A DOG DYING FROM DISEASE WRITES TO HIS EX-BOY
dear boy,
(my last day alive)
the dirt gone wet smells a little different here and i will go out with a cat-coloured crimson coat. i am sickly with distain more than ever but it’s no matter, for it is simply as you know it, i was born a muttering mutt and i am fitting into the crack, a gecko in the jar, the perfect shade of paint; finally i am what i was made to be. they call me names here too, like the boys back home did you, so i’ve got my tail stuck beneath me like a real fourth leg. it is not helping my heart, which is like your rotting tooth, your back molar or lost index finger. i have nobody to talk to these days. we used to have fun.
there is little to do but think about my life in this remaining timelessness, and about us. i was a new runt in the rain unsaved, slave to the sewage and other bottomless pits when you came for me crying away from your cursing mother, and now what you need is slipping down the drain and i will die lying lone, not a line in my face, sickly and ugly and insensibly vain without your raincoat and nice warm forearms. i am thankful to you. indebted. it is very hard to love ugly things. you know all about that, boy.
i wish i were able to remember how i wanted to remember these things that i won’t ever tell. how i used to be a bitch’s pup that gulped her milk, and had warmth and did not know about you or wonder about my lonely death. i am not that pup anymore, you see; the late-night train goes by with me in it and i am looking out the circle window which has been alive much longer than me; with the streetlights on i feel i must always be reminding myself that what passes by is real, and the most untouched parts of this earth still remain, just like the mongrels; just like your babies and their mothers’ bones. my mother and yours. i could jump off the train and walk into the forest and feel the leaves, and they would not disappear in my padded paws. perhaps i could disappear first, or into them. but i do not know that, just as the little girls pretend not to know that they are their mothers and the boys pretend you are not the greatest living thing. there are so many of those sweet, ripe, orange-things in the trees and i will not reach them all. none, in fact. i do not want to be left behind. i hide in my cart with the rest of the baggage. i hope you’ll come get me. but i know better.
the mutts who sleep by me at the mekong river do not have names either, just the atrocities shouted at them; they are skinny dog and dirty dog, and they bite each other at their ears. i am dying dog, now. they’ve named me that, but i doubt i’ll go by it long. i wish i could remember the names you used to call me. please do not get another dog, boy.
yes, it’s true. i will go laying down by the village streets. in the days it took leading up to this insurmountably long and anticlimactic death, i spent time in front of nice old people, with my belly up, in hope my vulnerability was attractive to them. i needed someone to look after me. i looked for them in hope i would see you in time before the wind got to me, but it’s far too late now.
yesterday the water buffalo came by and the calf sniffed my belly; she was the closest thing to the warmth of the sun and to my mother’s smell i have had in a very long time. the nice man who gives me his family’s leftover rice from the morning monk offerings is a driver; he takes the white people from the airport through the village, and i do not follow past the waterfall. i have learnt the white people are quite doting, but they are full of pity for me. they do not know or expect quite how grateful i am for what i have had, which is you. i do not want anybody’s pity, but i sure would like a nice bath. it is all too late in the evening for that now. i am going to go at such an odd and unsettling time. just before the beginning of sunset, and the moon is hidden behind clouds. i will have nothing to watch while it happens.
i hope you know i am not angry at you. i know you had to. i know i am not a bad dog. i know you are not a bad boy. but i wish we could be together still. i do not think saying sorry would do anything now, but i am sorry. i know you cried and cried when you realised i’d gotten sick, when your mother told me i was unsalvageable and your daddy threatened you until you threw me, took me by the collar and i was back in the rain, bowing myself below, babbling like an idiot. you couldn’t keep me any longer when i was so wretched.
the world is full and i’m dying of starvation, and perhaps some other things. this will never be you. please do not get another dog.
the back of your head is how i remember wanting to remember. when i shut my eyes it is that tuft of blackness that fills a dissimilarity inside me; and i remember our sameness.
i will shut my eyes, think of your voice, and try to remember my name. but i am not tall enough to reach the trees
Bethany Violet Lines, 15, ADL - Australia ✯
“bethany violet lines is a fifteen-year-old writer from adelaide, australia. this is her second time published in the nowhere girl collective. she wrote “a dog dying from disease writes to his ex-boy” with the help of a local laotian dog who she fell in love with.”