Dog-Water Dreams

All of the dogs at the Shelter are healthy, except my sister and I. Whenever clients come to the Shelter, they coo over my sister’s fluffy tail and blue eyes, and then wonder why I’m here, with a smushed muzzle and patchy coloring. My fur sticks up in the wrong places, and from what I’ve heard, my eyes are a sickly yellow.

“What’s that dog doing there?” I heard a toddler ask as he’s dragged through the Shelter. “It doesn’t look like the other dogs. It looks wrong.”

The family laughed, and chatted, and dragged their boy to the back section (that’s where the children are), and cooed over the little ones there. I can hear the family’s offspring whining on which baby to bring home.

My sister blinked, and scooched closer to me. “What jerks,” she said. She never says much.

When the volunteers at the Shelter tell incoming people that one of us is sick, they always look at me with a partly pitying look on their faces and nod, like they understand. They always have a double take when they realize that it’s my sister who’s hurt.

“She learns quickly, poor thing,” Volunteer Michaels said. “But something’s wrong with her brain, so the memories don’t stick right.”

This is what makes people turn straight around—nobody wants a brain damaged dog.

My sister hurt her head by hitting it on a river rock. I remember her scrambling around in the froth, trying to latch onto the banks but being thrown backward onto the stepping stones. How she didn’t whine or whimper anymore, just let herself be carried by the current.

That memory always picks up again, like a cold breeze or the way people grow up and are suddenly different.

And today should be the best day of my life—we’re being adopted. By a farm who just so happened to need exactly two female dogs—better yet, sisters.

“We don’t need any puppies or mates,” the farmer said. “We just need two guard dogs—no more, no less.”

The farmer scratched out things on a piece of paper, then another piece of paper. Volunteer Michaels warned her again and again that my sister had a memory problem, but she just shrugged.

“Dogs is dogs,” she steadfastly repeated. “And dogs like to bark at everything under the sun.”

She took us to her house, and we realized why she needed two dogs. The land was wide, measured in something called ‘acres’ it was so big. There were even a couple of other dogs who were already patrolling the chicken house and the horse barn.

The farmer brought me to one end of the farm, my sister to the other. We tried seeing each other, but the farmer always separated us to our individual ends.

“Bye,” I told my sister.

She said goodbye too, but she didn’t need to speak.

The farm ran by a river, which trickled down south to somewhere off the land. I didn’t like the river, and it didn’t like me.

“I’m warning you,” I growled at it. “Keep away from me. Keep away from my sister.”

I didn’t want history repeating itself. My sister had enough problems without being hit on the head by river rock twice.

When my mother was pregnant with me and my sister and some others, she was so pleased with herself, and so were her owners. They expected the pups to look like her, like little rays of fluffy sunshine. When it was discovered that they looked like I do, like mutts with mismatched parts, they were… unhappy.

My mother loved us, and comforted us when the clouds stormed and the river rose. We still whimpered and shuddered deeper into her soft belly. I suppose we must have kept her awake all night, my poor mother.

That’s when her owners came. They fell, like shadows, into the barn.

“You should’ve kept your hands on your dog,” one told the other. “Then we wouldn’t have ugly little mutts on our hands. Nobody would want these little scraps.”

“I can’t watch her all the time, you idiot. She was supposed to watch over us. Now we have to get rid of these things,” the other owner said. They actually said that. Like we were pieces of garbage that had to be thrown out. Gotten rid of.

One held out a burlap bag. “Here puppies. Come here, puppies.”

My two brothers walked in. “Okay,” I heard one whisper, before the rough cloth swallowed them up.

My sister and I stared at the bag as one. “Do we?” She whispered. “Should we?”

I don’t know, I thought. I just don’t know.

And the bag swallowed us up too. It stank of fresh blood and earth and dust. My smaller brother made a soft noise.

“There’s big pebbles in here,” one of my brothers said. “They hurt.”

I turned around, and I could see blood on my brothers, and bruises beneath their mangled fur. Above us, I could see the top of the bag closing. The air felt stuffy and I wanted it out of my nose. I barked.

“Be quiet!” Barked one of the owners back. “We don’t want your mother waking.”

The bag lifted up high, spinning and swivelling in the air. I felt dizzy, and I wanted to go lie down with my mother. Where was she? The air I breathed in and out pounded around me, going through my sister and my brothers.

“Help,” I whimpered, and the human started to walk. The rocks were tumbling around with us, and we scrambled frantically to be at the top of our pyramid. The sounds of our struggles never made it to my mother’s ears.

“What do we do with them now?” The person holding our bag said.

“Follow me,” Said the other. “I’ve done this before, with my dad. It’ll be no problem in a matter of seconds.”

And both were silent.

I felt a cold breeze waft through the bag, and we were there, wherever ‘there’ was. They hoisted our bag higher into the air, and tied the end into a firmer knot. Then they dropped us, and we were flying.

We landed somewhere cold. It was water, running water, not the water of our mother’s bowl, but the water that sneaks around your neck like a snake and chokes you.

I tried to stay at the top, but the rocks instantly dragged us the muck at the bottom. We were bashed against dull rocks and scratched against the sharp ones—but so was the bag, its burlap as bruised as we were.

Then the water pulled me out of a tear in the burlap, and I was scrambling for air downstream. Sister, brothers, I called once before I fell again into the cold. All I could see was stirred-up mud and blurry shapes.

I rose and fell with the waves, crying like the little dog that I was, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw my sister, falling onto a river rock.

Never making a noise.

The river was unpredictable. It was fast, and tough, and cruel to my brothers. But Volunteer Michaels, just Mr. Michaels back then, pulled us off the banks, our fur swollen with mud and grief. My sister's fur grew out and changed color, and she grew into her wobbly legs and large, blue eyes.

And so, I would not let the river triumph again.

At the farm, which we’ve been at for months, my sister met me many nights before to tell me that she was having puppies. Children.

My sister never remembered the river. She does not know that we once had brothers, and she doesn’t know that some people can’t be trusted.

She now has her puppies, which must have been born with a passing-by mutt as their father, because between their three bodies, they have enough good looks for just one. One has too small legs with choppy black fur, one has a pinched snout with little eyes, and one has too long ears with a mouthful of sharp teeth.

The farmer took one look at them, and was not pleased. Not pleased at all.

As I look into the night, they’re sleeping with their mother, my sister, and I wish them moon-fulls of luck.

I’m scared for her children, the ones that can’t possibly be sold or given away because nobody would want one.

Because—because I can see the farmer coming. And she’s holding a burlap bag.