Джонатан Кэрролл - Mama Bruise

She wasn’t surprised. “My dad died and came back as a dog. It explains why we chose him over all the others at the animal shelter that day. What made him so special? Just look at him—he’s completely plain, nondescript—just a dog-dog. Why would we choose him over all the other sweet ones we saw there?”

“ You chose him. I just said okay.”

“Exactly—I chose him and now I know why, but I didn’t then. I just thought he was cute.”

While she spoke he kept glancing over at the dog. “How much does he know? I mean, does he know everything; can he understand everything we say?”

“I don’t think so, and that’s part of what’s so frustrating. He knows little bits and pieces, which come and go like fireflies. I think his mind or his soul is caught between three places—human, dog, and death, or back from the dead. When his head is clear he can do all kinds of magical things, but a minute later he’s like an old, old man with very bad Alzheimer’s disease. Absolute blank, or just absolute dog and only dog. He can’t remember or express anything; he doesn’t understand anything you say. No, he does, but only in the way a dog understands human commands. He knows and can do amazing things but it’s all broken up and scattered. Like, how did he know the name of your old girlfriend? And then the things he does know, he keeps forgetting. But he also can do these wild things, like making those words appear on our fingers, or turning on faucets, or…” She stopped and looked at him, her face almost guilty.

He sat up in his chair, sensing something. “ What? Come on, what?”

She nodded slowly, as if telling herself it was okay to continue. “I told you about my father at the end of his life, remember? How he stole all of my mother’s savings to buy drugs. He even took fourteen dollars I’d saved for a skateboard and spent it, too. He was completely out of control by then—mean and scary and desperate. God, he was so desperate. He probably would have sold our house, too, if the deed hadn’t been in my mother’s name.” She made to say more, but instead got up and went to a desk nearby. She opened a drawer, took something out, and walked back with a bankbook in her hand. She opened it, leafed through some pages, found what she was looking for, and handed it to him. “Look at the balance.”

It was their joint savings account. Because he was a tightwad, he knew exactly how much was in there, or did until that moment. When he saw the new, hefty balance his eyes widened. His mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water.

Watching his reaction, she put a hand over her mouth and then flapped it away. “I didn’t tell you about it until I checked with the bank to make sure the money was real. It is. I believe he’s paying me back for all the money he stole from us when he was alive.”

He snorted. “Paying you back with interest! This is amazing. You’re sure it’s real?”

“It is real. And it fits a pattern—I think he came back to make amends.”

But their wonder and delight was short-lived because, like a person with severe dementia, whatever the dog knew or whatever powers it had brought back from death rapidly began to blur, fade, and slip away like a human mind sucked down into the quicksand of the disease. And with that fade came the frustration and fury of the sufferer.

For a while, a short while, there were fascinating glimpses of what the dog had experienced after it died as a human, what death was like and how reincarnation worked. But only in mysterious, tantalizing fragments—three words written in sugar across the coffee table in the living room. Or a paragraph on Tibetan bardos in a book about after-death experiences magically highlighted right before the woman’s eyes in vivid yellow as the woman was reading the words for the first time. When the highlighting stopped, three exclamation points appeared beside the paragraph and then, in black, the word THIS!

No more money was put into their account, but a beautiful new ornate gravestone for her mother was in the cemetery the next time they went there to lay flowers on her plot.

One night, his awful parents appeared at the door and invited themselves in on the excuse Mama had baked his favorite chocolate chip cookies and just knew he’d want to eat them fresh out of the oven. The real reason they came was for one of their periodic snoops around the house to find things to fault and be nasty about. But first the old bitch had to show off and there had to be a cookie unveiling followed by the son’s required yumming over how delicious they were.

The cookies were in the large red tin she always used and, for the umpteenth time, said she needed it back when it was empty. Why would the harridan think anyone would want to keep her old dented box?

The four of them sat down on the couch and Mama leaned forward to present the goodies. As she did, a loud sound—a sort of burp-urup-urup came from inside the box. When she pulled the top off there were no cookies inside but an enormous, slimy, brown African goliath frog as big and wide as a Frisbee; it must have been ten inches by ten inches. The giant thing fit perfectly inside the tin. Before any of them could react, it hopped out of the box, across the coffee table, and onto the floor. The dog took one look at it, leapt forward, grabbed the huge frog in its mouth, shook it violently from side to side, and ran out of the room with his catch going urup-urup all the way.

The old woman squealed, her husband squawked like a parrot, and the two of them fled.

The younger couple sat on the couch, staring straight ahead. The woman fought back a smile but it didn’t work. The smile turned into a giggle and then a howl of laughter. Her husband, his parents having just jetted out of his house in abject horror, cracked up, too. Neither of them felt the need to go find the dog.

When it reappeared later, its muzzle was covered with cookie crumbs.

Soon after that things got darker. The dog, that until then had slept peacefully, began having what sounded like terrible nightmares every time it slept. It twitched and shook, growled and barked. Several times, they tried to wake it, but that was dangerous because it came out of sleep in a rage, snapping and snarling, as if fighting off its dream enemies in real life.

The few messages it conveyed became more and more incoherent, most of the words misspelled; toward the end, strung together, they made no sense at all. The dog grew surly, sullen, and aloof—a complete change from the lovable goofy, friendly, warm guy who in the past liked nothing more than to cuddle up next to you on the couch and snooze.

After it pulled the woman to the ground, things got even worse. MAMA BRUISE was the last coherent message it communicated until right before the end. Twice after that it knocked the man down from behind when he was walking to answer the front door after the bell had rung.

“It’s like he doesn’t want me to answer it—like he’s expecting someone bad.”

And by its behavior in other ways, it did seem like that. For hours it sat on the couch looking out the picture window onto the street, just watching. When they took it outside for a walk, it moved its head from side to side like a searchlight, its body so tense that it shook much of the time when it stood still.

The day it bit her, it ran away. She was walking it around the block when they saw another person coming toward them with a large white poodle on a leash. As soon as the two dogs saw each other, they stopped. Then the poodle flew into a barking, growling, snapping fit. It started jerking wildly on the leash, as if to get off and attack her dog however it could.