eye,” said the coyote.  “So surely you realize this is a lesson in genetics.  The mass of humanity isn’t smart enough to live their own lives without rigid guidance from above, be it God or an overseer’s whip.  Too many variables, too many decisions.

“Too many choices.

“All I do is provide a matchmaking service, introducing slaves to their masters -- “

The shotgun blew the coyote’s head off.  For a predator who claimed to be smarter than their prey, the coyote wasn’t clever enough to realize the abolitionist might have a partner, and that partner might feel supremely indifferent to the coyote’s philosophical nuances.

“You didn’t have to do that,” the abolitionist said in a gloomy tone.

Their partner jacked the spent shell from the shotgun.  “My grandmother spent a decade in a whore house before they turned her out to work the fields.  They were going to deport her when she got pregnant, but she fooled ‘em and bore my mom prematurely on this side of the border.

“Before mom died, she told me to do whatever I could to spare others what her mother went through.

“So you take the high road, I’ll take the low.”

© Buzz Dixon