Джонатан Кэрролл: Mama Bruise

She’d never seen an aggressive poodle before, so she was surprised and caught up in watching it act out. Then she felt a terrible pain in her right hand—the one holding the leash. Looking down, she saw her dog biting her for the first time in its life. Yelping, she dropped the leash and the dog ran off as fast as it could, the leash trailing behind.

She just stood there watching it, helpless, her hand exploding with pain from the bite.

Although the dog had all of its rabies and distemper shots, her husband insisted she go to the hospital to be checked.

Driving home, he asked quietly, “Do you think we should try to find him?”

“No.”

He nodded and said nothing more.

Hours later, in the middle of the night, he awoke and found she was not in bed. He got up and padded around searching for her. She was sitting in the dark in the living room on the couch, in the same place where the dog had stationed itself in the past days, staring out the window there.

Her husband sat down next to her. She turned to him and held up her bandaged hand. “ This was a message. He didn’t bite me because he was angry or trying to get away. He was telling me why, and that was the only way he could convey it at this point.” She stopped and swallowed. “This was the only way he could tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“It came to me before when I was sleeping. It might’ve been the bite. Somehow it connected us in a way we hadn’t been before. What came through was when you die and are reincarnated, you’re not supposed to bring anything from your past life into the new. But for some reason he did, somehow he stayed part human—my father—part dog, and God knows what else. I think that combination should never have happened. But it gave him those special powers like some kind of weird alchemy. After a while, though, it all started to mix together in bad ways and then implode. Like a medicine gone bad, or that stops working. At the end, everything was slipping away from him. But whatever he was by then, he still knew one thing—they were coming to get him.”

Her husband frowned. “ Who was?”

“Other dogs and whatever else didn’t want him alive. It’s why he sat at the window all the time watching. He knew something was coming for him. That’s why the poodle went crazy tonight when it saw him. They know. They all know that, with his mixed knowledge, no matter how debased it is, he’s a threat, and they’re out to get him.”

“Get him? Why? What did he do?”

“Nothing. He didn’t do anything—somehow it was done to him or it happened by mistake. He’s like a calf born with two heads. A freak, but a dangerous one, because he knows things he’s not supposed to. We’re not supposed to communicate with animals, or know what happens to us after we die. But he does, so as long as he’s alive he might tell us—” She stopped, cocked her head to one side, and held up a finger for him not to speak.

In the midnight quiet that followed, after a few moments they both heard it—a faint scratching. A faint scratching on their front door. Then loud sniffing—scratching and sniffing. Then, their ears attuned to the sounds, they heard more of them, many more just outside the house, all of them near, all of them growing louder. Scratching, hard scratching now, frantic sniffing and whining. Louder, all those familiar sounds times ten, louder and more every minute, everywhere out there in the night. Very close.

Jonathan Carroll’snovel The Wooden Sea was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2001. He is the author of such acclaimed novels as White Apples, The Land of Laughs, The Marriage of Sticks, and Bones of the Moon. He lives in Vienna, Austria. You can sign up for email updates here.

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Art copyright © 2019 by Mark Smith