Looking to Kill a Dog

The day was edging toward dusk, the sun casting long shadows across the backyard. I remember the cicadas’ hum filling the air, marking the middle of summer, a relentless reminder of what should have been carefree days. I am posting this because I need help, and someone else might have a way to right my own wrong. Seventeen is a treacherous time, and all aspects of my life have been disrupted, eroded from stone to reveal my one focus: the dog. I hope that by sharing my story, others can offer advice, or at least understand this bizarre ordeal.
The dog.

Killing this dog is my only priority. While they say all dogs go to heaven, I disagree. This creature is no angel in the eyes of any God. It stands there, eyes gleaming with an unsettling intelligence, a shadow of menace clinging to its very presence. What was once a loving companion has been twisted into something sinister, a devilish specter haunting the edge of my vision, something more beast than pet now.

Before suggesting a gun, please know that I have already gone this route. It led me to this place.

About a month and a half ago, my dog passed. A summer’s day with a storm on the horizon was his death day, and a car was the chariot of his demise. It had been 5:42 pm.
The woman who drove the car had a watch.
A black car.
Running over the fence, I had seen my companion lying panting, his breath huffing, and his eyes glazed. Misery painted his face, and it was hurting us both like fire.

“You outta put him out of that misery. Be a man.”

It was the woman who gave me that gun. Stupid, downright fucking stupid to take a gun from a stranger. Of all the world’s charades, it simply sounds like a lapse in judgment.

I’m telling you it wasn’t, though.

No amount of pacing can allow me to recall the gun itself. Or my decision to take it.

Least of all the woman.

Black car.
Black hair.
Soft voice.

The rest is gone. A memory that aged by only a month and somehow feels like a recollection of my toddler years. The only clarity in my head was the ringing in my ears as the gun fired.

“You outta put him out of that misery. Be a man.”

When I turned to give the gun to the woman, the gun that I swore rested heavily in my hands, and she was gone. Then, as if time itself split, the gun too was gone.

After that, I sat on the porch staring. Trying to get the courage to start digging, to honor Ringo, my dog, by burying him properly. If only I had been a man.

Nobody believes me here, not the woman, the car, or the dog.

Especially not when my dog got up and walked off, with a hole in his head, eyes crossed and glassy, and walking perfectly like some wolf down over a mountain pass. I ain’t ever believed in the devil, but when I saw that no good monster walk off, I swear nothing in the world felt like that.

It’s a type of feeling that would have me going to church every day to pray away this twisted thing.

Maybe I should’ve stopped that son of a bitch at the time, but my legs were tangled with fear, and my brain was a rabbit ready to run. I hauled ass to bed that night and wondered if a fever or drug had addled my brain to dust.

I told myself that come morning, Ringo’s body would be lying in the yard.

At breakfast, Ma asked me where the dog was. On her early run, she hadn’t seen him inside or out in the grass of the yard. Avoiding all the windows hadn’t done me any good. Ma had delivered my worst nightmare with a side of bacon and eggs.

Even worse, I didn’t have the heart to tell her I shot him.

“Yeah, last night he ran off.”

By the end of the next day, I had convinced myself that a predator must’ve dragged the body away. Never mind that Ringo was a big ol’ dog. My hope was that something much bigger had come along and relieved me of the burden.

A week later, I was emptying out the trash behind the house when I slipped on something.

The hazel bloodied hair of a girl. Leila.
She had been in my class.

God only knows how much I screamed before the police showed up. One of them said she was bitten all over. Mauled and torn. Missing one of her sneakers.

A chalky-eyed medic had told me that all my screaming would tear my vocal cords. Ma had tried to get me to shush. In the end, they gave me something sweet and warm through the barrel of a needle that lifted me into cloudy skies. When I woke up, they asked me questions through the wazoo.
I didn’t know Jack.

Then Ma took me home. Tired to the bones, I still couldn’t sleep, and when Ma had dozed off, I snuck outside to sit on the porch. It was nice, crickets chirping and fireflies darting. I was about to go inside, muscles tensed to stand, when everything stopped.

No sounds. Like the world was paused.
Crickets stopped chirping, and owls shut their beaks.
I couldn’t even see a single firefly.

Our porch light is plenty bright.

I was seconds away from bolting or crying when I saw them.

Eyes.
Yellow eyes.

Ringo stalked into the circle of light, and I swear to the sweet lord above that my heart started beating backwards. Goosebumps and sweat were all I could manage.

He stopped only a few feet from the steps.

Fur caked in blood, he held himself the way a wolf would. Now I ain’t ever seen a damn wolf, but I sure as hell watched some Discovery Channel. Ringo used to loll about. But this Ringo was different.
He was a real hunter, I could see it in his eyes.

And when his mouth opened, and he dropped a grizzled shoe on the ground, I knew he had been out hunting as well.

I barely made it to the side of the railing before vomit spewed out of my mouth. And when I turned, Ringo was gone. His delivery was still sitting a few feet from the steps.

Leila’s shoe.

My cries and wails were loud enough to wake Ma. We ended up going to the police station that night for the second time.

Not a soul believed my story. Not Ma, not the Sheriff, not even Animal Control. Said that Ringo must’ve died, and I was going through a tough time. Gave me meds to make me sleep.

When Ma finally managed to wrangle me outta that station, she made me sit in the backseat of the car. She thinks I didn’t notice her engage the child lock, but I did.

I was all outta crying by the week’s end. My brain was fuzzy from all the meds, and a part of me was slowly coming to the realization that it was possible I had imagined all of it. Had Leila been a traumatic thing for me, right?

“Be a man.” Echoed in my brain persistently despite the medication’s interference. The entire world felt distorted through the panes of glass covering my mind. But glass begins to crack and shatter when hard storms hit.

And Ringo didn’t seem intent on waiting until hurricane season.

The mailman ended up dead in our street a week after that. He was barely recognizable.

All night long, I could hear him howling in the woods. I needed to kill that dog.

Mixing my sleeping meds into Ma’s tea was the first step. I knew if she thought I was planning anything, I would be whisked away to the loony bin in a heartbeat. No, this had to be perfect.
Before my grandfather died, he had kept a pistol. Ma kept all his old stuff tucked away in the dirt of the garage.

When I retrieve the gun from the dusty box where it lays I take a moment to study its features. The weapon itself is heavy, and a metallic scent wafts from it.
In my hands, it feels cold as death.

I’ve only shot a gun once, with my grandfather. Ma hadn’t been happy about him taking me shooting, so I never got the chance again.
I just have to hope that Ringo is a big enough target and that luck is on my side.
I wait. Bullets were loaded on the rickety porch.

A boy is planning on shooting his dog.
Maybe a dog is planning on killing his boy.

The howl was all the warning I got before I whirled at the figure stalking towards me.

Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Thud.

Ringo dropped to the ground dead. Skull riddled with bullets.

I put my head down.
I took a deep breath.
I looked up.

He’s gone.

I heard something running towards me.
Then my chest exploded with stinging fire.
The world was fields of pain among roses of agony. Nerves splitting at the seams like stitches in a dress, I cried out. My fingers gripped and clawed at the dirt; I became an animal of only primal instinct. Escape. Run. Hide.

Why had I ever thought I was more powerful than the monster?
In science class, once a kid had told me that breaking a rib feels like hell. I can tell you he wasn’t lying. Bone, pressing against the soft fibers of my lungs as I repeatedly attempted to inhale, was omnipresent.
Hot breath from the hellhound Ringo had made the hairs on my neck stand to attention. A cold tongue met my face and neck as the beast began to lap at me.
A childish part of my being was tickled by such a gesture. Infant and puppy in nature, something a younger dog would’ve done.

But Ringo isn’t young.
He’s dusty with age and death.
Infected with something I can never hope to explain. When I look back, all I can tell you is what I saw and heard. Feelings that were brought about through my own eyes. God only knows if my lens isn’t distorted, if the camera itself isn’t warped.

It all felt so unfair. When I lay on the ground, believing I was going to die, I hated that dog. It wasn’t my dog, I had known that, but now it felt true. My trusted friend had attacked me.
With malice.
Hate.
A dog can’t feel true hate.
The dog will kill the squirrel because it is a dog. Not because he hates the squirrel, wanting it to suffer, to be afraid.
This Ringo wanted me to suffer, to toy with me like a bird caught in a trap.

Life is funny. Even while my rib shimmies into my lung, and my dead dog licks my neck, I still ended up falling asleep. I finally managed to wake up just for a second. The woman who gave me the gun is standing above me. Then she isn’t.

Distantly, sirens wail.
A specter.
A ghoul.
Who fucking cares?

The hospital truly enjoys dishing out meds, apparently. They give me lots of meds.
I imagine if they brought all the bottles into the room with me, they would be stacked up to the ceiling. They could all be lined up like strange poles and sandcastles along the hospital ward wall.
When I walk around, I have to tiptoe through them like a garden maze. A maze where every few steps there’s a little white label with a medicine. Above that will be rows and rows of my name. Knocking them down, as all the little white pebbles spill out of them. Pills on pills.

A soft, middle-aged woman is in charge of making sure I swallow all the pills. If I don’t or refuse, they put it in the IV.

Yanking the IV out doesn’t get me a lot of good graces.
The first time I had actually attempted an escape.
I was apprehended in about 30 seconds and spent the rest of the week woozy from sedatives.
Not only does it hurt, but I lose my mobility “privilege.” That’s what they call being unrestrained.

Doctor Shepard says that being allowed to walk around freely in my room is something I need to earn. Never even raises her voice, not even when I yell at her. She’s a real gentle parent about this shit.

I even have my own traffic light card next to the door. Like a damn toddler.
Shepard also makes me journal every single day. I’m sometimes supposed to draw Ringo to “help me cope.”
Then I’m supposed to draw Ma.

They sent me here after Ma died. That’s what made me give up.
According to the police chief, I had been attacked by a robber. This robber had unknowingly let me live, then went upstairs and killed Ma in her sleep.
Sometimes I wonder if I had skipped the sleeping pills, would she have woken up?
Doesn’t matter. My list of guilts will always include it, heavy like a rock.

When I first woke up in the ICU, they told me she had died. At first, it felt like a tornado was running through me, breaking things, destroying, capsizing.
A lot of screaming had been done on my part.
My vocal cords had hurt like a bitch, and for a whole month after, I could barely utter a word.

But now, I’m almost empty. Almost.
Walking around my room in circles has become my only pastime. Do they count such a thing as a hobby?

You’re probably wondering how I found my way onto the internet, being that I’m such a head case. Well, about a week ago, they decided I was trustworthy enough to have free time outside my room.
After a little exploring, I found this computer lab.

All four computers are bolted down as if they might float away. So I only have a few times a week when I can write this. Free time only lasts about an hour.

I don’t matter. The doctors here are nice to me. Doctor Shepard thinks that I had some kind of terrible mental break when my dog died, and the nurses pity me. It’s not too bad.
But what does matter is Ringo.

If you see the woman, don’t take the gun.
And if you can, kill that fucking dog.

Credit: Bea

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