I couldn’t write this story forever and ever. Because there’s a simple truth: life is difficult and painful enough.
Nobody needs to see doggos as monsters.
Nevermind that I can’t hear the word “doggo”, or, worse, hear some furry beast called a “woof” without finding a weird phenomenon: my broken and vanished heart, so far and so long gone, and so cold wherever it is, so disconnected from my monstrous true self…
…I can feel it break again. It was thirteen years of bonding. And my heart won’t forget. And you can’t make your dog, your loyal dog who loves you, into the villain, even though he tried to tear out my throat.
And that’s a kind way to put it. It wasn’t playful. He wasn’t roughhousing. He went for my face, went for my eyes, went for my groin without an ounce of humor, went for my throat, and tore it out, and killed me, and I bled out, and it was uglier and worse than anything you might imagine.
But he loved me and he was a good dog. So the problem was me.
I was covered in blood. I couldn’t smell it or see it, and to be honest, I don’t think it was real. I’ve spent too much time examining my clothes, every bit of furniture, everything I owned, every photo, every piece of evidence. You might say, “But you went mad and burned all the clothes”, and I say, “It was not a proverbial ocean of blood, it was a real ocean of blood, in fact, it was all of the Earth’s oceans of blood, 321,000,000 cubic miles of it, just ask anyone; I couldn’t have hidden all that blood from myself. I couldn’t have fit it all on my body. But other people believed in it.
And my dog smelled it.
He was so sure.
He was so sure that he tried to rid the Earth of me. Because I was a threat. I was a predator. I was a monster.
After he bit me and I died, I rose again as a werewolf, which was as confusing to me as anyone else, and left so many questions: why would I rise at all? Why would my dog, a normal dog, make werewolves? Why would I rise as a werewolf, something not undead, if I had died?
Damned if I know. All I know is what happened.
This is how my dog was the worst: he took an innocent Master and killed him, because my dog had gone mad.
This is how my dog was the best: he killed me because there are some truly awful humans walking the Earth, and most of them are the kind loved by dogs and other humans, and someone needs to stop them before they destroy every human and every dog, because I may be a Villain, but, as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, being a Villain doesn’t always mean you want to see the world in ashes; sometimes it just means that you’ll no longer stand idle while they burn the misfits. First, because to Hell with those who burn my fellow misfits; and secondly, when they run out of misfits, they’ll start in on everything else.
I have no idea where my former dog is now. Maybe he found a Master who isn’t a monster, and he lives happily, and if he does, who cares? He might have been a loving creature, but he wasn’t as smart as I thought, and I wouldn’t trust his sense of object permanence, much less his sense of faith in humans. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s off guarding some of those who I’m going to discomfort: the book-burners, the platform-breakers, the dream-stealers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s become human himself, because it’s hard to burn books with paws.
And maybe I do him an injustice; maybe he realizes he killed what he loved, maybe he even realizes that if, in the end, I was a Bad Human, he was, in the end, a Bad Dog, and like me, he roams, restless, pacing, never trusting, never believing, only trying to right a few wrongs without biting the wrong damn throat again.
I forget where this was going again. I miss my dog. I love my dog. I hate my dog. I never had a dog, and with every act of will I shatter every memory and make it as false as the blood he insisted he could smell on my hands, on my clothes, on the face he tried to bite off.
We ended in weakness and dishonor, the betrayal of everything either of us had believed in; but, while I don’t know or care where he is or what he’s doing, my life is not over yet, and though I’ll never again have a dog, or a lover, or, really, my humanity, I have the potential for a lot of years, and I’ll live every day as if, that very day, I had to pound out a few thousand more words and make a few dozen more pieces of change, because whenever I’m killed the second time, I won’t have lived in vain.
My dog tried to kill me, and I live to spite him, and I know dogs are good and kind and right and I must be wrong; but so help me, I am not wrong. Chip Matthew, wherever you are, whoever you are barking at now, whatever bed has you, sleeping, curled up, at its foot: you’d best hope I am wrong, because you made me what I am, and now it’s more than half of your life that you’re half-responsible for a monster, and if I died writing out the next sentence, you could still live another fifty years and not easily undo what you did.
The moral is that I’m sorry to burden you with tales of my past life, my past love, my past marriage; but please stay tuned. I am exorcising the demons of a broken and embittered life, and within thirty days of this writing, assuming no-one manages to get my throat again, I will be amusing and fun to watch.
Tonight, there’s nothing but tears, but tomorrow, I promise, I promise on my vanished heart: tomorrow, we feast, and we howl.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. You can get most of my books right here. Go ahead, pre-order “I HATE Your Prophecy“. It may make you into a bad person, but I can live with that.
