Joshua Cohen - Witz

A wood, the Kieferöde it’s been called, where many of the wealthier residentials of greater Siburbia went to loose their canine companions aged old and useless. When You Won’t Put Them Down, Put Them Here , an old plankside sign offered in the ought tens, bought as a collectible curio summer memories ago by a retired Philadelphia lawyer weekending at an antique market out by the founding of the forge that was Batsto: Jack for Sale , its reverse went on to declare, by the bushel, the basket — Apples — Pumpkins — Golf Course Sand By the Bag or Trap …they’d drive themselves out to this particular weathered marker, maybe driftwood set to demarcate another, more intimate, distance, that of love fallen out of, perhaps, an incalculable exertion; at whichever exit, a tenthed mile, a third, mensurated like mad, amid the wilds of New Gretna, just a shallow inland from Mystic Island, the milchy oyster bay and shoals giving way to the wetlands by which the Absegami first came to settle Absecon, the cattailed marshes turning to cedar, the birchedbeery, dogwooded wade; its exact number, though, if any it had, a secret to be passed around only in whispers at dunch parties and schoolboard meetings from brother to inlaw, a wooden designate standing high and holy menhir, megalithic, ever ancient and older even, as if natural, organic, grown of the earth, in the early light often recommended for the execution of this particular ritual: usually the morning of a Sunday with the kinder all still attractive, intelligent, promising, and unsuspectingly asleep, they’d drive on out, stop for coffee black for him, milked and sweetened with flavor for her, drive then stop again on the shoulder rumbling as if the earth disapproved of their betrayal and would quake in punishment, to swallow and so betray them, throw it in reverse, stop then throw open the hatch doors of their vehicles allterrain, to kiss and kick, slap and punch and, ultimately, to lead by the leash — there to let their unwanted pets loose to the world. And the Top Ten it’s your faults given for this were, drumroll please…Lameness, Rabidity, Old Age, Senility, Newfound Allergy, Unwanted by New Husband, by New Wife, Scared the New Baby, Newly Moved In Dying Parent, Grandparent and the like — don’t get defensive, it just ran away, we’ve been driving around searching for forget its name, it answers to hours, all Reward Offered day.

And so the Kieferöde’s stumped full of dogs of various breeds, many now regarded as domestically extinct. No longer around for your roll over, sit, stay. In a stark, terrible reversal of the laws of evolution — which reversion seems in the air of late, doesn’t it, an upheaval, an overturning — these dogs had devolved to an existence prior to that of domestication, to an incarnation even earlier: before the morning Shema, according to one rabbi or another, when a dog was nearly indistinguishable from a wolf. All were carnivorous, all ate meat, ate anything providing, though were starving, are always, these what to call them omnivorous, these allaccused, and manynamed: monstermutants, postnuclear primitives, survivors of hearth and home and neglect and abuse and of love, not enough, just wandering around foaming, gnawing hides, rending flesh with teeth sharpened on teeth; rendering their skins parchmentlike, palimpsested, adorned with scratchy symbols and daubed marks the language of an ungardened estate. And not only those still alive: of those lost, their boned carcasses lie everywhere ripped open to dank decomposition its stench vomitous; rot, the mate of disease. Predators swoop down to rend, tear flesh with talons; fleas swarm overhead, maggots teem pleasurelessly in remains. Verily, these are the only known denizens of the Kieferöde, predatory flying things, nibbling pests, and their native dogs, now a newborn and His frustrated pursuit. Mada initially thinks these dogs are dead, have to be, though are they playing, is this only part of the game: whispering at first, here Spot, tear out my jugular, or Hearsay, the Philly lawyer’s mutt, those precious billable morning hours fetched out on the beach in Sea Isle, Hear Say, come boy! — they wait for Mada to approach, then spring at his gut with an imposition of jaws, starry teeth, brilliantly yellowed, though, just prior to the bite, there’s a simper of slaver, they fall, into fur heaps, exhausted; it’s obvious they haven’t had food in a while, wet or dry. Hamm about to pet at their exposed ribcages, their flanks stretched thin, withdraws his hand, himself, with rakes, scrapes; who knows if they’d had their shots, whether Hamm’d had his…

Needlemarks covering their matted flanks of one vast scar, slicings through their coats, of which some are merely pilled, and others totally ragged, prophesizing in their motley markings the ineffable, the excruciatingly obscure. Those scrappy slits of weather, nature, and affliction untold loosing, also, the inner jellies of bulging, bloodshot eyes: there’s one eye bleeding, the other hanging out the socket by only a single thinning dangle; noses veined on by a mere shredded nerve, a fringing, a scapular tassel; frayed straps for tails and phylactery ears; hairs skewed in the electric antennal as if their existence shocks even themselves. It’s evident, too, they’d been rolling around in their own dreck, as the reek’s overwhelming, and black, both excremental and fleshified, and fiery, ash, with a whiff of the marshy egg to the east, it’s cold, and it dizzies: Mada’s loafers encased in droppings, these sickening green flecked in red, and pissyellowed, in every color of traffic’s bypass, control — the lanes that divide the forest into forests, the wood into woods, the known into all these many separate unknowns; every three steps or so he lands a foot in a leftover dogdish, overflowing with urine so acidic it scalds through the turd, then his loafers, dress socks, skin; then how he steps into it all over again as if to salve, and shrieks, inhaling remnants of the latest autumn, fall down the wrong throat.

They bury their burrows in wormy dens, hidden by snow, in pocks emptied by the force of forepawed rain, nests of leaf and needle, piles, logs hollowed for infestation. And then, come the dawn of late afternoon toward winter’s dusk, they crawl themselves out, to prey — what’s left of them, that is, what’s been left, their own stray parts, their lost. As many of these dogs are missing limbs — some with limbs hanging by torn tendons, others dragging themselves on two front legs only, on two rear legs, on one up front one rear left and right, right and left or, one leg or anything less how they’d deal. It’s apparent they’d long ago adapted to cannibalism: once rich dogs fed and watered well, exercised and groomed, even with papers, certificates of bloodline, shots and widely accepted veternary approvals, though now straggling superlean, scraggled scrawny; in their mouths, hunks of other dogs, either gnawed from them or loosed in miscellaneous incendiary, strayed in unfortunate mishaps, lost to accidental deterrence: four legs to stagger into errant leashtripwire mechanisms, you have to be careful, traps set down, concealed, leafcovered; dogs, only a handful, that still have their collars, their tags, by which they’ve been leashed up to treetops, hanging spread for the eagles, the night owls, and noontime hawks: who’d hung them; what, exactly, merited them this punishment — that they’d been coupled in heat on the Ark two-by-two…beware, what’s justice to the dogs?

With saliva freezing in jaws, both sires and dams, dogs and bitches, pups and whelps, slash at one another, then huddle together over their weakest dead to warm with the last pumpings of innards, and then, finally, with the smokelike steam of their panting; in masses emitting whines fiercely piercing at the chirpless pitch of dovish, preyedupon snowbirds flown south to tend to their Nest Eggs, anywhere but here with its graygrim weather and violence. With slobbersome, hotheavy tongues, they bay their own natures separate again in a snort, in a terrible gasp, dispersing in whimpers at dawn, with raging stomachs, with the stirrings of growl, a roar echoing from within the past shared. An instinct, they sense — intruders; they want their bones, a life to bury, other than their own, to grave down into earth.