The following contains physical abuse, sexual scenes, use of blood, and violence against an animal.

Dog

“But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.”

— Timothy, 5:8

I.

Dad was a religious man. He grew up Christian and tried to raise a Christian son. He got me, Martin Williams II, a guy who could appreciate religion at a glance but never get into it. Which is why he repeats his mantra: “If you do right by the Lord, then the Lord will do right by you.”

II.

Bump. 

“What was that?” Sam asks from the passenger seat.

“I just ran over Dog.” I’m backed out of the driveway, manning the Subaru, prepared to take my girlfriend on a summer trip to the Cape, when I hear a bone-splitting crack from the back right tire followed by a howl of pain. I slap my hand against the steering wheel in frustration.

Sam places her hand on my arm, looking at me with her calming eyes. “It’s alright,” she says. “Let’s get out and check. I’m sure it was just a branch.”

I nod, breathing deep to regain my composure, thinking that if Dog’s dead, then Dad would take away the car and forbid me from seeing Sam again. I unbuckle, step outside, and walk to the back left tire.

Dog, Dad’s fifteen-year-old German Shepard, lays spread-eagle on the ground. The tire cut straight through her abdomen, burying itself into her flesh. Blood cakes the tire’s sides, and Dog looks at me, whimpering, soft and slow breaths of death. I imagine her winking at me, the ghost of a smile forming at her lips.

Sam cups her hands over her mouth, jaw dropped. “Oh my God. What do we do?”

“How should I know?” I ask, throwing my hands into the air. Sam’s lips are tightened in a straight line. “Sorry. Dad’s gonna kill me. That dog meant the world to him. Hell, probably meant more to him than I do.”

“Don’t say that,” Sam says. But then she doesn’t know what to say, I suppose, because she says nothing else. I want her to say more, to make it all better for me, but she can’t. She can only be quiet.

“You’re talking about the guy who sent me to Christianity Camp, or whatever it’s called, because I wanted to watch It when I was fourteen,” I say. “The guy that forced me to get baptized. I don’t think running over his precious Dog is going to be peachy.”

I’ve never run over anything before, not even one of those squirrels that runs into the street, ponders the difficulties of squirrel life, and then proceeds to the other side of the road, thinking that it actually does want to live. What I want to do right now is puke. I turn around, bend over, and expel the bacon and eggs I had for breakfast this morning. 

Sam pinches her nose. “That is absolutely flattering, Marty.”

I stand up straight, gathering my resolve. I look at my house, a three story Victorian that my father always reminds us that he worked his whole life for. My eyes drift to my room, the site of superhero posters, an unmade bed that’s been home to some fun nights with me and Sam, and a computer that’s home to many fun pictures of me and Sam.

Sam looks at me, stoic, at a loss for words, and then she thinks of a solution. “But you didn’t kill Dog. We have no idea what happened to her. Because Dog ran away.”

I nod, thankful that Sam is able to take control. “Let’s go bury Dog.”

III.

Traveling from Salem to the Cape takes two and a half hours on a good day, but I’m driving slowly. We meant to leave at one, but it took an hour to bury Dog in the backyard and another fifteen minutes to calm myself enough to drive. We’re in the last half of our trip, about to cross the Sagamore Bridge, sitting in the usual Cape Traffic when one of us speaks. Cars are gridlocked for miles, a sight of never ending stopping, starting, stopping, starting…

“At least she was like a hundred in dog years,” Sam whispers, testing the waters.

I smile. “Dog was ancient. That thing had it coming.”

“Getting run over?”

“No. Death.”

“Talk about lifting spirits.” 

The good thing about traffic is that I can take my eyes off the road. I turn up the radio, and “Every Step You Take” plays. Turning towards Sam, even though this might not be the most appropriate time, I revel in her beauty, thinking that I’m lucky to have her. That’s the thing about my brain, or maybe even brains in general; when you shouldn’t think about something, that’s when you think about it. I think about running my hands through her cherry red hair. Making out with her. Cupping my hands around her boobs. My eyes drift down to them, and I imagine tearing off her shirt, her pants, kneeling down beneath the passenger seat and–

“What?” Sam asks.

“Huh?” I say, taken out of the moment. 

“You keep looking at me,” Sam says, laughing. 

“Is that a federal crime? Because if it is, I’m guilty as charged.” I hold out my hands, faking a prisoner that’s about to be handcuffed. I hope I do get handcuffed.

“I mean, no, but you should be looking at the road.”

“Fine,” I say, rolling my eyes in mock exasperation. “I suppose.”

I fight to look straight ahead; a blue Chevrolet with the license plate “JSCRST” is much less attractive than Sam. There’s a dog in their backseat, though, sticking its tongue out, smiling widely. A happy dog. A German Shepherd. God damn it.

Talk about coincidences.

“Don’t you have an ex from the Cape?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Sam. “His name’s Adam. ‘Chatham Adam,’ we used to call him. We dated two or three years ago when I went to summer camp there. Not much in the personality department, but damn if that wasn’t the best sex I’ve ever had.”

“Hey!” I say in mock outrage. “I’m right here.”

“Sorry. I’m joking.” Sam gives me a cute smile, then eyes me up and down. Her eyes land on my crotch and hover there for a second. “Actually, yeah. It was the best sex I’ve ever had. We were only eighteen, so that’s saying something.”

Even if it’s a joke, I can’t help feeling jealous. While I never thought that Sam would cheat on me, there have been times when I was curious. The times when she says, “Oh, no one,” when I ask who she’s texting, when she’s leaving home without telling me (because healthy couples should tell each other everything), when she goes to parties with her girlfriends. One time last summer, she took a girl’s trip to Chatham to get high and drunk all weekend. But the day after they left Salem, I bumped into one of the girls who was supposed to be there at O’Brien’s Pub. She claimed she was sick, and I left it at that. I never told Sam.

IV.

The popular theory is that dogs are man's best friend, and my father and Dog can prove it. My father adopted Dog when I was three years old, and ever since then they have been inseparable. My mother used to joke that my father would spend more time with Dog than with her. Now, I’m not sure how much of a joke that was. When Dog was a puppy, my father would take her into his study for hours while he sat at his computer, writing a novel that would never get done. More than once, I walked in on my father reading Dog Bible verses, while she sat there listening, wagging her tail with curiosity. 

I never had that same connection to Dog. Many of my memories surrounding Dog, especially when I was young, are frightening. The first memory that comes to mind is one I’ve thought about so much that it has a dream-like quality to it. I’m five years old, sitting on our couch. My parents are next to me, asleep, and Dog is curled up in her bed by the TV. I can't see anything, not even see my own fingertips, let alone Dog all the way across the room. Can’t see her fur, but I know that she’s breathing deeply from the low, constant snarl that escapes her. She’s looking right at me. The glow from the TV illuminates her eyes, which are two glowing orbs in the darkness, boring right into my body. The thought of going to my room sends cold iron into my blood because if I walk by Dog, she will surely snatch my ankles from underneath me. 

Is that really Dog? Or is it Backwards God?

We’re watching a movie with lots of sex and black and white scenes because my father wanted to get into experimental cinema to improve his writing. The critics liked his first few novels, but he feared that he would get typecast as the guy who writes uplifting stories about families that have golden retrievers. He wanted something else, and possibly to leave the dog behind. One of the many sex scenes comes on, when the main character becomes a prostitute in her effort to escape a toxic relationship. My father turns off the television. 

“What’d you do that for?” My mother slaps my father across the arm. I don’t see it, but I hear it. Dog’s eye snaps open at the noise. “That was a good movie.”

“It’s stupid,” my father says. “I don’t want to watch that with my family.”

“It’s liberating, she’s getting freedom.”

“She doesn’t need to debase herself like that to–”

“It was like the 1800s, all we women could do to earn money back then was either sex or… I don’t know. Maybe just sex.” My mom was more than halfway drunk at this time, as she downed her third glass of wine for the night.

“Sex outside of marriage isn’t healthy.” My father gave my mother a glare, maybe knowing that his marriage would soon end. Martin Williams, ever the prophet. He sighs and leaves the living room, Dog in pursuit. “And it definitely isn’t Biblical.”

Dog’s lips curl into her signature smile as she glares at my mother. Then she walks to the TV stand and grabs the Bible that my father keeps there with her mouth. She follows him upstairs, a disciple following Christ. 

My mother turns the TV back on and resumes the movie, staring intently at the screen. I can’t tell what goes through her mind at the display of infidelity, and I don’t know what goes through mine, either; I retreat into myself, into a hole as deep and dark as Dog’s mouth. Perhaps because I have my own suspicions about my mother, perhaps because I wouldn’t blame her if those suspicions were correct, but probably because watching sexual material with your mother next to you is not pleasurable for anyone.

___________________________________________

One year ago, Sam and I in bed: 

“My dad shouldn’t be home for a few hours. So we have plenty of time.”

“Well, you’ve been the slow poke recently,” Sam says, poking my chest.

I'm the "slow poke" because I'm afraid that Sam would leave me if I couldn’t get it up. I would also think that I would never be as good as “Chatham Adam” or any of Sam’s other exes, since Sam is my first. But there’s no time to think about that as Sam kisses my stomach… making her way to my neck… touching me… And my sexual desire for Sam increases when I think about my father saying that sex outside of marriage isn’t healthy.

We had been doing it doggy style when I caught Dog staring at us through a crack in the door. I freeze.

“Psst,” I hiss, “go away.”

She doesn’t.

“What’s going on?” Sam says, laying down face first on the bed.

Dog eases the door open with her nose and creeps into the room, not making a sound. My phone buzzes a second later. A text from my father: “If you do right by the Lord, then the Lord will do right by you.”

“Who is it?” Sam asks, leaning her head on my shoulder.

“My father.” 

“What’d he say?”

I look at Dog, huddled in the corner of my bedroom, shrouded in shadow, yet I can still see her face, tongue protruding from her mouth as she licks her lips and yawns, exposing an endless dark hole. Maybe she thinks, Come on, Marty. Think, and things will go well for you. I am The Backwards God…

“Nothing,” I say, putting my phone on my nightstand. 

Sam catches Dog’s eye and whispers, “There’s an unwanted voyeur in your bedroom.”

We stop.

___________________________________________

Ink droplets, those are the kinds of memories that come as I stare as JSCRST’s dog. Incomplete scenes; scenes aren’t fully formed when I’m staring at a creature I thought I just killed. If I had been laying on my bed, begging for sleep – which happened many times in Dog’s early years – I might have remembered when my father came home fifteen minutes later, screamed at Sam to get out of the house, and told her to do right by the Lord in a never ending loop: “If you do right by the Lord, then the Lord will do right by you if you do right by the Lord, then the Lord will do right by you…”

V.

“What do you think your dad will do now that Dog’s dead?” Sam asks.

“What he always does. Close in on himself. Did I ever tell you that when I was seven, he went three days without speaking to me when I called the woman he was dating a cheating liar?”

The German Shepherd from the JSCRST car barks. Somehow, I hear it through the glass, reverberating in my ears.

“Was she?”

“Oh yeah. I saw her at O'Brien's with one of the deacons at our church. Looked like they were gonna have sex, that she was gonna call him ‘father’ in a whole new way.” Anger, a stealth canine, sneaks up on me, and I don’t realize that I refer to my mother as “her.”

“Dad yelled in my face and told me that I had no idea what I was talking about. Then he sat on the couch and watched baseball, right next to Dog.”

I give the horn the loudest honk of its life. Sam stares at me then puts a comforting hand on my leg, inches from my crotch. JSCRST’s dog sees it then barks again. 

“What happened after that?” Sam says, texting someone with her free hand. Not looking at me.

“Who are you texting?”

“Oh, no one.” Sam puts her phone away.

It starts, a quiet hum of a heartbeat, and then thoughts that start slow and pick up speed, like an avalanching snowball. Distortion. Thoughts, thoughts, and time folds in on itself, ceasing to exist.

Mom came home, Dad and Dog stormed down the stairs together, and I watched the scene unfold from the top of the staircase, outside my bedroom, doing nothing…

JSCRST’s dog is no longer there. Perhaps it has laid down to take a nap. I unlock the car. I will stand outside for a minute, that always helps with these anxiety spells. I open the door…

… and then Dog jumps up, paws on Mom’s shoulders, growling in her face. She yells at her to get down, GET DOWN, but she doesn’t move until Dad elbows her away and grabs my mother by the throat…

…and then Dog jumps up, lands on my lap, and leaps across the car to Sam. She growls and barks in Sam’s face, but Sam doesn’t seem to notice. She just stares at me, eyebrows raised, not afraid of Dog. But it can’t be Dog, Dog is dead. It can’t be Dog, Dog is dead. It can’t be... I grab Dog's neck and try to pry her off Sam, but she bites her across the face, cheek to eyebrow.

“Marty…?” Sam’s voice is a hoarse whisper.

I look at Dog in the eye. “Get out.”

…“Get out,” my father says, spitting into Mom’s face. She looks blank, confused, and grabs my father’s arms, trying to get him off, but Dog bites her leg, causing it to bleed an endless stream of blood. Her grip weakens. Mom spots me at the top of the stairs, her eyes begging me for help. I turn away from her and head to my room. I can’t watch this anymore.

…I squeeze tighter, trying to kill this thing once and for all. Dog whimpers. The first time in my life I have ever heard her whimper. I squeeze, my knuckles now white marbles, and Sam looks at me with begging eyes. I turn my head away from her, I can’t watch this anymore, I can’t do this anymore, and reality distorts again, and the cars behind me honk because traffic is finally moving, a call for me to wake up, and maybe we won’t be stuck between where we are from and where we are going to much longer.

I close my eyes. Open them. Dog isn’t there. No blue Chevrolet. No JSCRST. Just Sam in the passenger seat, her head lolling off to the side, eyes closed, red marks on her neck. Her phone is open with an unsent message to Adam.