Man's Best Friend

Alright, bear with me. Every once in a while I'm gonna post one of my short-stories. Now, wait... before you blow by them and head to the video of the dwarf and the pinhead, let me explain something. My fiction is every bit as disturbing as the other shit on here. Maybe more so. So if you just don't like to read amateur fiction, you may now go to the freaks. But, if you're like me and you hate reading anything normal or happy, take a moment to peruse this (I'd like to hear what you think).

Once again, this is called Man's Best Friend:

Frank Purcell shifted on the wooden park bench. Peeled the front of his sopping T-shirt from his chest, coughed. It was hot, almost unbearably so. There had not been a breeze all day; the air felt as thick as spun wool. It altered his breath, made each one shallow, tedious. Weighed on him like a stone. Yet he barely noticed it.

Instead, he squinted from under the brim of his battered baseball cap, into the fury of the late afternoon sun. Eyed with hatred the quicksilver form that ran and leapt on the dazzling stretch of green grass before him. It was a Golden Retriever this time, chasing a saliva-soaked tennis ball. One moment the dog lay panting, its belly to the ground, its bright eyes on the hand of its master. The next it was off, bounding across the grass after the flung ball, swift as thought, its narrow feet seemingly never touching the earth.

Purcell watched all this from his vantage point on the park bench, shivering a bit at the palpable loathing that seemed to seep upwards into his throat. He felt his jaws clench of their own accord, sensed the muscles of his belly stretch. Felt his hands draw themselves into fists.

How could everyone not see? He asked himself. How had they been so blinded? At that very moment, halfway around the world, close cousins of these trusted companions trotted in blood-thirsty packs, loped lazy across dusty savannas, ravenous. Salivating as they watched the slow moving herds of wildebeast, ever watchful for the weak or the old or the sick. Could all of mankind not see there was no difference between them? Were they so self assured, so egotistical to believe such a beast might feel enough fondness for its master to suppress a million years worth of instinct? Was he the only one who actually knew the truth?

Even as a child he’d been suspicious. Had often wondered why some people drew dogs to them like honey-hungered flies, had happy hounds licking at them at every turn. His father, in fact, had been one such fellow. Everywhere he went dogs would yip and yelp with tails awagging, leap all over him as if they’d been pining their whole lives for that very moment. He’d seen owners grasping at his father’s shoulder, warning him about their blood-thirsty hounds who strained at lengths of rope, red-eyed and howling at every passing car or pedestrian. Yet the next moment that selfsame dog could be seen barking in pleasure as his dad approached, was soon nuzzling itself wet-nosed in his lap. Why was this? What was there about his father that drew these creatures to him? Certainly not his demeanor. By all accounts he was a dim and gruff man, thoroughly unpleasant. Yet dogs found him irresistible.

It had mystified Purcell for much of his early years, this strange phenomenon. Had confused him the whole of his youth. That is until his father became ill one day. And, after weeks of tests, had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Only then, when the old man began to waste away, coughing up blood for hours in the sour air of his darkened bedroom, only then did he finally realize the answer.

Purcell shifted again on the park bench. He marshaled a small amount of saliva in his dry mouth, spat on the sidewalk. Then gathered himself and rose into the heat as an old man might climb creakily from a recliner.

“I wouldn’t turn my back on him, mister,” he shouted at his shoes, not really concerned whether he was heard or not. “He’d just as soon rip your throat out as fetch your slippers.”

Then he began a slow stroll homeward, along the concrete edges of the park. His feet shuffling beneath him like the whisperings of locusts, slow and arduous as if the heat were a tangible weight upon his shoulders. His head was down. Yet he was alert, watching ever sideways other hounds with their masters. Trying once more to grasp the reason for the deception, wracking his brain once again for the logic behind the madness.

In the beginning, he knew, ancient man had needed these creatures, required them for their hunting skills. Had used them in his pursuit of wild game. But that was thousands of years ago. Somewhere along the way, instead of banishing them to the fields with the rest of his animals, our ancestors had decided these creatures deserved a place in the home. But why? Did it have something to do with man’s domineering urges, his need to control all he saw? Had these animals merely began as slaves of some sort, vassals? Something simply to be kicked around the house?

Well, maybe that was how it all started, Purcell mused, a befuddled smirk stretching sideways across his narrow face. But today it was a different story. Today everywhere one looked one saw poodles in sweaters, and gourmet dog foods, and grown men on their knees gathering up the shit his dog had just left there on the concrete. Now it was often difficult to tell who really was in charge.

Purcell clipped the toe of one sandal on a tilted section of concrete, stumbled a bit. Then looked up and saw an aging fellow being lead his way along the sidewalk by a couple of newly-scissored poodles. Every few steps one or the other of these rat-like hounds would glance nervously over its shoulder, seemingly making certain the old fart was still there, just behind. To the untrained eye it might have appeared they were concerned for his welfare, some might’ve even found it cute. But Purcell knew different. He knew that such sentiments could not be farther from the truth.

Why does one hear so much about dogs befriending the elderly? He asked himself for the umpteenth time. Why was it impossible to turn a corner without tripping over some fading eyed fossil and his doting hound? He had argued such points with so many unhearing imbeciles that such phrases now merely ran roughshod within his own head. Banged impotently against the backs of his weary eyes.

Why did the television news always air stories of the special beast that has found its way to a darkened rest home, now eased the loneliness that once blanketed those there like a pall? Love, you say? Adoration that these simple creatures somehow feel for those that pulled them from the wilderness, gave them the easy life? Bullshit. They are drawn to these, the weakest of our kind, for the same reason that their cousins across the ocean choose the most eldest members of the herd to drag down. Some ancient inner sense is at work, pulling them to our oldest, our weakest, as if they are merely walking carrion. A certain smell, perhaps. Maybe something entirely else. And, indeed, the only reason they do not pull them to the ground and gorge themselves is that after so many generations they have lost that final killer’s instinct. They are simply not quite sure how.

Purcell stumbled into the fading evening, homeward. The remaining fragments of his lifelong argument careering through his head like heat-addled hornets. He pushed through standing crowds, oblivious, muttering.

That’s why they’re drawn to the children. They’re weak, too. The wild dogs of Africa would do the same. The family dog pulls a toddler from a raging river and is praised as a hero. Again, bullshit. Instead it'd simply noticed that a nice meal was in jeopardy of being swept away, was saving it for itself. And the same is true when a barking dog saves a family from a burning house. It just knew that if it did not act the fire would enjoy the meat that was deservedly his. Purcell’s father, that’s why the dogs had loved him so. They’d smelled the cancer in him, years before it ever leaped out of its dormant sleep. Before it ate him alive. They knew it was there. And knew they wanted to be near when it did.

He looked up, noticed he was home. The gate to the small yard before him, his hand already resting on the latch. He lived over his elderly mother’s garage, in a small muggy room with one hanging light bulb. As he had for years. Ever since he’d been kicked out of the army for using his M-16 to kill several dogs that kept sniffing around the garbage cans at his barracks.

It wasn’t so terrible, though. He didn’t pay rent, and he had his own TV. Really, the only bad thing was that his mother had a dog. One she worshipped. One of those tiny bug-eyed little things that spend their days yapping, and shitting everywhere, and shivering like they lived in the goddamned Arctic. It was, Purcell’s mother often told him, the son who’d never disappointed her. But even this really wasn’t so bad ‘cause the jittery weasel was scared of Purcell, petrified in fact. Even though he'd never even kicked it, not once. And if the little shit was out in the yard when Purcell came around, the little bastard simply ran to the back porch and hid.

Well, that’s the way it usually happened. But not today. No. Instead, just as Purcell opened the gate, just as he stepped in, he noticed a quick flurry of motion near him, at the edge of his vision, in the emerald wash of the lawn. He started, looked down. And saw that fuzzy little freak there. Its tiny tail awagging, its tiny tongue lolling all happy to see him. Purcell froze. He felt his throat close in on itself, his breath catch. He shuddered and took a step back.

“Get away from me, you fuck,” he hissed, poking out with his foot.

But the tiny freak was lightning quick. It merely sidestepped a bit, pushed its tongue out and licked his ankle. Purcell felt a shriek force its way out of his mouth at this miniscule swab of moisture, break from his throat and rise into the burgundy sky. He tripped, then gathered himself and leapt off toward the steep steps that led up to his room. He stumbled over the rough walk in a daze, near fell. He felt the tiny dog hard on his heels. Heard its nails chitter along the walk like a tiny spray of sleet, its breath huffing thin like a sparrow's behind him.

He reached the bottom of his stairs in no time and churned up the steps. His heart hammering like an iron mill in his chest, his lungs on fire. And, at the top, paused a moment to push the yipping beast back with a tentative toe. Then slipped in the door.

He stood for a minute there, in the darkness, leaning against the door, his cheek pressed against jamb. He listened to the muffled whimpers, the tiny paws scratching low at the weathered wood. Then he turned, hurriedly, and lurched through the darkness, stumbled into his bathroom. Fell to his knees. And leaning over the toilet, his hands on the tiles, the porcelain hard into his chest, began to throw up blood.