Fiction: My Mad Dog

By Jenna Obeid Mackenroth

He had his duck dinner two years ago. I knew it the moment I heard his voice, sheepish and sly, over his single call, long-distance, telling me his sentence and that the Army would send him home in a year and half. He didn’t say the girl’s name. He didn’t need to tell me what he’d done to her.

My mad dog bites. He is putrid on the inside and blind to the rest of the world. He has my hair. He does not understand tragedy. He does not mind the dark flies that follow him in the summer heat. Mange layers well with his father’s cologne, the way he smelled before deployment. He was a real charmer, he once broke the hearts of four Miss Lakesides in a single summer. Now he begs for scraps at my back door but I can’t let him in, even when he’s stiff and whining– that’s why I keep him in the shed. He sleeps when I’m at work. I leave the meals outside in the evenings, and I lock my doors at night.

But now he’s bitten the neighbor girl, crept into her room and had her like a beast, made her sick and motionless and foaming at the mouth. The doctors say she’ll live; meanwhile my dog gets off scot free because the cops can’t find a witness. I never have the heart to put him down but the girl’s brother can cut his losses like any true army man, so the next morning he takes aim at the shed and shoots my mad dog in the shoulder. His heart is good, but he’s a lousy shot, and by the afternoon he’s sitting in the county jail, stone-faced and willing to try an insanity plea; insanity by way of passion, something like that. The police assure me that my dog’s done nothing wrong, but I know my dog as if I’d known a son. 

The next day I visit the girl’s brother in the county jail. He sits like a prophet beside his cot, a Bible open in his hands while he stares serenely at the wall. When I peer through the bars of his enclosure, he meets my gaze with contempt and rage. I can’t remember what I came for. I leave wordless and empty-handed.

Before the sun sets, I pick my dog up from the hospital. He has a thick bandage over his shoulder and clutches his arm, grunts with pain and takes the back seat. I don’t say a word when I drive. I take the long way home and hit as many potholes as I can find, hear him yelp when the car jumps up. He’s shivering in agony by the time we’re home. I pull him up by his good arm and he shuffles silently to the shed. 

Then I go inside and put on Golden Girls. I turn the volume up high enough for the whole street to hear. I think about the girl’s brother sitting in the county jail, his stoney face, his contempt. We are kindred spirits, we cut our losses. With one hand I take dinner out to the yard and keep the other in my pocket, resting easy on my dog’s favorite toy. It’s always quiet when he sleeps. The silence likes to linger in August. 

And the shed door is unlatched because he never needs to be afraid. It swings open silent. I am glad I greased those hinges. The court of summer flies all rise when I step inside. Rotten flesh. I set the plate down. My mad dog is curled up among his blankets and in the pale he almost looks like my boy again. But I know better than believing in tricks of the light, so I raise his father’s gun and then I shoot: once at his neck, twice to his head. I hear the birds trouble up from all my trees. I don’t keep to watch him die. I guess it’s over in an instant. I shut the shed and pull my rocking chair to the backyard. It’s been long, and I’m an old, old woman. The sky’s a deep and sacred navy by the time the police arrive. They cuff me beneath it and I see that girl’s pale face shining through her window like a moon. 

Kindred spirits, cutting losses. I sing it in the backseat of the cruiser. The officers grin like dirty, tell me that they know I’ll try to play insane. One turns around and says it’s sin to kill one’s own and I’ll get the chair if I’m lucky. I laugh. I have other children, I say, and to hell with sins, I’ll sit like goddamned Mary on that electric throne. They don’t respond and I turn to the woman in the window. Damn right, she says to me in secret. 

She’s the only one who can look me in the eye. So I lean my head against hers and think about what’s left. The police forgot to turn off Golden Girls. My bedroom light’s still on. Dinner cold, dog dead. Summer over. And the night is good. And the night is blue.

 

 

 

 

 

Jenna Obeid Mackenroth is a writer and scientist from New York. She is a believer in the double life. Her other work is published in Spectra Poets, Don't Submit!, Expat Press, and the Biophysical Journal.